NOTES for Php 1:23-24

Paul says of himself that it is all the same to him whether to remain in this world a while longer or to leave it. He is ready, following Christ's will, to choose what is better for the ministry entrusted to him. The apostle himself would like to be released and be with Christ, but if it is more useful for his brothers that he continue his earthly path, he agrees to this as well.

Paul considers this attitude toward life and death normal and natural for a Christian, and he calls his Philippian brothers to look at life and death the same way he himself does. And that is no surprise: with the coming of Christ, much here really did change. And above all, the relation between our untransformed world and the Kingdom, which, in the Savior's words, "has drawn near," changed.

Previously, before the coming of Christ, death one way or another meant departure into the world of shadows, which in the Bible is called sheol (in Greek and Greek-language books the Greek analogue of sheol is mentioned, hades, from which, incidentally, comes the Russian word ad, "hell"). There were also, for example in Egypt or Greece, ideas about another kind of afterlife, but it is difficult to say exactly what stands behind them, what kind of spiritual experience. The idea of the world of shadows can be considered universal, common to humanity; in one form or another it exists among all peoples. There, in the world of shadows, there is no life, but only its pale likeness, which can be called life only with a great stretch.

Rather, it is a kind of existence between being and nonbeing, in which no memory of earthly life remains and self-awareness barely smolders. With the coming of Christ, however, everything changes. The process of the general resurrection begins already at the moment of the Savior's death on the cross; the first risen ones come out of the tombs precisely at this moment. And afterward it continues: sheol, the world of shadows, no longer exists in its former form, and if before death meant the final loss (until the coming of the Messiah) of the fullness of life, now it is only a boundary dividing the stages of the Christian's path.

The completion of earthly life means for a Christian only the beginning of a new one, and what it will be depends on how he has walked his earthly path. That is why the apostle says that for him there is no difference between life and death: he does not live according to his own will; his earthly path is determined by Christ's will, and therefore Christ Himself will also determine the moment when this path is completed. Such is the path of a Christian, and this is the very path Paul calls his Philippian brothers to walk.