NOTES for Luk 10:1-24

The disciples are glad that they have become heralds and co-workers of God's Kingdom, victors over demons and healers of diseases. But Jesus stops them: "You are rejoicing over the wrong thing"... God gives those who believe in Him many good and amazing things (if they can see them), but the chief value of His Kingdom is not this.

The disciples, and with them the readers of the Gospel, are blessed, happy already because they have seen and heard what the prophets and sages of antiquity only dreamed of: they are witnesses, witnesses not only of miracles, healings, victories over evil, but they are near the very Center of God's Kingdom.

So this is not an abstraction, not paradise, not an afterlife, not gifts and miracles, but God Himself, revealed to people in His Son Jesus.

All of us, in one way or another, are called to apostleship, to the preaching of the Gospel. Clearly, not everyone must be a missionary, a preacher, or some other "minister of the word"; nevertheless, witness to Christ is the work of the whole Church. Today's passage will help us understand the principles on which such ministry should be built.

First, openness and complete trust in God; second, openness and goodwill toward the people to whom we bring the Gospel; third, the real action of grace through us. It may be expressed not only in healing the sick and those possessed by demons, but also in every good deed, in prayer for these people, in peacemaking, or simply in the presence of a loving heart where love is lacking.

As we read Luke the Evangelist's account of the sending of the seventy apostles to preach, it is important for us to determine as precisely as possible the charge with which Christ sends them. The Evangelist conveys in detail the Lord's words that the seventy should not prepare for long and difficult journeys, but, relying on God, should be content with what He would send them along the way. The main thing, the Lord says, is this: where they receive you, stay there; where they do not receive you, go on from there. The essence of what the Lord sends them with is to bring the message of peace and that the Kingdom of God has drawn near to you.

So the task of the seventy apostles, and after them of the whole Church, is to announce to people that Christ is already near, close beside them. After the apostles, the Lord Himself will come into those villages and towns and will speak the word to those who want to hear and heal those who suffer. In the apostolic ministry of the Church, the main thing is to proclaim to the world the coming of Christ, and the key element in this witness, according to Christ's word, is the ministry of peace. Not to scourge people's vices and "rebuild society," but to bring peace to those who are willing to receive it.

The Lord says: "If a son of peace is there, your peace will rest upon him." It is important that He does not say "My peace," although the prophets had long said that He Himself is peace for people, as the apostle Paul will repeat: "He is our peace." In order to fulfill the commission given to them, the seventy apostles, and the whole Church after them, must themselves be filled with this peace of God, so that it truly becomes ours.

And so He sent laborers into His harvest - and what happened? Our labor looks more like a stroll of wolves than the life of lambs. We are always right in everything; the world is divided into "them" and "us." The fewer people listen to us personally, the narrower the circle of "us" becomes, smoothly turning into "I," and the wider the circle of "them" becomes. They do not understand, do not know, do not hear, but I know, understand, and hear, so I must insist on my own way. Otherwise it will be worse for them than for Sodom and Gomorrah, so I can impose no limits on myself in words or deeds.

How convenient it is to apply to ourselves what the Lord said about Himself. But let us read in the Gospels that "whoever is not with Me is against Me." Yet concerning the laborers who must bring the news of His death and resurrection: "Whoever is not against you is for you." It is not our task to judge which of us is with Him, how, or to what extent; what matters is that in Him we are not against one another, but together. And then Psalm 65 will become reality, when "You tested us, God; You refined us as silver is refined."

Every person mentioned in the Bible becomes an example for us in something special and very personal. Luke, who wrote much but is rarely mentioned in the text of Scripture, is often lost against the background of those whom he described so brightly and vividly. Whenever we try to make out his features and hear his voice, it is best to remember the apostle Paul's words from today's reading: "Luke alone is with me." Here Luke is the one who remains nearby when the celebration is over, when the days follow one after another, filled with hard and thankless work. He will remember and preserve what matters most; he is faithful and patient. And he will never turn away from the One in whom he believes, and that, you will agree, is very important on a difficult road.

