NOTES for Luk 9:28-45

Today's reading includes two events that, at first glance, are connected only chronologically: the Transfiguration (vv. 28-36) and the healing of the possessed son of an unnamed man (vv. 38-45). And yet the Evangelist does not connect these two stories by accident. It would seem that, against the background of what had just happened, another healing, even one unsuccessful for the apostles, was an ordinary enough event that one might not even mention it.

Meanwhile Jesus' reaction to it was unusually harsh (v. 41). Commentators, of course, have still not come to a single opinion about whom Jesus' words primarily concern: the man who brought his son to Him, or the apostles. But against this background an important detail is the mention that, precisely after the unsuccessful healing, Jesus again and again reminds His disciples of His suffering and death (vv. 43-44), while they cannot understand Him at all: something hides from the apostles the meaning of what the Savior has said (v. 45). It is especially noteworthy that they were even afraid to ask the Teacher again. Until then He had never left their questions unanswered, and not once had He become angry at any question; what, then, could the disciples have been afraid of?

Of course, it was frightening to hear about the Teacher's death from His own lips, but the apostles were not children or cowards ready to hide their heads in the sand at the sight of danger. Apparently they did not simply fail to understand; rather, they did not accept Jesus' words, hoping that they were only a slip, a misunderstanding, or some image, a parable whose meaning would in time be explained. For on the day of the Transfiguration the apostles saw the Kingdom already in all its fullness; one could say that they came home to their Teacher, who had invited them to Himself in order to show them His true home. And there, on that day of triumph, He suddenly begins to speak to them about His death, which for them could only be defeat and catastrophe.

Such a thing, of course, could not fit into their consciousness: for the resurrection, in which the apostles of course believed, was still something too distant for them to become real within their own lives. And so they still did not trust Jesus to the end. But distrust destroys relationships, and when the moment of healing came, the moment of witness to the Kingdom, the apostles failed. Seeing this distrust, which had gone so far, Jesus may well have judged the situation with utmost severity. And no wonder: for the unreadiness mentioned here by the Evangelist to accept Jesus' words about His death and resurrection would later become the cause both of Peter's denial and of Judas' betrayal.

Soon after Peter's confession, as we can see, Jesus showed the closest of His disciples visibly what the Kingdom is and what human nature becomes in it. In church usage this event received the name Transfiguration. As the Savior appeared before the disciples on the day of the Transfiguration, so every person becomes in the Kingdom, if he can contain its life in all the fullness available to him. The fullness of the life of the Kingdom transforms every human nature, but for that to happen, the nature being transformed must be freed from the power of evil and sin, just as the Savior's human nature was free from it. And then, immediately after the scene of the visible manifestation of the Kingdom, another scene follows: the scene of no less visible a triumph in this world of the evil in which it lies.

Indeed, one can hardly find a brighter example of triumphant evil than possession, where the power of darkness manifests itself almost openly, as though challenging everything bright that exists in the world. And the disciples, who have just seen the triumphant Kingdom entering the world, can set nothing against this evil. They are unable to help the possessed man. This is no surprise: the Kingdom is still only on the threshold; the process of its entering the world, in essence, has not even begun yet, while all its fullness is concentrated entirely in the person of the Savior.

The Kingdom is not of this world, and it will remain outside the world until Jesus completes His earthly path. It is no accident that after all these events Jesus returns again to the theme of His earthly path and His death on the cross. Again and again He repeats: the Kingdom is not at all what most people imagine it to be. It will not become a triumphant earthly power. Evil cannot be defeated by external force; within the fallen world it is indeed invincible. The Kingdom of God is impossible in principle as a kingdom of this world.

The Messiah cannot be a triumphant victor not because God lacks the strength to drive evil out of the world and defeat it, but because, if He acted that way, the world would disappear together with the evil in which it lies. In this sense, the salvation that Jesus brought into the world most closely resembles an operation to free hostages, which is what we all are. Such an operation can be carried out only at the cost of the death of the One who brought the Kingdom into the world, at the cost of His death on the cross. It is an infinitely hard path, but there is no other.

