NOTES for Mat 10:37-11:1

Of course, in today's Gospel reading, the words of Christ that draw the most attention are those saying that whoever loves his household more than God is not worthy of God. First, they concern everyone without exception, and second, one immediately wants to test oneself by them. Besides, these words often provoke a fairly decisive protest in us, because we are used to treating home as a fortress and considering close relatives the only safe and reliable circle. And Christ's words deprive us of this illusory security and call us to be open to the world. This is difficult, and therefore the human being does not like it.

But it is important to consider the Lord's words about relatives in the context of the whole Gospel passage, more precisely, of the whole second half of chapter 10. The Lord calls the disciples to confess their faith before people without fear. Then He says that in relationships characteristic of this world in its fallen state, the disciples' faith will inevitably meet resistance. This concerns relationships not only with authorities, but with people in general. This very resistance largely explains why the path of following Christ is the way of the cross. And this word of Christ ends with a call to the disciples to build their relationships with people not by the standards of this world, but to receive one another for God's sake.

"And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water..." Only a cup of cold water... These are very important words. Goodness has no measure. "For God gives the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34). It is bitter for us to see how immeasurably smaller the good we do is than the burning of our heart, than our thirst to embrace the whole world with our love and make everyone happy. If we suffer too much over this, then our suffering is supplied by pride, which has pushed some people into terrible crimes in similar situations. And here before us there is only a cup of cold water...

To give, or more precisely to give a thirsty person water to drink each time, may be no less precious to God than all the apologetic theological treatises written over the past 2,000 years taken together. For goodness has no measure. Only evil has a measure.

In the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew that we read today, the Lord says two things that are important for our understanding of holiness. First, a disciple of Christ is someone for whom the Lord Himself and the confession of Him matter more than anything else in life; someone ready to lose everything, even his own soul—that is, his life—for Christ. Neither deeds nor spiritual or other achievements, nothing makes a person Christ's disciple except the concentration of his entire life around one center, the “one thing needful”—Christ.

No less important are the final verses of chapter 10: the Lord speaks of how the holiness of His disciples is expressed. It is the ability to receive other people and do good to them. The scale of the good deed is entirely unimportant—even if you can do nothing but give a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty, you will not lose your reward. The holiness of Christ's disciples is expressed precisely in their attitude toward people; everything else is beside the point.

It obviously results from these words that we should not love any Man more than God. Does it mean that we should love God more that Men? I don’t think so! I think these words are saying we should stop perceiving love as something we can talk in terms of “more-less”. Who do I really love more: my father, my mother or my daughter? Foolish question, because I love each of them differently. Here is one question again, who does he Heavenly Father love more: His only-begotten Son or me? His Son? Then why He sends Him to suffer and die for my salvation.

Whilst we use the logic “more-less”, we apprehend love as emotion, as feeling, that can really be stronger or weaker. But Love isn’t emotion; it is interpersonal relation, thus all these relations will be different and incomparable between themselves, just as “Soft” and “green” are incomparable. We draw near to the way God loves when we renounce from this logic of “more-less”, we have His method of love in the basis of our own love to any one. Love to God and love to the neighbor turn out then to be two sides of one and the same medal.

Can human life be considered an absolute value? This question follows from the phrase we have read, if we take into account that on Jesus' lips the word "soul" means not some immaterial component of our personality, but rather bodily life.

How often we think that life in itself is the greatest good, and death an irreparable and terrible loss. Fearing death, we are ready to do anything to preserve our life. And once again Jesus overturns all our ideas: the only life that has value is life filled with love and self-giving, and such a life, even if interrupted by death, does not cease.

Can we consider human life as an absolute value? This question comes out from the text we read; if we take into consideration that the word “soul” from Jesus’ mouth does not mean a certain non-material constituent of our personalities, but on the contrary, quite a corporal life. How often we think that life itself is a superlative blessing, and death – irretrievable and awful loss. We are ready to do everything in order to save our life, because we are afraid of death. But Jesus once again overthrows all our conceptualizations: Only Life filled with love and commitment has value, such life even if interrupted by death doesn’t end.

Today the Lord speaks about Old Testament prophecy: all the stories, prophecies, and promises about the Kingdom of God continued until John; now the time of their fulfillment begins. Now the Kingdom is real in Christ, accessible to every person who believes in Him and follows Him.

His surprised disciples were accustomed to speaking of the Kingdom as something expected, something that does not yet exist. Strangely enough, we too often speak of the Kingdom of Heaven, of life with God, as a kind of posthumous reality, or as something that must be revealed in the age to come, after the Second Coming. But Christ says that the Kingdom has already been opened - and those who are ready to make some effort can enter it.

