NOTES for Luk 17:1-19

As the Savior's words show, the question of faith is directly connected with the question of spiritual life as such. What does it mean to increase faith? How did the disciples themselves understand an increase in faith? They must have meant something connected with the confidence they experienced when, at their Teacher's command, they preached the Kingdom and joyfully saw that not only people, but also spirits obeyed them. In those days, this sense of power was usually associated with faith, with its presence or absence. Jesus, however, is speaking of something somewhat different. He speaks of faith as a spiritual state. Precisely and only a spiritual one. After all, any manifestation of inner strength in a person is a natural phenomenon as much as a spiritual one. Here there is not only the spiritual impulse as such, not intention alone, but also nature and the psyche, which also respond to spiritual influence. But Jesus speaks only of the spirit. Only of the will. Only of intention.

Spirit is not nature. Quantitative measurements are impossible here. Spirit, or will, does not come in larger or smaller amounts. If the will is not fragmented, if it is not scattered through inner, psychological space or outer, physical space, it has absolute force. Not in the whole universe created by God, of course; only the will of the Creator Himself has that kind of power. But at one concrete point, it certainly does. That is why faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move a mountain from its place. Faith here is not inner strength, and certainly not conviction about anything at all, but the fullness of relationship with God. It is that same fullness which, when directed toward creation, becomes the source of an infinitely powerful force, if only it is fully concentrated on something specific. But reaching that kind of concentration is not easy. No psychological techniques will help here.

This concentration is a derivative of that fullness of the life of the Kingdom which, in principle, has been opened after Christ's coming to everyone who seeks. It is the same fullness whose experience lets a person serve without counting merit: we have done what we were supposed to do; we are only servants who do not deserve a reward. It is the fullness in which one understands that every sin is absolutely destructive, and that, although sin is inevitable in the fallen world, complicity in it is always an existential catastrophe for a resident of the Kingdom. It is the fullness that is possible only in the Kingdom and without which there is no Kingdom. The fullness for which alone it makes sense to live.

The paradoxical nature of God's Kingdom penetrates the most hidden areas of human life. Today, at the center of the paradox is faith. This may be the most difficult word in human language, because we almost always use it for the wrong purpose. For example, when the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, it turns out that they are asking for the wrong thing. They could move mountains even with an insignificantly small faith (a "mustard seed" is clearly something very small). But what could be more important? After all, Christ says many times to different people, "Your faith has saved you." This also happens with the healed Samaritan leper: the miracle of healing itself happens to all ten, but "faith saved" only him. And what kind of faith could this heretic have? The others went to show themselves to the priests, which was exactly what their faith required. In both cases, by "faith" Christ clearly means not quite what the disciples mean by it, or what you and I usually mean.

Jesus' words about occasions of stumbling are often split into two parts, and only the first is used: the part that says that such occasions inevitably exist in this world. Why exhaust ourselves and try to live by the law of love if these occasions of stumbling will catch up with us anyway? Taking this reasoning to its logical conclusion, some say that there is no reason to regard Judas' act as terrible if the Messiah would have been betrayed in any case. In a sense, this turns Christianity into fatalism: the advent of evil is predetermined, so why hate the fruits of evil in the world and try to renounce them? But what Jesus offers us contains no predetermination: occasions of stumbling will come, sin is present in the world, evil exists and acts, but this is no reason to become a conduit of evil and a source of stumbling ourselves.

Evil and sin don't really please us; and it is correct. It is impossible for all that is in the world, some taking place in spite of the truth, in spite of the Creator's will, in spite of good and beauty, to not provoke protestation to a normal person. But it is inherent to us to “be aggrieved" against God because "He allows all this to occur ", relieving responsibility from ourselves for "all that". Why is it so much evil in the world? - a regular question, but badly formulated. The Lord Jesus Christ asks the followers to take the problem of evil completely differently: actively and with responsibility.

"Offences" - All which brings doubt and disappointment in the faith, all which provokes the disgust to people - such is the sense of the Greek word "skandalon" which uses the evangelist. They are already in the world; therefore it's already too late to carry on conversation to know how they happen… "Woe unto him, through whom they come!" - here is what is really important for the moment. And if we refer to the most important questions of our lives, then we can say that The Lord directs the attention of the followers on "what to do", and not on "who is guilty ". He says that the dissemination of evil can be stopped by the will of people, and it isn't some kind of people, but indeed we (you and I). It is impossible that offences come, since they already exist in this world. But it is very important and even major that they don't come through us - it is apparently the only way to resist evil.

It is still substantial that if we make efforts (even in the least degree) not to be the source of evil, the failures on this road and God's forbearance towards us help us to find an answer to two questions: on the origin of evil, and on the reasons of God's forbearance.

