NOTES for Gal 5:22-6:2; Luk 6:17-23

Here there are very difficult words that require a very careful approach: they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. These words are generally seen as a basis for every kind of asceticism. This theme itself appears very often in the Apostle Paul. There are many other words related to these: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6:14). I have heard it said that these words mean: I have died to the world and the world to me. But if the apostle had wanted to say that, he would have said exactly that, whereas he said something different.

Here is what Fr. Georgy Chistyakov says: "The point is that the Bible has no orientation toward fighting the passions. The New Testament, through the mouths of the holy apostles, calls us not to fight anger, rage, malice, and so on, but to 'put off,' that is, to take off like old clothing, or to 'strip off' all these vices from ourselves. These two words are used many times in Scripture when it speaks of passions and vices, but nowhere here is there talk of fighting the passions. One must think that everything concerning the struggle with the passions that rule over us and nest inside us entered Christian literature from Stoic and, more generally, ancient philosophy at a later time.

The holy apostles see the Christian's path not as a road of fighting the passions, but precisely as the throwing off of old clothing, as growing out of that clothing... But if we begin to take sin apart bone by bone and subject it to analysis, then we are inevitably seized or sucked in by the very process of struggle, we turn into fighters, and at that point our Christianity simply comes to an end. From the depths of our consciousness we transfer the struggle into the outside world and begin to fight everyone who, as it appears to us, thinks the wrong way, does the wrong thing, and so on."

Let us feel the important circumstance that our Lord Jesus did not derive pleasure from His suffering, the pleasure that we at times derive from our own asceticism. After all, there is such a mental disorder as masochism - that is where Freud had grounds to accuse us. And this is, in fact, essential.

The apostle Paul writes in Galatians not so much about discerning spirits as about the fact that every Christian is called to live by the Holy Spirit. St. Seraphim of Sarov calls the acquisition of Him the goal of our life. And in these words of the apostle we read about simple and understandable things whose presence can indicate that the direction toward this goal has been chosen rightly. Both in the context of Paul's letters and in the context of contemporary life, it is important that the apostle does not include in this list what in the letter to the Corinthians he calls gifts of the Holy Spirit. Here he speaks precisely about what should testify to the action of the Holy Spirit in the life of every Christian; extraordinary gifts, according to the apostle's teaching, are not obligatory for all. Therefore there is no mention here of the "gift of tongues," of mystical illuminations, or of artistic inspiration. Nor is there any mention of emotional experiences, which are changeable and not obligatory.

The apostle speaks, in essence, of very simple things that, when we meet them in people, we usually attribute to pleasantness of character. In reality this is not so: only the Spirit of God can bring all this to birth in human hearts, and this is important for understanding the ways of the Lord. The fruits of the Holy Spirit's action listed by Paul have several common traits. First, they are not traits of character, but everything listed requires an effort of the will. Even joy, which requires the ability to give importance to what is good, needs the help of the will. Still more are efforts needed for faith, patience, and the other things listed. Second, all these things are very practical: one can check one's heart by this list when preparing for confession. In addition, one can consciously strive for what is listed. It is clear that only the Lord can fulfill this striving, and we ourselves are powerless to attain anything of what the apostle speaks about. But without our will, hardly anything can happen.

It is also very important for the apostle that acquiring these fruits of the Holy Spirit frees us from slavery to the law. Indeed, if a person labors in order to bear these fruits for God, he simply cannot do anything unlawful. The law is thus fulfilled by itself, while the efforts of the will are directed not toward fulfilling it but toward God. In this, for the apostle, lies the radical difference between the New Covenant and the Old.

Paul formulates the essence of Christian life briefly and concisely: if we live by spirit, then we must also walk by spirit. That is how the corresponding Greek text sounds literally. What does he mean? The answer depends on what one understands by "spiritual life." Often even Christians mean by it something more or less figurative. By "spirit" they understand certain new principles of life or a changed worldview. At the same time it is supposed that one or the other appears in a person when he becomes "spiritual." And a life corresponding to these new principles or this new worldview is called "life according to the spirit."

