NOTES for Luk 6:17-36

These words seem deliberately to contradict ordinary human ideas. Why are the poor and hungry, the weeping and rejected, suddenly blessed, while woe is pronounced upon the rich, the full, and those who laugh? One might think that Christ is proclaiming a revolution that will turn the world upside down! The Kingdom of God that He brings to earth really is radically different from the order of the world familiar to us. Relationships within it are founded on the Father's mercy, not on the struggle for survival. Even as believers, we often forget that entirely different laws prevail in this Kingdom. We call happiness what Christ calls woe, and conversely regard His blessings as misfortune. How greatly we must change to become true citizens of this Kingdom!

The text usually called the Beatitudes forms the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, strictly speaking, it is difficult to call them commandments. What, indeed, is a commandment? Take the Decalogue—the Ten Commandments—what are they? At first glance, a system of prescriptions and restrictions. On closer examination, God's intentions addressed to the human person. And however we look at them, an imperative. For some, an external one—legal or moral. For others, an internal one—spiritual and ethical. But in any case, an imperative. Something that demands to be carried out. Followed. Or built up within us—if we are speaking of the inward Torah. In any case, it involves some kind of activity, outward or inward. Something that requires a person to act. To fulfill the commandments of the Decalogue, one has to do something. It is impossible to fulfill the Beatitudes in this sense.

Throughout Christian history, theologians have tried to determine exactly what must be done to fulfill the Beatitudes. A wide variety of opinions has been expressed, and this only confirms that the Beatitudes cannot be fulfilled in the sense in which we speak, for example, of fulfilling the commandments of the Decalogue. There, one has to do something—what exactly is beside the point here. Here, one has to be. Exist. Abide. There, it is a matter of human activity; here, of the quality of one's existence. To fulfill what are called the commandments of the Beatitudes, a person must begin to live a different, new life.

We might say that all nine Beatitudes come down to one: the commandment of new life. And all of them simply describe different aspects of this new life. A life that the human person does not possess. A life in which one can participate by accepting Christ as King of the Kingdom that is entering the world, but which one does not and cannot possess of oneself. And the entire Sermon on the Mount is about the same thing: the new life that a person can enter and that can enter a person. Otherwise, one cannot love one's enemies. And certainly cannot become perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

I long to make gaining Christ the first priority in my life. Not finding myself, or righteousness for myself, but precisely what Paul speaks of: 'To be found in Him, not with my own righteousness, which comes from the law, but with that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God through faith.' The Lord gives us everything in this world, including life itself; would it not be natural, in gratitude and praise to the Creator, to open ourselves to His presence? More than that—to seek Him and call upon Him continually, so that in the joy of being with Him we may 'know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and participation in His sufferings, becoming conformed to His death'? And Jesus, with the same love with which He speaks to the sinful woman (see Jn 8:11), will speak to us too, gradually revealing what we are able to take in.

And what is all this for? The joy of sensing God's presence that is available to us on earth conveys only a small part of what will be after the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 2:9). If only because we will be able to stand beside Him and hold His hand…

Many sayings in the Gospel ought to sound strange if we really considered their meaning. Why, indeed, should those who mourn, hunger, or suffer persecution be called “blessed”? And how can “poverty of spirit” help? Of course, a hungry person who knows that they will soon be fed is happy because they will soon receive what they long for. A person weeping in grief can likewise be happy if they are certain that relief will soon come, as can someone being persecuted who understands that they have only a little longer to endure. Yet all this is still only future happiness, whereas Jesus speaks of these people's blessedness here and now, while the triumph of the Kingdom still lies ahead.

Perhaps we can answer the question by turning to the original meaning of the word “blessed”—or, more precisely, to its Hebrew original, which described a person receiving strength and support from God. Then everything falls into place: all those whom Jesus names can indeed rely on God as they await the coming triumph of the Kingdom that the Saviour brought into the world. And the poverty of spirit He mentions (although Jesus, who spoke Aramaic, most likely simply said “the poor” here) was a necessary condition for receiving help from above: after all, we can entrust ourselves completely to God only when we know for certain that, apart from Him, there is no one and nothing else on which we can truly rely. Then the path into the Kingdom, once unbearably hard, becomes not simple but light, like the burden of which the Saviour speaks.