Today we read the evangelist Luke's account of a somewhat mysterious dialogue about faith between the Lord and His disciples. At first glance, Christ's answer is hard to connect with the disciples' request that He increase their faith. Perhaps, as the evangelists often do, Luke reports Christ's words much more fully than the essence of the disciples' question. In such a situation, we should try to understand from what the Lord answers what the disciples had in mind. In addition, the evangelists often tell us about dialogues in which a person coming to Christ asks Him a question, while the Lord intentionally answers not the outward form of the question spoken aloud, but what deep in the heart moved the person to ask it. It is very possible that today we are seeing just such a dialogue.

So the disciples ask Him to "add" faith to them. The "increase" of the Synodal text renders a Greek word that, in an arithmetic sense, means addition rather than multiplication. So to speak, they ask Him to increase the quantity of faith, to give them more of it than they and other people have. Judging by Christ's answer, the disciples' request sounds like a request to sit at His right and left hand. The Lord says that the "quantity" of faith is not what matters. Even a small "quantity," faith the size of a mustard seed, in the Savior's words, transforms the world.

After this the Lord tells the disciples that a person should not expect a reward for doing what he is obliged to do. How does this thought agree with the previous one? Most likely the point is that the disciples, who have already grasped what the Lord says about the importance of faith for a person's salvation, are asking Him to give them faith that would "advantageously distinguish" them in God's eyes.

They have already understood that God needs not outward reverence, but faith. "See, we have left everything and followed You," Peter once said to Christ... Now the disciples, it appears, are asking Him to give them such faith that they could say: "See, we have great faith; what then will there be for us because of this?" It is precisely to such a question that the Lord answers with the words that faith capable of moving mountains is comparable to fulfilling one's duty before the Master and does not allow one to speak of merits. This is, of course, a very important revelation about God and the human person, especially if it is compared with the parable of the workers of the eleventh hour.

"...we are unworthy servants, because we have done what we ought to have done..." These words can offend us. We can say to the Lord, But You Yourself told us: I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I heard from My Father (John 15:15). But there is a difference: in one case He does not call us servants, and in the other He calls us to call ourselves servants. And what is the difference, if I am simply "no longer a slave, but a son" (Gal. 4:7)? This is a question on which lovers of objective materialism or opponents of subjective idealism keep banging their heads every time. Suppose there is a party decision according to which I am no longer a Pioneer but a Komsomol member, and no one is allowed to say to me, "Be ready!" but only and exclusively, "The party has said: it is necessary." In reality, everything is not like that at all, and there is no univocal answer; the world is richer and wider than our words and concepts. The Lord gives certain markers of meaning that we must hold to, but the path between them is our personal creativity. There are moments of tenderness and moments of severity. And everything is filled with meaning if there is love. Therefore no single phrase taken by itself from the Gospel has the divine authority that the Gospel possesses in its wholeness. But besides this, it is important to understand the more prosaic meaning of today's words of the Lord: a slave, when set free, often does not learn freedom, but enslaves those who gave him that freedom. It is not enough to be a former slave in order to become a son. There is still a long path between these two concepts. And each of us must walk this long path. The whole Gospel has not been spoken once for all, but is still being spoken; it has not been completed, but is still being carried out. "Christianity is only beginning," as one contemporary holy martyr said.

"If your brother sins against you, rebuke him..." the Lord tells us today. To an unbeliever, someone not living in God but reading the Gospel with a certain external interest, these words can appear to contradict other words of the Gospel. "Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye?" (Matt 7:4). How can you rebuke someone for anything if you yourself are no better?

In reality, this visible discrepancy reflects a very serious and deep problem of the soul, or a tension of the soul, in every real Christian. It is very rare for someone to offend us consciously and seriously while we are completely innocent. Of course, that happens, but it happens rather rarely. As a rule, we are dealing with ordinary conflicts in which each side is guilty of something. And of course each one considers it his "sacred" duty to call the opposite side to repentance. He rejoices at the thought that now he will forgive. This only leads to an escalation of the conflict.

This is not what the Lord wants from us at all. It appears to us that these words of Jesus contain a very serious warning to people of a very different kind. The point is that among Christians there are very often vulnerable, kind people who are, however, inclined toward depression and excessive self-abasement. If someone offends them, the first thought that arises in their head is, "It is my fault; I did something wrong." In reality, these are people with a huge deficit of love directed toward them, lonely people. If one looks closely, among physically healthy young people who attend churches, they are the overwhelming majority. Because of this kind of self-perception, their sorest spot is often the fear that they will be loved even less. Therefore, if someone around them offends them, they will never "rebuke" him, because they are afraid of bringing that person's displeasure on themselves, of losing some part of his love. That is the essence of it. But in their minds they cover this fear with pious exhortations to themselves about their humility, about their Christian love capable of enduring humiliation, and, in the end, with those words from the Gospel of Matthew that we cited today in an antithetical key. Such people remember small offenses for years. But not because they are vindictive; it is because passing through these offenses was connected for them with the layering of many different fears and pains.

