NOTES for Luk 6:24-30

Christ raised Old Testament morality to an unreachable height. It is one thing to call on God concerning one's enemies: "Let death come upon them, and let them go down alive into hell," and another thing to love them. Perhaps this is how it should be: moral laws should be impossible to fulfill; we should strive toward them. All the greater is the tension of this striving. Remember Kant's famous statement that there are two things that fill him with awe: "the starry sky above us and the moral law within us." And the stars draw a person into the sky with unimaginable force, but they also serve as guides on earth. Such is the New Law of Christ. On the one hand, we understand how much we still have to grow in order to grow into its full measure; on the other hand, it is a guide in the world of relationships with people and with God.

There is, however, one more danger here: turning this unattainability, say the unattainability of the commandment to love enemies, into a cult. In this connection one can recall such an ambiguous and still controversial phenomenon as Tolstoyanism. You know, there is an amazing property in the word of God. It is so complex and multidimensional that it attains truth only in its full wholeness.