In today's apostolic reading Paul offers us a striking interpretation of sacred history. He says that the promise to Abraham anticipated the coming of Christ, while the Law, which appeared four hundred and thirty years later, was a special form of help for unruly humanity, so that we would not perish for want of support before our encounter with Christ.

The Law in itself, as an impersonal norm, does not enable us to encounter Christ; it is needed so that “along the way” to that encounter we do not turn aside. In the same way, a photograph of someone we love helps us during a separation not to forget that beloved face, but the photograph itself is not what brings us to the actual meeting.

"...And He spent the night in prayer to God..." From these words, which let us touch our Lord's experience a little, there came a huge and remarkable tradition of night services. Strictly speaking, an "all-night vigil" means staying awake and praying all night. It is a pity that now it has been reduced to a service from 6 to 8 in the evening... But we always have the opportunity to stay awake at home, and this is an amazing experience. It is very hard to explain what it is to someone who has never lived through it.

The main thing night gives is silence and solitude; only in this silence can the voice of God be discerned. The whole world is plunged into peace, and space and time lose their meaning. Have you noticed how differently time flows at night? This, of course, is also ascetic discipline, because at times, especially after a hard day, it is difficult not to fall asleep, just as the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

One can endlessly list reasons for the advantage of night for prayer. The main thing, it seems, is the desire never to part from God, even for a few hours of nightly insensibility.

In the sermon "on a level place," as this passage from the Gospel according to Luke is traditionally called, the Lord speaks to His listeners about what true life and true righteousness are, about the meaning and moral foundations of life. And precisely in connection with these words of Christ, the evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him, because power went out from Him. This is a very important remark, for we need to remember that the truth of God possesses real power, and precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious. Understanding and accepting His words, and still more fulfilling them, is very difficult. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness: none of this follows at all from the experience of human life. But we have been given the possibility of feeling and experiencing in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because this is not simply the invention of an idle mind, but the word of God addressed to us.

That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another turn out to be the place where, at times quite unexpectedly for ourselves, we meet the Living God.

Over two thousand years of Christian history, more has perhaps been said and written about the Beatitudes than about any other Gospel text. Most often, commentators have tried to discover in them some new word, whether in the moral, theological, or spiritual-ascetic sphere.

But a natural question arises: how necessary was it for Jesus to begin His conversation with the people listening to Him with ethics, or asceticism, or theology? He was addressing believers, many of whom were surely very religious. There was little point in speaking to them about moral norms: the commandments of the Decalogue were already well known to them. And theological or ascetic subtleties were hardly suitable for this rather mixed and not very educated audience.

Besides, the people listening to Jesus were expecting an answer to a completely different question. At that time messianic expectations were very strong among the Jewish people. Quite a few claimants to messiahship had already appeared, and although all of them, unsurprisingly, had failed, the expectation did not become any less intense. The people looked with hope at anyone in whom there was even a hint of the Messiah.

It is no wonder that Jesus' listeners looked at Him Himself with such hope. And He did not want to deceive their expectations. But if He had declared His messiahship openly, that would almost certainly have happened. In rabbinic circles and in popular consciousness alike, the person of the Messiah was associated with something militant and heroic. According to these ideas, the Messiah had to be a great earthly king who would restore Israel's independence and make it a strong state governed according to the laws of the Torah. Jesus, of course, could promise the people nothing of the kind. So He simply reminds His listeners of what the messianists of earlier ages had awaited, beginning from the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem.

It was then, apparently, that the first messianic movement arose, whose participants came to be called "the poor." They accepted this name, which later became attached to those who lived a righteous life and awaited the coming of the Messiah. It is of the blessedness of these messianists, these poor ones, that Jesus speaks. He truly bears witness to His messiahship and to the nearness of the Kingdom, which is already entering the world. But it enters not to the sound of battle trumpets, but quietly, in that silence in which a spiritually sensitive heart hears God. It is a Kingdom whose blessedness is understood only by the poor.