The healing of the demon-possessed boy, which we read about today, is a special case, different from other healings. The boy’s father turns to the Lord not simply as a last hope. Christ’s disciples, who themselves testify that demons obey them when they bear witness to Christ’s name, have already proved powerless to heal the boy. If the disciples, who heal not by themselves but in the Teacher’s name and in the way He does, have failed, is there still hope for this man? The father no longer even asks for healing; he says to Christ, ‘Look’, unsure whether any hope exists for him. In the same way, in grave and hopeless situations we say, ‘All that is left is to pray.’ According to the Evangelists’ accounts—and all three Synoptic Gospels report this healing—the Lord does not approve of such an attitude towards Him. ‘Perhaps He might help after all’ is not the best attitude for someone turning to God for help. Perhaps that is why Christ’s words about the faithless and perverse generation sound so bitter.

And yet, despite the lack of trust, the Lord responds to this man’s timid hope. The Evangelist Mark reports that, in answer to Christ’s words, ‘If you can believe at all, all things are possible to the one who believes’, the boy’s father utters the famous words, ‘Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief.’ Immediately after today’s reading, the Evangelist adds: ‘And all were astonished at the majesty of God.’ Trust in Christ or His disciples, as both the reader of the Gospel and the witnesses of Christ’s healings know, is necessary. And so the fact that the Lord responded to this man’s weak, wavering hope bears particularly clear witness to His divinity and His mercy.

In the account of the Transfiguration, the themes of Christ's glory and His sufferings merge into one. On the mountain He speaks with the prophets about His "exodus" - about Golgotha. Coming down from the mountain, Jesus foretells to the disciples what awaits Him in Jerusalem.

It is interesting that the disciples prove unable either to see the glory of the transfigured Jesus or to hear His words about the Cross. These things are connected with each other. This can be judged from one's own experience: the less we see the presence of the Lord in our life, the less we know what glory is, the worse we understand words about the cross. The cross appears to us as certain everyday troubles of ours, not as the path of faith and self-denial.

This new understanding of the cross can be acquired only by seeing the Glory, the living presence of God - openly, as the apostle Paul did, or hiddenly, through recognizing His action in the circumstances of life.

We very often hear educated people say that the wrath of God, as described in the Pentateuch of Moses, is a kind of anthropomorphism: God cannot be possessed by destructive passions such as anger, since He is the Supreme Good. This is precisely how the God of the scholastics appears to us: impassible, absolute Good and mercy. But is this the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the scholastics and scholars” (B. Pascal)? Could it really be merely an anthropomorphism, evidence of the imperfection, though also the truth, of the faith of the Jews in the Old Testament period?

But let us turn to today's passage. Here the Lord stands before the father of the sick boy, the disciples, the curious onlookers, and ourselves, and He is clearly experiencing a certain anger. Perhaps it is no longer as catastrophic as in the Old Testament, but if we look at it by bringing the scales into proportion—as though performing an affine transformation—what do we see? “Jesus answered and said: O faithless and corrupt generation! How long shall I be with you and bear with you?” What is this if not anger, irritation? We may be told: “Yes, but Jesus possessed both a fully human and a fully divine nature; that is precisely why we cannot speak of anthropomorphism here: the argument itself loses its force.” But where were His divine and human natures united? Where was this point of connection, if we may call it that?

