NOTES for Luk 12:1-7

These words of Christ can be understood as a simple statement of fact: our life is arranged so that any human secrets of ours come out into the open. For that to happen, it is only necessary that someone need those secrets. It is important to remember this because often, though of course far from always, we do secretly what we are ashamed of. It is obvious, however, that trying to hide anything from the all-knowing God is rather foolish.

But, on the other hand, these words of the Lord speak about the nature of the faith to which He calls all of us. And for us these words are very important, because they allow us to distinguish Christ's calling from that complex set of religious manifestations that takes shape in us as a result of joining Christian dogmatics with Hellenized natural religiosity. If in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead is revealed to us bodily, as the apostle Paul says, then in faith there is not and cannot be anything secret. And this inoculates us against the temptation of esotericism, against dividing spiritual life into the sacred and the profane.

And then the Lord speaks to the disciples about the fear of death and the fear of God, giving us the opportunity to trust in God's care for us. The Lord speaks about confession, in which the main thing is not so much the sum of theological definitions as devotion to the Son of God, crucified for us. And finally, the Lord speaks about love for the Holy Spirit. It is the insulting of the Holy Spirit that should be most bitter and terrible for us; it is precisely this that we should avoid. And then, in the most dangerous situations, we will not be left alone. In short, the Lord speaks about a faith that is truly life, deep and intense. As it is said: "The righteous shall live by faith."

Let us show first of all the way the Lord expresses himself here: "my friends"; and not my slaves, my servants, and neither my followers, He says "friends". Who are these friends? For us, there are the ones we love, with whom we wouldn't like to separate and to whom we wish all the best. Let's read now what Jesus is saying to His friends, forewarning them of disasters, persecutions, murders to come.

We would have certainly looked for the means to avoid the coming danger, and spoken of adequate care… The words of Jesus are unexpected: "be not afraid "; perhaps the misfortunes will pass by? No, they might not pass by, but we should not be afraid of death - the physical death, because the murder can do nothing more with us once we are dead; physical death is not yet the end. So, if it is necessary to consider something, it should be what separates us from the One Who gives eternal life, this something is sin. To consider or to take into account means trying to avoid it here and now. Because resurrection waits us after death and after resurrection is judgment, which is carried out by the Judge, Who gave His life for our salvation. And if we have no reverential thrill (what is called "the fear of God" in the religious language) in front of this Judge, our road with Him will be interrupted and we shall be cast into hell.

The Savior's words that on the heads of His disciples and followers "every hair is counted" can raise a number of questions. The main ones are two. The first is connected with the freedom of choice which, it would seem, a Christian in that case cannot have at all, and the second with the reality of Christians' life in the fallen world: can one think that there are no accidents in their life? At first glance the answer to the second question is obvious: Christians live in this world like all other people, and they are not spared either natural or social catastrophes. But is this the Christianity of which Jesus speaks?

Christianity was conceived as life in the Kingdom, and the Church as a community of people living in the Kingdom while remaining at the same time in this world. Not, of course, so that this world penetrates the Church and the Kingdom, but so that the Kingdom enters the world. And for this it is necessary that the life of each individual Christian and of the whole Church as a whole be determined by the laws of the Kingdom, if not completely, which is impossible before the full transformation of the world and man, then predominantly. Then all the hairs on a Christian's head will be counted according to the laws of the Kingdom.

According to the law of this world, such a thing is impossible in principle. The laws here are different, purely or mainly natural, even when the matter concerns man. Nature knows neither the individual person nor his value; it is based on the laws of large numbers. For the functioning of natural systems only the preservation of the species matters, not the individual specimen. And not all species exist forever; most appear and disappear.

So as long as a person remains within the framework of natural laws, he remains in the world of accidents, where anything can happen to any person, no matter how good, just, or even believing he may be. Indeed, faith, at least in the biblical sense, is not a system of views and convictions, but trust in God. It is a person's choice made in favor of God. The only choice possible for man, because in nature there is only chance, determined by the law of large numbers, and determinism, determined by causality. There is no freedom in nature, and a person can only choose whether to remain in a world where he will never be free and where anything at all can happen to him, or to trust Christ and leave the world, becoming an inhabitant of the Kingdom, where a person is truly free and where he is so important that all the hairs on his head are counted by God.

At the same time, no one takes freedom away from a person in the Kingdom. But there his freedom becomes significant, and choice receives meaning, unlike in the natural world, where choice has no meaning because it is always a choice among many accidents, none of which frees a person from the determinism that determines the very existence of nature. This is the main choice of man: acceptance of the freedom given by God in the Kingdom, or refusal of it in this world. There is no third option.