The Beatitudes in the Gospel of Luke sound somewhat different from those in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 5:3-12). They clearly contain a social appeal. The Kingdom of God is, of course, not of this world, but it grows in this world. All our “spirituality” is worthless if we are prepared to accept the suffering of other people while saying, “The Lord endured, and told us to endure as well.”

We may say this to ourselves, yes, but we may call only ourselves to suffering, just as we may call only ourselves to humility and repentance. And we are called not only to suffering, but also to compassion. Only such a spirituality, one of grace, mercy, and compassion, is genuine; it is precisely this kind of spirit that God promises to give us.

The words of the Sermon on the Mount always shake us with their radicalness. Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich; rejoice, you who weep; weep, you who laugh... Christ calls us to a radical understanding of life, in which what is habitually white for us may turn out to be black. From the point of view of an ordinary person, these norms were invented for madmen, because they contradict the logic of life and the commonly accepted idea of a successful life.

But Jesus offers His disciples a look at their life from eternity, from that Kingdom whose unconditional value and beauty He tried to convey to them in many parables. And from this divine point of view our usual problems may appear completely different: insignificant, or, on the contrary, sources of great joy.

Jesus speaks these words immediately after many people came to Him in order to touch Him and be healed. Often we come to God bringing our burdens and wanting to be freed from them, but the Lord calls us to look at them in the light of His eternity, in which reproach, thirst, and poverty of spirit are the greatest blessings.

Jesus strikes at what is most precious. "Woe to you when all people speak well of you!" He says. And this is the greatest desire of many of us... We act with an eye to others. We can allow ourselves a small, or large, meanness - but only if no one sees it. Yet we are afraid to take a step against common opinion. Why? Because we want all people to speak well of us. This is what the Lord warns us against. In such a situation the main thing disappears: objective truth, honesty. If we are honest, by definition we cannot please everyone. But if we adapt a little here, there, everywhere... then we can indeed manage to have everyone speak well of us. And then - woe to us. Because then we are not in the Truth.

It is possible to imagine what fear and bewilderment Jesus' words about the coming Kingdom produced in His listeners. There everything will be unlike human ways. After all, wealth, prosperity, happiness, and a person's good reputation were all signs of God's blessing; all of this meant that God was pleased with him and would reward him even more when the appointed time of the Kingdom's fulfillment came.

But in Jesus' preaching, the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those cast out of society are at the center of God's love, while the rich and respectable will experience His judgment. In this paradox, the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, between "good" and "bad" people, become confused and erased: none of them can be compared with the infinitely merciful God. Therefore "to us who listen" there remains only to imitate this mercy, making no distinction between the righteous and sinners; our judgment will not stand in any case before the paradoxical judgment of Christ's Kingdom.

"Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Luke. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Matthew (Matt 5:6). These two texts have completely different meanings, despite the fact that, by all appearances, they originate from one source. And this produces bewilderment and unease in the rational consciousness. But let us see whether it is truly so terrible.

We all remember well the prayer of the second antiphon, taken from Psalm 145: "His hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps truth forever, who executes judgment for the wronged, who gives food to the hungry." But in fact there, in Psalm 145, there is a more concrete word than "food"; the word there is bread, panem, a circumstance also reflected in the Synodal translation. So it is bread that the Lord gives to the hungry.

The word "bread" occurs a huge number of times in the Bible and is understood in most cases in the most ordinary sense. Therefore the translation "food" given by the Church Slavonic Bible may not change anything essential. But one can look at it from another side as well. "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread..." - supersubstantial, such would be the translation exactly corresponding to the Latin "supersubstantialem": super means above, substantia means essence (the above-mentioned circumstance of the lost letter is noted, for example, in the book by the well-known Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, "Axioms of Religious Life"). Thus the bread of Psalm 145, which the Lord gives to the hungry, can be understood in the light of the New Testament as supersubstantial bread. And what is supersubstantial bread if not righteousness?

Throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus shunned the kind of populism that, in his words, belongs only to “false prophets”—those who claim to be men of God without truly being so. Indeed, if everyone says only good things about a person and his activities, this usually means one of two things: either the activity is so insignificant that it affects absolutely no one and nobody cares about it (so there is no reason to criticize the person engaged in it), or the person is trying to please everyone, without scrupling at any means. Anyone who amounts to anything at all will certainly have friends and enemies; and if he is engaged in something of any substantial scale, he will also have supporters and opponents. This naturally raises the question: how should a Christian—that is, an inhabitant of the Kingdom the Saviour brought into the world—treat opponents, and still more, enemies?

Friends and supporters are, of course, easier: we love them and wish them well quite naturally, according to the laws of the untransfigured world that everyone knows and therefore needs no one to teach. Enemies are more difficult: there is nothing to love them for, while the untransfigured world, by its nature—whether physical or psychological—presupposes reciprocal relationships. If these are absent, if they break down, or, even more, turn from positive to negative, a kindly attitude is out of the question. Moreover, we want immediately to sever all relations with the enemy who wishes us harm. But this is precisely what, according to the Saviour’s word, we must not do. It is no accident that he calls us to pray for our enemies. Indeed, it is impossible to maintain good relations with someone who does not want them. Yet love is, above all, precisely an attitude towards another, a desire for the good of the one we love. If love is reciprocated, the relationship becomes mutual and a special spiritual space arises in which it exists and develops. But what if it is not?

Jesus points to prayer as the only possible way of interacting with someone who wants no positive relationship. Of course, prayer presupposes a relationship with God first and foremost. But any other person can also be included within that relationship if God is willing to receive him and the person praying asks for this. There will, of course, be no delay on God’s part, so here everything depends chiefly on the person praying. His relationship with his enemy will then be mediated by his relationship with God. The enemy is no longer excluded from the life of the person praying (as hatred and cursing erase the hated and cursed person from the spiritual life of the one who hates and curses), but is included in it, albeit indirectly. Yet such indirect inclusion can always become the beginning of another kind of relationship, direct and immediate—and it will no longer be a relationship between people who hate each other.

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.

Probably no passage in the Gospel has provoked as much argument, bewilderment and rejection as this one. How much irony and outright mockery have been directed over the centuries at the words about loving our enemies and turning the other cheek! More often than not, Christians themselves have been embarrassed by these words and, in response not merely to a slap on the cheek but to any offence, often an imagined one, have been eager to strike back harder.

Yet turning the other cheek often requires greater courage than striking back. Someone being beaten is forced to turn the other cheek when standing silently before tormentors who are beside themselves at that person's composure; this is not masochism but steadfastness. Soldiers, too, turn the other cheek when they do not respond to the enemy's armed provocations, so as to strike at a calculated moment. Finally, think of assaults intended to intimidate the enemy, when the ranks of the attackers are thinned by machine-gun fire, yet the advance continues.

Of course, although the biblical authors repeatedly use military terminology, we should not see these images as having only a practical military meaning. Those faithful to the Lord are called to a steadfastness comparable to a soldier's, but our struggle is not against flesh and blood. We must therefore see even a person who is hostile to us as a brother worthy of love, stricken with the infection of evil as with leprosy. Even when force has to be used to stop that person, we should remember this, however difficult it may be.

Such words are difficult and seem impossible to put into practice. But if we hope to limit our possibilities to the little we can already do, we will not accomplish even that little. To achieve anything, we must set our sights higher than our accustomed capabilities. A minimum of good is already good, but Christ offers us more. And with His help we could be capable of more.

The idea of loving one's enemies can hardly be considered something entirely new and unknown to the pre-Christian world. The Torah already contains a requirement to refrain from harming an enemy who finds himself in difficulty. In this case, however, the Torah proceeds not from the need to love one's enemies as such, but from the fact that enmity between people cannot and must not become grounds for violating the Torah. In other words, if we want to adhere strictly to the Torah as the law given by God, we must follow its precepts even when dealing with enemies who wish us harm. Some philosophers of the pagan world held the same view: Socrates, for example, who saw the chief purpose of philosophy as learning to distinguish good from evil and to follow the good. He was convinced that, since we must never do evil to anyone, we must not do it to our enemies either: any evil a person does harms, first and foremost, the person who does it. Yet Jesus' words about loving one's enemies have a quite particular context, connected with His testimony to the Kingdom He brought into the world.