Our first thought is that this cannot be identified, that the union is incomprehensible. Yet it seems to us that, for all its incomprehensibility, something can still be said. One of the most important affirmations of our faith is that, in taking on human nature, the Lord accepted everything in it except sin. But what is sin, and how can we “locate” it? The Lord Himself tells us: “...for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immorality, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matt. 15:19). Thus, the source of sin is the heart. But love, anger, and all our emotions also arise in the heart. So if sin originates in the heart, and our Lord assumed human nature apart from sin, then His heart is precisely the place where the divine was joined to the human in Him (heart and soul are synonymous here, a kind of mediator between body and spirit). It is not surprising that this is the place we have identified as the “point of connection”; the Lord's emotions in today's passage seem to bear excellent witness to it. His heart was pure, His anger entirely loving; yet the form of His human soul (“form” in the Aristotelian sense) was filled with divine content. And indeed, all arguments about anthropomorphism lose their force, for there is nothing comparable to this.

It is worth asking: to whom do Jesus' words about an evil and corrupt generation refer—a generation He does endure, but only with difficulty? They are usually taken to refer either to the possessed boy himself or to his father. Yet such an interpretation seems, at the very least, unusual: during His earthly ministry the Saviour had to heal many possessed people, and He never said anything like this to anyone who came to Him for help. With His own disciples, however, He could be quite strict, sometimes to the point of severity, when they forgot the Kingdom in whose life He wished them to share.

‘Get behind Me, Satan’ and ‘You do not know what spirit you are of’ sound no less harsh than reproaches for wickedness and corruption. It seems, then, that the Saviour's words are directed precisely at the disciples, and were spoken in response to the man who had approached Him mentioning that His—Jesus'—disciples had been unable to heal his son. At first sight, such a reaction from the Saviour may seem somewhat unexpected: after all, no one is immune to failure, and the apostles had not previously heard such reproaches from their Teacher.

Evidently, behind what outwardly looked like an ordinary failure lay something more serious, which provoked so sharp a rebuke from Jesus. What had happened? Apparently, in this case the failure was not due to chance or to objective difficulties, but to the disciples' own lack of spiritual focus. And evidently the time had come for them to overcome this lack of focus: the days were approaching when it could become a critical factor that might cause everything to fail. Of course, Jesus Himself would still follow His path to the end; He would not turn aside or make a mistake.

But His disciples' behaviour would also matter a great deal, not only in terms of support in a critical situation, but also in the context of their own spiritual condition during and immediately after the events at Gethsemane. All the evangelists agree in noting the disciples' utter bewilderment immediately after their Teacher's arrest and until His resurrection—and, to some extent, for a while afterwards too. And if the work of humanity's salvation hung by a thread at any moment in history, it was not because of any wavering on the Saviour's part, but because of this spiritual bewilderment of His disciples. By reacting so sharply to what seemed an ordinary failure on their part, He sought only to prepare them better for what they would have to endure. For their own good.

As we can see, the apostles still had little understanding of what the Kingdom Jesus spoke to them about was. They clearly imagined it as something like earthly kingdoms, perhaps with its own special features, with daily miracles, but still resembling the states of the untransfigured world. In any event, judging by the Evangelist’s testimony, they had no doubt that this kingdom would be governed just like any kingdom of ‘this world’: naturally, Jesus Himself would be King, but after that... after that came the most interesting part: whom would He make His closest associates? How would He distribute the places in His Kingdom among His disciples?

Jesus continually tries to explain to the disciples that His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, not because it is full of miracles and supernatural phenomena, but because it is built differently—not according to the laws of the untransfigured world, but according to its own laws, which may seem strange, to say the least, to the people of ‘this world’. The one who is least of all is great: from the standpoint of the untransfigured world, this is of course utterly absurd. But every earthly state is built on force; there must always be some centre of force that also becomes the centre of the authority founded on that force.

The Kingdom the Saviour brought into the world is built on love, whose source is the breath of God. What gives this Kingdom its form is the web of relationships binding its inhabitants to one another, each of them to God and to Christ, and Christ Himself to His heavenly Father. In such a Kingdom, a person’s importance is determined not by their capacity to wield power, whatever kind of power it may be, but by the measure of love they can receive.