Meanwhile, that spirit, or more precisely, that breath of which the apostle speaks, has no direct relation to any principles or to any worldview. Of course, a person who lives by this breath may have his own principles and his own worldview. And as long as the person remains consistent, both will correspond to the life he is living. But what is primary is still life itself, not principles. It is life in accordance with the divine breath that permeates the Kingdom. That is what Paul is speaking about: this breath. It is not principles, not rules, not a worldview or a way of sensing the world. It is a real experience of the real, living presence of God. It is the experience of that presence in one's own life, outer and inner. This presence is what makes a person a Christian. Contact with it makes life spiritual in the proper sense.

Of course, a certain measure of spiritual life was opened to the human person even before Christ came into the world. After all, the breath of life that God breathes into the human person at creation is also presence. God's breath can be nothing else. And if such breath is in everyone, this means only one thing: every person, regardless of what he thinks about this breath, or whether he thinks about it at all, lives in the presence of God. Not an external presence, but an internal one. And it already depends on the person himself how much this God-given breath will define his life, how much it will be spiritual in the proper sense of the word. But the breath of the Kingdom, which entered the world with Christ, is not given to everyone, but only to the one who has entered into real and living relationship with Christ. Yet it is still the same breath, only in a greater, one may say absolute, fullness. In such fullness that it can make a person's life spiritual also in all fullness, up to the complete transfiguration of human nature that makes it an inseparable part of the Kingdom.

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.

"...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.

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?

Paul returns again and again to the theme of human nothingness. The Apostle often said of himself that he was nothing, while advising others, as in the Epistle to the Galatians, not to imagine themselves to be something great or exceptional when they were nothing. Such a self-assessment and such an appeal are entirely appropriate in the context of the understanding of poverty as a spiritual state that in Paul's time was commonplace in Jewish and early Christian spiritual tradition alike. Indeed, poverty as a spiritual state is defined by the fact that, by virtue of having been created, a person is in a certain sense not his own. What makes him human is the “breath of life” that God, at creation, “breathes” into his “nostrils.” It is this that makes the human being the image of God. Yet this breath does not belong to the person; it remains God's, and the person remains human only so long as he preserves it and insofar as he is conscious of it. Once he realizes fully that his own existence as the image of God does not depend on him at all, that it is wholly God's work and that he himself can only participate in it, he understands himself as nothing, as having no existence apart from God's action.

Human nature, then, not to mention everything that belongs to a person, begins to be understood merely as an outward shell, as a set of tools given by God, as something received from Him on loan for accomplishing the tasks that God sets before a person during his life. Understanding himself in this way, a person becomes a perfect instrument of God. He can now help his neighbor if the latter has sinned, for God Himself will act through him, and God knows what to do. If, however, a person does not accept his own nonexistence, he will not thereby acquire another quality of being or become something he was not before; but he may well convince himself and even others that he is something when in fact he is nothing.

Such an illusion may prove costly in spiritual life generally, and especially in Christian life, for here the issue is the Kingdom, which can be found or lost in a single instant: one need only empty one's heart for it or, conversely, fill the heart with something of this world. It is these things, fundamental to Christian life, that Paul recalls to the recipients of his epistle, who had evidently forgotten them quite thoroughly.

Continuing the conversation about the Kingdom and about the relationships that take shape among the inhabitants of the Kingdom, Paul formulates a fundamental rule of spiritual life, one close to the well-known saying, "You reap what you sow" (vv. 7-9). The apostle understands perfectly well that spiritual life is a process just as ordinary life is, but unlike ordinary life, it unfolds not according to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, but according to the laws of the Kingdom. And if, in the untransformed world, a person who violates the Torah and every moral norm may still succeed in certain respects, in the Kingdom this is impossible in principle. It is not because someone will specially prevent a violator of the Torah from succeeding, but because the very nature of the Kingdom does not allow it. That is why Paul reminds them of the senselessness, from the point of view of the laws of the Kingdom, of boasting and self-exaltation (vv. 3-5): the point is not only that it is deception, but also that it is useless deception. In the Kingdom, deception is not only impossible but also pointless. The very nature of the Kingdom allows a person to be only what he really is.