And this is what the Lord does not want. He wants us to understand soberly that we, that I, am not the last and most terrible sinner in the world, and that the people around me can also make mistakes and sin. He wants us to overcome our own egocentrism and remember that our goal, in working together with God, is to lessen evil, and that we must recognize the responsibility of this work together with Him. He wants us to perceive both our own repentance and another person's repentance as the joy of renewed mutual love. It is something like the moment in childhood when we made peace with our parents after punishment. Joy and love are what God wants. He does not want tears and sufferings, and still less does He want tears and sufferings to be covered with piety and placed on a pedestal, as became customary in the great psychological literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a custom that comes from the traditions of eighteenth-century Romanticism. "Suffering ennobles the soul," how often one hears this in half-educated circles... They simply have not seen people whom suffering crushed and twisted so badly that one can barely make out the person's personality. The Lord certainly does not want that.

How many times should you forgive a person who has done you harm? How far must mercy and forgiveness extend? In other words, what measure of forgiveness will be sufficient? For people formed by the law, this question looks natural, and so the disciples ask it of Christ. The evangelist Matthew in chapter 18 reports a similar question from Peter; the evangelist Luke in today's reading also transmits Christ's words about forgiving seven times, without mentioning the question.

To understand what the Lord says, it is important to keep in mind that "seven" is a number symbolizing every fullness, and this was well known to Christ's disciples. In essence, the Lord rejects the Jewish idea of a "measure" of forgiveness. Forgiveness, mercy, and compassion toward people, including those who do us harm, can never be sufficient. We have no possibility of ceasing to forgive on the grounds that we have already done so a certain number of times. This is what today's words of Christ are about: "if he sins seven times in a day... and seven times turns back... forgive him." This is what Matthew's words, "not... up to seven, but up to seventy times seven," are about. This is what the commandment to love enemies is about. Relationships between people are not built on weighing debts and forgiveness. The Gospel as a whole considers forgiveness of people our duty, but not before people; before God. That is the whole point.

The Lord speaks about this many times. The clearest illustration is His parable of the unmerciful creditor, which He told in response to Peter's question about how many times to forgive. In practice this is very important, because fulfilling Christ's words about repeated and constant forgiveness is hard. Moreover, as the Lord Himself says, "with men this is impossible." But if we forgive not by our own human strength, not because we have to grit our teeth and fulfill the commandment, but for the sake of faithfulness to God, regardless of those whom we forgive, then this becomes for us an encounter with God Himself.

The evangelist Luke transmits an important word of Christ about this, one very difficult to translate. Before the commandment to forgive always and repeatedly, the Lord says to the disciples: "Take heed to yourselves" (such is the Synodal translation). The Slavonic text offers the version "Attend to yourselves," and the Vulgate renders the expression with the words "adtendite vobis." The Greek prosehete heautois includes two main shades of meaning. This expression chiefly means "watch yourselves, pay attention to yourselves." It is a call to reflection, to analysis of one's actions, decisions, and experiences. The Lord calls the disciples to look into themselves so that forgiveness will not be for them a calculated payment for people's actions, but an encounter with God acting in their lives.

But the Greek expression cited by the evangelist also has another shade of meaning, one not missed by blessed Jerome and noticeable in translations that follow the Vulgate. One can try to render this shade with the words "Hold firm, make an effort, gather yourselves." "Brace yourselves" - that is very important. The forgiveness of which the Lord speaks is not a "state of soul" in which forgiveness happens "by itself." It is labor that requires collectedness and effort. When Christians say that the Church is the army of Christ, forgiveness is the front line of the battle in which this army is called to take part. And it is important for us to watch ourselves and remember that forgiveness is not a payment we bring to people and not a sacrifice to God; it is a miracle that God works in us.

Speaking about relationships within the community, the Savior calls for complete sincerity and for not concealing hurts and misunderstandings when they exist. Indeed, rules of politeness are good only so long as there is no need to build serious and deep relationships with those who are nearby.