Reading closely Luke the Evangelist's account of the sending of the seventy apostles to preach, it is important for us to clarify as precisely as possible the commission with which Christ sends them. The Evangelist conveys in detail the Lord's words that the seventy should not prepare for long and difficult journeys, but, relying on God, should be content with what He will send them on the way. The main thing, the Lord says, is this: where they receive you, stay there; where they do not receive you, move on from there. The essence of what the Lord sends them with is to carry the message of peace and that the Kingdom of God has drawn near to you.

So the task of the seventy apostles, and after them of the whole Church, is to notify people that Christ is already near, close beside them. After the apostles, the Lord Himself will come to these villages and cities, and He will speak the word to those who want to hear and heal those who suffer. In the apostolic ministry of the Church, the main thing is to announce Christ's coming to the world, and according to Christ's word, the key element in this witness is the ministry of peace. Not to lash people's vices and "restructure society," but to bring peace to those who want to receive it.

The Lord says: "if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest on him." It is important that He says not "My peace," although the prophets had long said that He Himself is peace for people, as the apostle Paul will repeat again: "He is our peace." In order to fulfill what has been entrusted to them, the seventy apostles, and the whole Church after them, must themselves be filled with this peace of God, so that it truly becomes ours.

But what we have here, "The harvest truly is great" or "When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth" Luke 18:8)? Is it not a paradox? "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations" Mt 28:19) - is this the sending of the labourers into harvest? If we remember the parabola about the wheat and the tares, then we know that "the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the Angels" (Mt 13:39). The answer to the paradox is paradoxical: it is not the "or" that makes it paradoxical, but rather the "and". Christianity is a way, on which there is always something at the point of departure and something at the final goal. That is why, although faith is little, the harvest is great. That is why, although nobody (except Jesus) has the right to effect the final judgment, people are called to gather and to bring so their fruits. But, Jesus speaks to us above all about praying for the sending of labourers, - so the Lord of the harvest will say: is it not the moment to send my Angels!

Sending His disciples to preach the Kingdom that has drawn near, Jesus says to them: I send you as sheep among wolves. A natural question arises: why does everyone around turn out to be wolves? And if so, why and for what purpose does Jesus send the disciples to preach? Meanwhile, the answer lies in the very character of the preaching, in what those sent are going to preach and what they are to bear witness about. The disciples are to bear witness to the Kingdom. To the Kingdom that, according to the Savior's own word, is "not of this world." And which for this very reason the world does not accept.

Not even because it is of a different nature from the world, but because it is hostile to it. The world lies in evil. If it were simply different compared with the Kingdom, there might be no hostility: the action of the Kingdom on the world would transfigure it, change its nature, and the world would become the Kingdom, opening itself to God's direct action. But in the world there are forces that oppose the Kingdom, and the world has submitted to them, has fallen completely under their power - that is why it is called fallen.

And therefore it is hostile to the Kingdom. Not by nature, but by the present state of that nature. And everyone who lives according to the laws of this world becomes, accordingly, hostile to everyone who lives by the Kingdom and bears witness to it. Here there is the same organic opposition as between wolves and sheep. Wolves do not attack sheep out of malice, but out of hunger.

As, in fact, all predators do with their prey: nothing personal, only the necessity of survival. And unlike the well-known character in Krylov's fable, neither wolves nor other predators seek justifications for themselves. "You are guilty already because I want to eat" is a human view of the situation; animals know no such concepts, and their instincts tell them nothing about any moral categories.

And people who live according to the laws of the fallen world often react to witnesses of the Kingdom and to those living its life in roughly the same way: they want to get rid of such people, they want them to disappear from the world and from their own life simply because they are different. Because they bring into the world and into their own life something that will destroy the existing order of things, apart from which the fallen person cannot imagine himself. Of course, unlike wolves and other predators, people usually somehow justify this desire of theirs.