“You are worth more than many little birds”—for many people today these words sound like a revelation. When a human life is worth next to nothing (or worth a great deal of money), food inevitably becomes more important than the soul, and clothing more important than the body. The reality of the Kingdom of God frees us from this slavery to money, food, clothing, and the oppressive anxiety about tomorrow. The Lord simply tells us: “To Me, you are more important and more precious than all these things.” We are very good at seeing the ugliness of this world and the ugliness of those around us (and sometimes our own). But the Lord says: “To Me, you are more beautiful than the flowers of the field.” We tremble in fear for our well-being, health, and life. But He comforts us: “Do not be afraid; My Kingdom belongs to you.”

Speaking to the disciples about the Kingdom, Jesus describes it above all as a new life opened to those who seek it. But it can be found only in the case of absolute openness on one's own part. To live the life of the Kingdom, one must renounce one's own life. Not one's life-space as such, not that flow of life which the Bible calls the soul, but the attempt to appropriate this space and this flow for oneself, to regard it as one's inalienable property, belonging to oneself by right.

In the Kingdom everything is different. There life is shared. One life for all. It is not owned; it is given for use. And the measure of this use is limited by nothing except the spiritual potential of the person himself. As much of the life of the Kingdom as he can contain, that much he will receive. But it does not become anyone's own in the sense in which we are accustomed to use that word with reference to property relations in our world.

The life of the Kingdom is yours insofar as you can live by this life. And therefore Jesus advises surrendering oneself to the flow of the life of the Kingdom. Enter it like a river. And move together with it. Without trying, as people say today, to fix anything in place. Without trying to evaluate one's own states, achievements, or failures. Without clinging to anything that attracts and holds a person in this world. And certainly without trying to fit the life of the Kingdom into religious frameworks: the new life cannot be kneaded on either Pharisaic or Sadducean leaven. The Kingdom does not fit into any human frameworks, but it does fit into the human heart. If, of course, it becomes the person's chief treasure. For where the treasure is, there is the heart.

Speaking about the Kingdom and about how to obtain it, the Savior, as can be seen, puts first the question of life, of what kind of life a person lives. Such an approach can be considered quite traditional. Indeed, in the Bible, when the subject is a person and his life or life force, the Synodal translation in this case usually says "soul," a clear line is drawn between the person as he was before the fall and the person as he became after the fall.

Before the fall, this force was connected above all with the breath of life that God breathed into the human being at creation. After the fall, it became connected mainly with blood, with the physiological essence of the human being, just as in animals, where it too is connected with blood. As can be seen, life is presented by the biblical authors as whole and indivisible. It is not divided into spiritual and physical in such a way that one of its components could be separated from the other. But the quality of life can differ, being determined by a person's spiritual state: the fuller and more intense his relations with God are, the more spiritual there is in the person's life, and the more his spiritual component prevails over the natural one, subjecting it to itself. In the Kingdom, as can be seen, a person's life is completely transformed.

Only one thing is important here: whether the person lives this life or not. If his life turns out to be part of the life of the Kingdom, then even the death of his physical body changes nothing in principle. After all, in the Kingdom nature in its former quality does not exist, and in its new, transformed state it is no longer something completely foreign in nature to the spirit, as it is in the untransformed world. And to the extent that a person's life in our transforming but still untransformed world belongs to the Kingdom, he need not fear losses at the moment of physical death, because death has no relation to the Kingdom. But if the whole life of a person remains connected only with the untransformed world and with untransformed bodily existence, he has nothing to count on: death will prove to be the only and final reality for him.

The Kingdom will in any case eventually transform our world, making it part of itself, but a person who has no relation to the Kingdom will have no relation to this triumph of the Kingdom, at least until the day of Judgment. That is why Jesus advises us to fear not the one who can kill a person physically, but the One who can deprive him of the Kingdom: after all, having the Kingdom, a person loses nothing even in the case of physical death; but having lost the Kingdom, he will sooner or later inevitably lose everything, including the physical life he preserved at such an inadequate price.

When Christ says, "Woe to you...," one is tempted to say that these words are addressed, of course, to His immediate listeners. Yet always and at all times His words are addressed to us ourselves, and only to us. Of course, it is pleasant to think that the words about God's love for the world apply to us, while no one likes hearing rebuke. And nevertheless, inside each of us lives that very lawyer who is always trying to appropriate the "key of knowledge." In words we may recognize another person's right to a different view, to a different way of confessing God, to a style of thinking unlike our own, but somewhere inside there is always a quiet but distinct little voice speaking: "But I know that in reality they are all wrong. After all, only I know what is correct."

Let us leave the origin of this voice outside our reflection; one thing is clear: it belongs to the human person in general. Sometimes we like this voice so much that we give it the right to speak out loud. And this is much more terrible than any failure to fulfill the law. Because the whole essence of the New Testament, the whole essence of the Good News, is in the change from Law to Grace. The Lord offers us a completely different way to see the world and live in it: to love our brother to death, to the cross, to weep and rejoice together with him. Only in this way, and not through observing rites, fasts, and internal church rules, can we be with God, on one side with Him. And if we stand before God, are we not all wrong to the same degree? But fortunately, His love for us is determined neither by our righteousness nor by our understanding.