This is, of course, primarily about love as an attitude toward another person—an attitude that entails wishing one's enemy good rather than evil. In this sense, Jesus' words are in harmony both with the Torah and with those pagan philosophers who, like Socrates, understood that the evil done to an enemy inevitably affects, first and foremost, the person who has done it. But whereas in the untransfigured world such conduct was characteristic only of the truly righteous, for the inhabitants of the Kingdom, in the Savior's understanding, it must become the norm, the only possible way of spiritual life. This is not only because any other course spiritually destroys the person who departs from that norm, but also because it is unacceptable in the Kingdom as a realm of all-embracing love. Indeed, in the untransfigured world, the psychological environment, natural at its foundation, within which all relationships develop admits, in principle, both positive and negative elements in them, both constructive and destructive interactions.

The nature of the Kingdom is different: here it is love itself that constitutes the environment within which all relationships between its inhabitants develop. One might say that here love is not only an attitude, but nature itself, just as the elements constitute the nature of the untransfigured world. It is hardly surprising that in such an environment there can be no place for any negative relationships, even when enemies are involved. This is not because Christ's enemies can enter the Kingdom and become its inhabitants without repenting, but because hatred, even toward the enemies of Christ and His Kingdom, is incompatible with the very nature of that Kingdom.

Being a kind person, it is easy to lend without expecting anything in return, especially if one's material situation is more or less stable. Even if you understand that you are depriving yourself of something, on the contrary, because of this you somehow grow in your own eyes. But here is the trap. In return you expect personal growth, first; you expect God's favor, second; you expect the favor of those people to whom you have shown mercy, or, if you do it anonymously, of those people through whom you do it, third. And getting rid of these three things is not at all simple; sometimes it even appears impossible.

Let us try to analyze them. It would appear that the favor of people and of God is a sign of the increase of love between us, and therefore also lies in the line of God's commandments and should not be a source of shame; but in reality, although this is very hard to understand, this is not so, because love is in principle an act between two absolutely equal people. The feeling of the person who has become the object of your charity, that he is now obligated to you and has nothing with which to repay you, can destroy the relationship between you, although outwardly it will look like love. And only for this reason, only in order not to destroy love, one should try with all one's strength to make it so that the person you benefit, even if he is very close to you, does not know that it was you, so as not to ruin that equality of love that exists between you.

As for personal growth... One can, while doing a mercy, immediately do something that cancels out all the good; one can do something such that no good deeds will count anymore. We, our fate in eternity, remain in question until the moment of our death, and what of it if we have grown a little? This may be one step forward after which there will be two steps back, and we ourselves will not even notice how. So all of this is trifles: growth, falling... One cannot keep a finger on the pulse all the time; one cannot always keep a ruler in one hand in order to mark daily how much I have grown, because one cannot keep one's hands occupied; they are needed for the work. As experimental physicists joke, every reasonable operation requires three hands. At least two, but certainly not one.

The commandments that the Lord Jesus gives His disciples look impossible and excessive at first glance. Impossible because no human being is able to act as the Lord commands. Excessive because our measure of justice is narrow and limited, and is satisfied with far less than mercy toward enemies. Of course, compared with the boasting of Lamech, who in deep antiquity counted it to his credit that he killed for a single scratch inflicted on him, the idea of adequate repayment that has soaked into our psychology, good for good and evil for evil ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), can be considered great progress. But the Lord looks not from the viewpoint of the depth of moral fallenness from which we need to climb out, but from the viewpoint of the height to which we need to ascend. He concludes His word about our attitude toward others with a call for us to be merciful, as the Father is merciful. Indeed, it is God who loves us, who have become His enemies and rejected Him; it is God who gives infinitely much to us, who can repay Him with nothing.

Often we think that these commandments about love for enemies and mercy toward those who hate us were given "for us to grow into," that someday we will "grow" enough to become able to fulfill them. This position has meaning, but it is still far from satisfying. Who, indeed, can "grow into" the perfection proper to the Creator? And the time of our life is so short that we have no chance to wait. Therefore the Lord, who fully knows our nature, offers us an astonishingly practical principle: "in everything, as you want people to do to you, so also do to them." It cannot be said that this is easy to fulfill, but still, when we try to understand how we should act in a concrete situation, we can be guided by it.

