NOTES for Luk 14:12-15

Behind Jesus' words about whom one should invite to one's feast stands a definite Jewish tradition connected with the idea of the distribution of goods in the present age and in the age to come. At the foundation of this tradition lies the understanding that each person is allotted by God a certain amount of those goods he can receive, common to the present age and the age to come. Accordingly, the greater amount of them a person uses in the present age, the less will remain for the age to come. From this point of view, it is indeed better to invite to the table those who cannot repay you in kind in the present age: your reward in the age to come will be that much greater.

There is also something more in the Savior's words, something connected with the Kingdom, its laws, and its life. The issue here is no longer the present age or the age to come, but how we relate to our own deeds and actions. It should be noted that practically all ascetic traditions in one way or another reflect an understanding of the fact that normal spiritual life and spiritual growth are possible only with the right attitude toward one's own activity. The right attitude is considered to be one that does not involve attachment to the results, to the fruits of one's labor.

Every task must be, for a person in a certain sense, an end in itself; it must have value in itself. The intention with which a person undertakes his work must be directed precisely toward the work, not toward future results. This is not only because striving for the fruits, for the results themselves, can make a person neglect the quality of his work for the sake of reaching the result more quickly. It is also because, by shifting the center of one's spiritual effort into the future, a person thereby concentrates on the unreal, on something that does not yet exist and whose nature remains unknown.

If this is true for our world, which has not yet been transfigured, then it is even more true for the Kingdom: in the Kingdom there is not and cannot be either past or future in the form in which they are known to us. In relation to the Kingdom, one can speak only of life here and now and of what one receives here and now. And if there is no fullness here and now, there will be none later. For the Kingdom is one for all times. And so is its life.