But in essence the same instinct of self-preservation is at work here, the desire to survive and not perish, which makes a wolf attack a flock of sheep. And until a person himself wants to change, until he wants to be freed from the power of that evil in which the fallen world lies, he will react to witnesses of the Kingdom as a predator reacts to prey. Not from any personal motives, but simply according to the law of this world.

Power no less great than that manifested in Chorazin, Bethsaida, Tyre, Sidon, and Capernaum has also been manifested in our cities. For in almost every city there are open churches, and the Eucharist is celebrated in every Orthodox or Catholic church. In the Eucharist, God is wholly present in the flesh—that is, no less fully than in Capernaum, Chorazin, or Bethsaida. But people still have to come to church. Whether they do depends on us Christians. “The one who listens to you listens to Me,” says the Lord; but can we say of ourselves that we often speak on the Lord’s behalf? Do we listen to God often enough to be able to share what we hear afterward?

And so Jesus sends His disciples out to preach. See what authority He gives them! A whole chain of “authorized representation” is formed here: the Father sends His Son into the world and gives Him all power and authority; the Son, as He educates His disciples, prepares them to become future messengers and Apostles, and raises up the Church that will later bear witness to Christ, passes His authority on to them.

When we become Christians, we are called to bear witness to Him, and therefore these words of Jesus apply to us as well. Whoever rejects our words and our witness also rejects the Son and the Father! That is remarkable. We might rejoice in such authority being granted to us. But I am more inclined to reflect on our responsibility for our words, and for the substance and adequacy of our witness—and to pray about it...

The Lord's disciples were people just like us. They also argued, were afraid, were vain, were proud... But they knew how to trust. They followed Jesus, leaving everything, although they had no idea what awaited them. They cast out demons and healed the sick, believing that in the name of Jesus a demon would leave and the sick would be healed. They rejoiced like children that it worked.

This very ability - the ability to trust - is what we have lost. We need proof that we can do something; it is not enough for us to know that God thinks we can. In response to God's request to do something that we consider impossible for ourselves, and sometimes simply difficult and unusual, instead of trusting and doing what God asks us to do, we say to God, "Prove to me that I can do it." And when it turns out that yes, I can, instead of thanking God who gave us this opportunity, we boast about our abilities.

There is nothing wrong with rejoicing that we do something well, because when God created the world He said, "It is good," and the ability to create something new has been given to us by God, so we too can sometimes say those words. But we cannot say them without adding, "Lord, I thank You," because without God we can do nothing.

At first glance, the Savior's call to rejoice not over victory against the spirits of darkness, but over sharing in the life of the Kingdom, since Jesus says in this case that the names of those who share in it are "written in heaven," sounds a little strange. In truth, one thing is inseparable from the other: the powers of darkness flee from those who share in the life of the Kingdom not because the citizens of the Kingdom are frightening in themselves, but because the life in which they share becomes, for the spirits of darkness, a power that kills them. Yet on closer examination it is not hard to see that Jesus has in mind, above all, the priorities that determine the whole pattern of spiritual life. First the Kingdom, and only then everything else, even successes in the spiritual warfare that awaits, in our transforming but still untransformed world, everyone who shares in the Kingdom.

And this may be the hardest thing: not to rejoice in anything by itself. It is not so hard not to be enticed by what one already considers vanity, foolishness, or especially sin. It is much harder to remain calmly detached when thinking about something that clearly testifies to progress on the path into the Kingdom. Yet the spiritual gaze must be directed toward the Kingdom itself and toward the One who brought it into the world, and toward nothing else. It is not for nothing that the Savior Himself says that such a gaze belongs more to children, who have not yet lost the ability to be carried away by what truly interests them, self-forgetfully, to the point of complete disregard for everything around them. If only we could be carried away by the Kingdom with the same self-forgetfulness, our path there would be, if not simpler, at least shorter.