The main place where the Lord calls us to apply this principle is forgiveness. Many times He repeats that if we want to be forgiven by God (and by people), we ourselves need to be able to forgive. It is clear that the principle proposed by Christ is much broader than it appears at first glance. It can be extended not only to relationships with people, but also to our relationship with the Almighty Himself. In other words, in everything, as we want God to act toward us, we ourselves should act that way toward God and toward people.

It is the most difficult commands of Jesus. Going to the Church, most of us understand this exactly as it, by feeling their disinterestedness and their cruelty. And after we get used to, we become "common" Christians, love towards our enemy is replaced by "the unwillingness to hurt him ", we are ready to lead mercy to almsgiving, and we oppose the proposal to lend without restitution to the words of Jesus “be wise as snakes ". Then… we forget that this command is the most difficult to fulfill, we stop aspiring to the inaccessible, we close up ourselves into our blind optimism.

Skeptics who rebel against Christianity and Christians often speak of self-interest. They say that, in doing good, Christians are concerned about a reward from above and do everything "for the promises of future blessings." How should we answer them, since we really do say, following the evangelist, "...and your reward will be great"?

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the Lord calls us to absolute selflessness. And today's passage, in which the Lord calls us to give while receiving nothing in return, and even without hope of receiving anything, should also serve as a warning against this pseudo-Christian reliance on posthumous or some other recompense from the Lord.

It is another matter that the Lord is just. And His justice is above all. But it belongs only to Him; we have no right to judge either it or ourselves in its light. That is why the Lord says, "Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay." In these words there is not only the promise of the final triumph of good over evil, or more precisely, of evil being turned into good. In them there is also the condition of our selflessness before Him.

Continuing His preaching of the Beatitudes, Christ speaks about exactly what must be done in order to "be sons of the Most High." If the Beatitudes spoke about a person's states, about the qualities and properties that belong to him, here Jesus lists a number of actions that a Christian must perform. "But I say to you who hear," He addresses those who have already heard and accepted the radical commandments of blessedness, which contradict the usual understanding of life.

It turns out that a Christian must not only accept life passively, but also actively carry Christ into the world. Bless those who curse, give away the last shirt, turn the cheek... The Lord, saying, "As you wish that people would do to you, do so to them," calls His disciples to perform actions that could move other people also to act in a Christian way.

By answering evil with good, trying to love where there is hatred, and showing true mercy to our neighbors, we are only giving others what we ourselves have received from God as His children.

Every person has moments when he realizes that he is sinful. Daniel speaks of common guilt (Dan. 9:5), without denying it and without excusing himself by saying that he was not the only one who sinned. And he contrasts these sins not with some "other fellow," but with the holiness and beauty of God Himself. Daniel looks at the Lord, being purified beneath His merciful gaze, which will be revealed to the world in Jesus.

Jesus also speaks of God's mercy, reminding the Jews of Old Testament truths. But He goes further: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," calling them to action and imitation. Verse 38 appears contradictory, but this is what God's mercy, His law, looks like. In the second part of the verse we read about the eternal inequality of our relationship with God: He simply cannot give less, less than His Incarnation, Love, and Cross. By these gifts of His we test everything we do in the world.

In recounting the calling of the apostles, Luke does not explain the principle by which Jesus selected them; he tells us only that they were chosen from among His disciples. By human reasoning, Christ ought to have chosen the best of the best. Yet the Gospels do not conceal from us the human weaknesses of those called to be apostles. What does this show—the general state of the people, when even the best of the best are not perfect? Or perhaps He chose ‘typical representatives’, endowed with ordinary human qualities? Most likely the latter, for Christ came to save sinners; and yet these ‘typical representatives’ were not ordinary in every respect: they proved able to respond to His call.

Judas is mentioned last in the list of apostles, and we are told at once that he later became a traitor. If he became one later, then he was not a traitor from the outset, and something must have enabled him to become an apostle. Nor did Jesus call him to follow Him because He failed to see that Judas was capable of betrayal. Of course He saw it, just as He sees the potential for evil in each of us, yet does not reject us on that account and seeks to protect us from our own evil. There was hope of healing for Judas too. He did not want it...