Today's reading tells us much about wisdom in the sense in which Jesus understands it. It begins with an episode describing John the Baptist's strange, at first glance, perplexity over the Savior's ministry (vv. 2-6). Indeed, the question was asked by the very man who first pointed to Jesus as the Messiah-Christ (Matt 3:13-17). And for Jesus Himself this episode became the occasion for bitter words about human wisdom. The issue is not the limitation of human reason: there is nothing terrible in such limitation in itself, for from the beginning God did not intend man to be omniscient. The issue is how and for what purpose a person uses the reason given to him by God. And fallen man, it turns out, most often uses it for self-justification and self-assertion.

The Old Testament authors look at wisdom as the art of building relationships with God and with people, as the science of righteous life. But it often happened that it degenerated into something like intellectual games serving only for entertainment and, in this sense, little different from children's games (vv. 16-17). Worst of all was that these games, taken with complete seriousness, at a critically important moment blocked the "wise men" from the living Truth that had come into the world, and blocked them from the Kingdom.

What kind of Messiah did believing Jews expect in those days? There were many messianic theological concepts, but it happened that the real Messiah did not fully fit into any of them. Even John the Baptist himself may have expected something different from the Messiah-Christ whom he had recognized.

In any case, it is impossible to please those for whom their theories are dearer than the truth: if He fasts, then He is possessed; if He does not fast, then He is a glutton, a drunkard, a sinner (vv. 18-19). Here only one thing matters: does the person being evaluated meet the criteria of "one of us," does he fit within the framework of the concept or not? If not, then one can always find reasons to declare such a person "wrong," a sinner, a violator of the Torah, and a servant of Satan. And supporters of the "right" theory will always be able to justify its "rightness" (v. 19). Only at the Judgment such "theorists" will have a harder time than those who simply sinned without any theories (vv. 20-24). This is, in general, not surprising: the wise person who has used his wisdom for evil bears greater responsibility than the one who makes no claim to any wisdom.

Christ brings not peace, but a sword into human society. For centuries many have tried to justify their own militancy with these words. True, in doing so, such would-be warriors did not want to notice that the word sword here is not a synonym for the word war. After all, Christ did not say, "I have brought not peace, but war." Let us not forget that a sword, or in the Slavonic translation a knife, is not only a weapon of killing but also a cutting tool. With this sword, ties between close people are cut when on the most important spiritual questions they can neither find agreement nor attain religious tolerance. But the choice that cuts old ties is often unavoidable when the old ties pull a person not simply toward old acquaintances and family relationships, but toward former sins.

It does not follow from this that Christians should start hostility. No, we are called to bring love into the world around us. But the reality is that it is not always easy for others to understand those to whom faith has opened another life. Therefore the break often happens without being initiated by Christians.

Many who read the Gospel find it hard to receive the words that whoever loves his relatives more than Christ is not worthy of him. Here one almost imagines despotism, the denial of all natural human ties... Thankfully, here we are dealing with that paradoxical quality of the Gospel which reveals to us the depth of Christ's love for us. For our "natural" love for those dear to us is, let us admit it, imperfect. But by placing Christ at the center of our heart, we can receive from him the resources for a love toward our relatives so strong that we could never give it to them by putting them first.

Jesus' words are very difficult for us. We would like things to be simpler... Is everything really so stark? Are His ways of ordering the world truly incompatible with ours, and does following Him necessarily require us to give up what seems right to us? On the way to unity, must we really pass through division; on the way to love, through hostility; on the way to glory, through the cross; on the way to true life, through death?

Living on earth can be frightening enough as it is, and if we apply to ourselves Christ's words addressed to the apostles, it becomes deeply unsettling. That is why the words "do not be afraid" are repeated so often and so seriously in the instruction. Fear is one of the strongest human experiences, which means it can be overcome only by something even stronger. The Lord points the disciples to these "powerful remedies": trust and, strangely enough, fear.

The trust in question is not simply faith that "God will always help," but the deepest, most fundamental confidence that everything is in His hands, from the little birds sold in the market for copper coins to every human life and death. And the second is the fear of God: not fear of punishment, not even fear of sin, but precisely "fear" before God, reverence and awe that make God immeasurably more real and significant for us than any other fears.

Today the Lord speaks to His disciples about coming disasters and trials. Betrayal, rejection, exile, and martyrdom await them. What, then, does He call them, and us, to do in this difficult hour? In such situations the world needs the intervention of God Himself, and Jesus calls His disciples to become instruments of this intervention. Let kings and rulers hear the word of salvation through them; let the suffering receive comfort and encouragement through them. They themselves will need nothing, for the heavenly Father Himself will care for them. They need only learn to trust Him. Then their bond with Heaven will become stronger than all earthly bonds, and God will be a greater reality for them than family, property, even life itself.

In the face of trials, the Lord calls us to surrender ourselves entirely to His will and to become His healing presence on earth.