In all known ascetic systems there is a very important rule: the adept's attention must be focused not on the results achieved, but on the very process of ascetic labor. The point here is not that the new possibilities and abilities a person acquires on the spiritual path are received not from God but from dark forces: the devil is barren, he cannot give a person anything, and therefore nothing can be received from him; he can only spoil what was not created by him. The point is something else: by focusing on his newly acquired abilities and possibilities, a person inevitably gets distracted from the main thing, from what constitutes the essence of every ascetic work: the spiritual formation of his own personality, the creation within himself of that inner core without which no qualitative change in one's own life can be discussed.

Meanwhile all ascetic systems without exception have as their goal precisely a change in one's spiritual state, a new spiritual quality of life, and not new abilities or possibilities. Besides, concentration on achievements of this kind easily turns into self-admiration, which in turn just as easily passes into pride, hindering further spiritual movement. It may seem that Jesus too, advising His disciples to rejoice not that spirits are subject to them, but that their names are written "in heaven," means the same thing: to shift the apostles' attention from newly acquired possibilities to the main thing that forms the basis of their spiritual life. But in this case the issue is not simply inner work; in this case the issue is the Kingdom, and this substantially changes the matter.

In any other case, whichever ascetic practice we consider, the issue is a person's own efforts, his path, his achievements. In the case of the apostles, however, there can be no talk of their own successes and achievements, just as there can be no talk of the successes and achievements of any human being when the Kingdom and the possibility of sharing in its life are concerned. And the issue here is not whether a person is bad or good: no one living on earth deserves or merits the Kingdom more or less than any other. Of course, it is harder for a sinner on the path to the Kingdom than for a righteous person, but not because the righteous person by his nature deserves the Kingdom more; rather, it is because it is easier for the righteous person to accept it than for the sinner. But the righteous person too receives it as a gift and in no way deservedly, differing in this respect in principle not at all from the sinner.

Through repentance the sinner by no means earns for himself the right to the Kingdom; through repentance he merely opens the way there for himself, receiving the possibility of accepting an undeserved gift of which he would otherwise be deprived. In such a situation, speaking of Christian life in terms of a Christian's successes or achievements on the spiritual path is self-evidently meaningless. And one can rejoice here in only one thing: that one has a relation to this Kingdom and lives its life, that one's name, in the Savior's words, is "written in heaven."

The first disciples of Christ were simple fishermen, not learned men. Among those who first heard the Sermon on the Mount, there were hardly many educated people. But for some reason it is precisely these unwise and weak ones that Jesus Himself chooses in order to entrust to them His chief mystery.

The Savior's grateful exclamation was prompted by the fact that seventy of His followers came to Him and joyfully reported that "even the demons are subject to us." The childlike simplicity of their faith, with which they receive what the Lord tells them, and the directness with which they express their joy at the greatness of God's works, are simply incredible. If they had been full of clever reasoning and doubts, if they had reasoned "like adults," then the power to work miracles in Jesus' name would hardly have been revealed to them.

The incomprehensible mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God was not revealed to humanity for many long centuries, and the fact that we can now even hear about it is a great mercy. In today's brief Gospel reading, the Lord tells the disciples that many prophets and kings longed to see this and did not see it. Only in likenesses, "dimly," as the apostle Paul puts it, did they describe the coming of Christ, because the incarnation of the Boundless One was impossible for them even to imagine.

Only now and then, in response to agonizing questions about the meaning of life and suffering, do prophets such as Jeremiah or the author of the Book of Job hear from God the message that He Himself will appear to people. Only in the great tension of attention of the human spirit, "on the divine watch," as the prophet Habakkuk and St. John of Damascus put it, is this mystery revealed. And the fact that we have the opportunity to hold the Gospel in our hands and read it is an incomparable gift for which we should give thanks and which we must use.

And the Lord emphasizes to the disciples one more important aspect of this mystery: intellectual effort is not enough for grasping the mystery of God's incarnation, nor for meeting Him at all. It is precisely Revelation, given in a personal encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.