It is no accident that the Beatitudes follow immediately after the list of apostles. In Luke they are shorter than in Matthew, but the ‘woe to you’ sayings are added, which are absent in Matthew. This is not a threat, but a warning of danger.

The evangelist notes something interesting: before choosing the Twelve, Jesus spends the whole night in prayer. Had He been an ordinary person, there would have been nothing surprising about this. It was a decision of the greatest importance, on which the Savior's earthly mission largely depended; before making such a decision, any ordinary person would probably have prayed all night, turning to God and trying to hear His voice and understand His will. But Jesus' contact with His heavenly Father was always perfect: He did not need to ask Him again or clarify the answer. Apparently, something else is at issue. What, then? For us today, prayer most often amounts precisely to a series of questions or requests addressed to God. And we must admit that the question of God's will is far from always first among them.

Even when it is, in our fallen condition knowing and understanding His will is usually, to say the least, difficult; accepting it is harder still. Naturally, Jesus had no such difficulties, nor could He have had them. Yet communion with the Father at such a moment was absolutely necessary to Him. This communion is the spiritual foundation of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is founded on relationships: those of its inhabitants with God and Christ, their relationships with one another, and, of course, Christ's own relationship with the Father.

It is this relationship, Christ's relationship with His heavenly Father, that supports the entire Kingdom. Before choosing the apostles, the Savior absolutely needed to activate this relationship and make it present not only for Himself—for Him it always remained deep and alive—but also for His chosen ones, whom He had to bring into His relationship with the Father, thereby bringing them into the Kingdom. He did so that they might not only carry out what He entrusted to them, but also understand from their own experience what life in the Kingdom is. For that is the only way it can be understood.

Before choosing the twelve apostles from the large crowd that followed Him, Jesus went up a mountain to pray. Judging by the fact that He spent the whole night there, this was a very serious and momentous decision. He endowed these people, whom the Evangelist lists by name, with special grace, because it was they who were to lay the foundation of the future Church.

By listing these names, Luke makes us recall what we already know about them. They are not abstract characters, but very real fishermen, tax collectors, uneducated simple men, learned men... It then becomes clear that their election and special status are not due to any merit of their own, but solely to the will of God. The Lord appointed them to this ministry and intended to act through them Himself.

At times, we feel indignant and wonder why a particular person suddenly turns out to be chosen by God, even though by earthly standards he may not seem to deserve it very much. But if we remember how the Lord built His Church, acting according to His divine logic rather than human understanding, much can be accepted.

God truly is with us in everything; as a human being He truly experienced everything we can go through, except sin. There are situations in our life when it seems to us that God cannot know this. Fear? But in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus "was horrified and distressed." Sorrow? God wept over Lazarus. The difficulty of choice?

We do not know whether Jesus knew, when choosing the apostles, that one of them would betray Him. Perhaps He did not know who. Because there is choice. We have the same freedom of choice that God has. We may fail to hear Him and fail to obey Him. But we know for certain that God went through the difficulty of choice. We know from this text that before choosing the twelve apostles, Jesus spent the whole night speaking with the Father alone. That means it was not simple for Him to choose. He went through this too. And He showed us an example; He showed us how to choose.

In the Sermon on the Mount, as the passage from Luke's Gospel following today's reading is traditionally called, the Lord speaks to His listeners about true life and true righteousness, about the meaning and moral foundations of human existence. It is precisely in connection with these words of Christ that the Evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him, because power went out from Him. This is a very important observation, for we need to remember that God's truth has real power, precisely because it is truth.

The things the Lord says are far from self-evident: understanding and accepting His words, let alone putting them into practice, is very difficult. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness—none of this follows from our everyday experience. Yet we are given the opportunity to feel and experience in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because they are not merely the invention of an idle mind, but the word of God addressed to us. This is precisely why truthfulness and purity in our relationships with one another become the place where, sometimes quite unexpectedly even to ourselves, we encounter the living God.