As one can readily guess, this measure is determined by the degree of their transparency to God’s breath. It is then that Jesus’ words about children become understandable: children really are receptive to every action of God, not because they are sinless, but because they have not yet had time to lose that spiritual wholeness which adults lack unless they deliberately think about it and take care of it. This is how the Kingdom resolves the question of precedence—the chief question of the untransfigured world.

Continuing to reveal the essence of the way of the Cross that He offers, the Lord speaks to us today about self-abasement. The Evangelist reports that a thought arose among the disciples following Christ as to which of them might be the greatest. A very human thought, unfortunately not foreign to many who follow Him in every age. We need to experience God's love; we need to feel that God accepts us. Christ responds to this need by saying that He came to seek and to save the lost.

A lost person still has to rise from the dead and be cleansed of many sins. We often imagine that God lies in wait for us as we clumsily scramble along this path, mildly irritated by our slowness. In fact, He came into this world to accept us as we are and lead us after Him along the path of holiness. Every person must experience all this personally; life is impossible without it.

Yet under the influence of sin, the human soul distorts this need to experience God's love, turning it into what psychology calls positive self-esteem. We depend on how we assess ourselves and how those around us assess us, and this is expressed precisely in the thought that “arose” among the disciples: which of them might be the greatest. We do not know exactly whether they were asking who was closest to the Teacher, who was more righteous, more intelligent, or simply more resilient... Unlike Christ's disciples, we ourselves generally measure one another by more primitive things, even by money.

What matters is how Jesus answers the disciples. First, He does not reject the very idea of greatness, so dear to people, but offers a different scale by which to “measure oneself.” Above all, this means not striving after one's own greatness but, counting oneself last, being zealous for other people; and because He Himself humbled Himself utterly to save us, this scale becomes a scale of likeness to God. Second, as in everything Jesus says, for example about forgiveness, He proposes that, in order to experience God's acceptance of us, we ourselves should accept others, especially the weakest and least significant. Therefore His words about those who receive a child and thereby receive the One who sent Him become a direct and exact answer to the disciples' thoughts about greatness.

A child, a little one... this being is so beloved by the Lord. And if this child is made lowly not only by childhood but also by illness, then here is an angel in the flesh, reaching heights on earth utterly beyond our reach, while we stand looking up from below. Once, an eight-year-old child gravely ill with cancer said before an extremely difficult operation: “Don't be upset with me if I die.” Such manifold lowliness brings one close to God like nothing else. We have somehow grown accustomed to treating children's spiritual lives condescendingly. We say they should not fast or go to confession before a certain age. In most cases, that is probably right. But here is what the prophet Joel writes: “Yet even now, says the Lord, turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. <...> Gather the people, call an assembly, invite the elders, gather the children and the nursing infants...” (Joel 2:12, 16). He says that children and nursing infants should take part even in penitential assemblies—not, of course, to torment their flesh, but so that in the mirror of their transparent souls the Lord may see our love for Him.

Another child, a perfectly healthy four-year-old, once told this story of her own invention: “Once there was a girl. And she was killed. Then she was killed again. Then they took her to the hospital, and the doctors gave her injections, but they didn't cure her. Then they took her to Christos (that's how she says it for now), and He cured her. And she began to dance. The end of the story is coming soon.” This child does not yet know that a doctor may fail to cure someone, because in her four years she has had nothing worse than the flu. Yet somehow she has already reached the understanding that what is impossible for man is possible for God (cf. Matt. 19:26 or Mark 10:27). We adults find this enormously difficult to understand, but for children it is what they live by, something that seems to come “of itself,” simply through receiving the Holy Mysteries of Christ and by other paths unknown to us. That is precisely why we hear: “Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants You have established praise, because of Your enemies, to silence the enemy and the avenger” (Ps. 8:2). For their mouths, though they do not yet know the law, are full of grace. And grace triumphs over the law (cf. “mercy triumphs over judgment,” James 2:13).