NOTES for Php 4:12-13

Perhaps someone will want to say to the apostle Paul: "Some problem! Living in abundance, what is there to learn!" But it is not so simple. The apostle Paul knows well what he is talking about. Abundance can be dangerous for us, both material abundance and spiritual abundance. Both create the danger of substitution. We feel comfortable and stop remembering God. Why should we, if everything is fine as it is? We lose gratitude... we lose our relationship with Him. Because if everything is in order for me without Him, then I end up without Him, separate. But learning to receive His gifts, to be grateful, and not to forget Him is not so simple.

Speaking about himself, Paul says that the outward circumstances of life are indifferent to him: he has learned to feel equally well living both in poverty and amid abundance. Such a statement may seem strange against the background of the idea of wealth, which, according to the Savior's words, hinders entry into the Kingdom, so that if it is possible for a rich person at all, it is in any case very difficult.

Meanwhile there is nothing strange in the apostle's words about himself and about his attitude toward wealth. He simply understands poverty as a state more spiritual than material. Wealth and social status are not especially important to him; for him wealth is connected rather with the habit of relying on it, and therefore on oneself, instead of on God. In this same sense, trust in wealth differs little from trust in poverty. If one draws from the Savior's words about the rich the conclusion that every poor person is guaranteed salvation simply because he is poor, one can easily fall into the opposite extreme, into which some Christian groups and communities have sometimes fallen.

In essence there is no difference, when salvation is at issue, between relying on wealth and relying on poverty: in both cases a person relies not on Christ and not even on himself, but on what he has or does not have. Counting on poverty in itself being salvific is just as absurd as counting on wealth in itself being salvific. Only God saves through Jesus Christ, and only relationships with God and with Christ can be salvific. This primacy of relationships in life became Paul's goal, just as in the normal case it becomes the goal of every Christian.

Everything else, including material position and social status, is merely the outward condition for building such relationships. Of course a person needs a certain material minimum for life, but here the Gospel principle applies: seek the Kingdom, and "all this," which in context means "what the Gentiles seek," what is needed for life materially, will be added, and in accordance with what and how much a person needs at the given moment. This is exactly how Paul lived: he followed Christ along his spiritual path, accepting what was "added" to him, and he did not regret it, advising the same path to others.

Paul gives special emphasis to humility ("meekness"), without which the Christian path, and therefore salvation, is impossible. At the same time, the apostle describes in considerable detail what humility means as a spiritual state. First of all, following Christ, he calls the recipients of his letter to be anxious about nothing, handing everything over to God, to whom Paul urges them to turn with all their desires.

It would seem simple, but in practice such simplicity turns out not to be easy to attain. Indeed, in order to live this way, one must realize that our very life does not belong to us. In fact, that is how it is, and the Bible says this quite plainly: what makes a human being human is the "breath of life" that God "breathes" into his "nostrils" at creation, and this breath belongs to God, not to the human being.

Yet the realization that his life belongs to God comes to fallen humanity with great difficulty. Direct divine intervention is needed here, the very peace about which Jesus Himself says that it is not of this world. Not of the world in the sense that it cannot be found in nature, in the world, in that space which the ancient Greeks called the cosmos; it belongs to the Kingdom, which is also not of this world. A person experiences it precisely as peace, as inner silence that stops and extinguishes in him all spiritual movements connected with fallen human nature.

The spiritual "I" of a person, which the apostle here, as in his other letters, calls by a Greek word literally meaning "mind," in the fallen state inevitably falls under the power of that nature which, according to God's design, it was meant to control and direct. Meanwhile, to be a Christian means to enter into the relationship that unites the Son with the Father, so that the person's entire spiritual life takes place within the space of these relationships. Without the direct influence of the breath of the Kingdom, which frees a person from the power of his own nature and immerses him in inner silence, it is impossible to enter there. And from inner silence one can already enter into the relationship of the Father and the Son, to "keep hearts and minds in Christ Jesus," as Paul calls it.

But in order to remain there, in order not to fall out of the spiritual space of the relationship of the Father and the Son, one must not admit into one's spiritual life any intentions or even thoughts except those that are "virtue and praise." Otherwise there will be no spiritual path: a person will only sometimes, and only for a very short time, touch the Kingdom and its life, but will not be able to enter it. This is what the apostle recalls at the end of his letter.