One can ignore hurts and misunderstandings where relationships are purely functional: after all, if the issue is only coworkers, all communication can be limited to the workplace, and for the sake of the work it is perhaps truly better not to dig deeply into relationships. Of course, in that case sin does not cease to be sin, and more than that, it does not cease to poison the relationship between the two people, one of whom offends and the other takes offense. But it may not affect their functioning, though usually only for a time. A community is another matter: here the issue is a shared path to God, and all relationships here are absolutely important because they will have to be taken along on that path.

If there are any half-spoken matters here, unspoken hurts, or sin burdening relationships, all of this will have to be resolved, or else one will have to come to God with one's sins and hurts. But there, with God, in the Kingdom, there is no place for sin or resentment. Therefore all this must be dealt with on the way. And in such a way that the road, already difficult enough, does not become unbearable. It certainly will become so if people pretend that there are no problems, as sometimes happens when people try to be guided in spiritual life by various schemes and rules of "ideal" behavior, usually of religious origin.

Then they usually try to see both themselves and others not as they are, but as they ought to be according to an invented ideal, and they behave accordingly, interacting not with real people but with imagined ones. That is when people usually try to hush up problems: ideal people are not supposed to have them. "Real Christians" are not supposed to take offense, so "among us" there can be no grievances. But in reality both grievances and misunderstandings are of course present; in the fallen world there is no way without them, and they do their work, destroying real relationships between real people.

It is so that nothing like this may happen that the Savior advises calling things by their names: grievance a grievance, misunderstanding a misunderstanding, and saying everything directly, as it is. Then it becomes possible to deal with the real problems that, if left to themselves, can destroy the community. And the possibility of forgiveness appears then as well: for in order to forgive, one must understand who is guilty before you and in what, just as one can ask forgiveness only when one understands in what one is guilty before others. It is better to make problems visible and solve them than to let them destroy everything.

The parable of the unprofitable servant is a typical double-edged sword. On the one hand, who is this servant? The one who carries out everything that was commanded. A great deal has been commanded of us: to love God and our neighbor, and to love one another as Jesus loves us. Whoever fulfills all this to the end may consider himself an “unprofitable servant.” In other words, even the greatest saints can be called nothing more than this, to say nothing of an ordinary person in everyday life. On the other hand, even the slightest effort to keep the commandments seems to us worthy of special praise and gratitude from God. Every little thing deserves payment at the highest rate. It is very difficult to accept that fulfilling everything, as it turns out, is not considered something extraordinary.

Of the ten who were healed, only one understood that a miracle had happened; only one was filled with gratitude and therefore believed. Is it accidental that out of ten there was one? We know that nothing in the Word of God is accidental. This proportion is certainly not accidental either. There are sociological studies showing that for a society to be stable, ten percent of its members must be believing people. The rigor of such studies can, of course, be questioned, but looking at today's reading one can understand that there is indeed some truth in this.

Not everyone is capable of faith, only those to whom such a manifestation of the Spirit has been given (1 Cor. 12:9). The rest, seeing a miracle, and even more than that, experiencing it themselves, will find natural causes for it. And this tenth part is that salt of the earth, a pinch of which is enough to make food tasty. Moreover, official statistics of confessional affiliation, of course, have no relation to this "golden section," because in principle they cannot reflect the true faith of respondents.

And one more thought comes to mind while reflecting on all this. The Lord calls us to give a tithe from what we have received. That is, of everything we have acquired, nine-tenths may remain within the circle of ordinary household needs, but one-tenth must be sacred. So too, perhaps, with us: one-tenth of people, those who truly believe, are an offering to God.

In the story of the ten lepers, one detail is interesting: the Lord sends the lepers to fulfill what is written in the Law about leprosy and its healing, to go and show themselves to the priests. As Jews who honored the Law, nine of them, they would not have been able to return quickly and thank Jesus if they first fulfilled the legal commandment and only afterward gave free rein to their feelings. Why, then, is the Lord more pleased not with them, but with the tenth, the Samaritan, a half-pagan who did not dare come close to a Jewish Teacher? Perhaps what matters more to Him is not formal gratitude expressed in the temple sacrifice that the healed leper was supposed to offer, but a living gratitude that comes from the heart and overcomes all legalistic barriers...

We all know how important it is to thank God, but do we do it from an inner impulse, or do we piously go to bring Him yet another "thanksgiving" sacrifice?

To the Samaritan leper who returned to thank the Lord, Christ says that his faith has saved him. It did not simply give him the possibility of being healed; it saved him. All ten lepers were granted the miracle, but only one of them understood that it happened by Christ's will, because He wanted it. And he received it as an undeserved gift and returned to thank Him. For this Samaritan, God ceased to be a faceless and distant force that sometimes helps people. He became for him the One who heard his plea. Unlike the others, what happened became for him a personal meeting with God face to face. This is the saving faith that the Lord saw in him.