One could say that the Kingdom is a world where all illusions are scattered and all mirages disappear, both frightening and comforting. It is no surprise that, speaking about correction, the apostle advises those who correct others to show gentleness and to watch themselves (v. 1). Of course, it is important to watch oneself also because anyone can sin, and, once carried away by correcting a neighbor's sin, one can do so very easily: during correction, the attention of the one correcting is inevitably transferred from himself to his neighbor, so that there is usually little or no time left to watch himself. But that is not the only point. It is easy to become carried away by correction in another sense too, forgetting that in the Kingdom, where everyone is in one spiritual space, the spiritual condition of each person concerns not only himself but also all who share the life of the Kingdom with him. Another's sin in the Kingdom ceases to be merely another's; it becomes a common problem, a problem for the whole fullness of the Kingdom, which it destroys and with which one therefore cannot make peace. But the struggle against sin can also become destructive for the Kingdom, especially if it becomes a struggle not only against sin but also against the sinner himself.

Of course, if the sinner identifies himself with his sin and refuses to repent, the situation truly becomes critical: sometimes it turns out that an unrepentant sinner may lose the Kingdom altogether. But in all other cases, a person must be helped to free himself from the sin that hinders him, not pushed out merely because his presence causes everyone else too much trouble. This is evidently what Paul has in mind when he speaks of the need to bear one another's burdens (v. 2). As we can see, everything the apostle says about Christians' relationships to themselves and to one another has only one purpose: to reorient the members of the Galatian church from the laws of our world, not yet transformed, to the laws of the Kingdom.

At first glance, the passage is full of contradictions. But only at first glance, because, as always, every verse in Paul is logical and clear. The general rule is this: bear one another’s burdens, but each individual must attend to his own affairs, do his own work, and not demand that someone else carry his burden. Watch yourself, your words, and your deeds; and when correcting someone together with others, do so only in a spirit of gentleness. Watch yourself. A spirit of gentleness will not allow you to judge and accuse the people around you; you will not be able to think yourself something exceptional. And as you live each day in labor, bearing what the Lord has laid upon you, in a spirit of gentleness you will be able to help those around you.

The division between spirit and flesh is a theme that occupied the minds of many ancient philosophers, but the apostle Paul speaks of an entirely new understanding of this question. What Christ offers does not fit within the framework of even the most coherent philosophical system. The spirit and human nature are directed in opposite directions, and reconciling them is practically impossible. This can be seen clearly in the absolutely incompatible fruits they bear. This is the law to which everything must be subject. Acting according to the flesh, a person must inevitably begin committing murders, adulteries, idol worship...

Only by living in the Holy Spirit is a person able to break this circle. If we are "led by the Spirit," then little by little He transforms us so that no laws have power over us any longer. For together with Christ we "crucify" our flesh "with its passions and desires," and we begin to live in the fullness of our whole being in such a way that our deeds can be called "fruits of the spirit."

The list of the “works of the flesh” is striking. The Apostle Paul lists without distinction sins that we call grave—adultery and murder—and so-called “everyday” sins—enmity, quarrels, and disagreements. And yet, it would seem, how can we imagine our life without any quarrels or disagreements at all? Perhaps we can imagine it, and perhaps we would even like the picture... but putting it into practice... We would so much like to say that if we have not killed anyone, then everything is more or less all right with us, while small shortcomings... everyone has them. And yet the Apostle Paul speaks clearly: “Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” So should we despair and give up? Is there no chance? Paul tells us that what matters most is what leads us. If we are led by the Spirit, we pass beyond the confines of the law of the flesh. The fruits of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives are the direct opposite of enmity and disagreement: love, joy, and patience. This is not about cultivating patience in ourselves. It is precisely about the Spirit acting in the heart, when patience and love are born from within. Virtue cannot be artificial.

Continuing the theme of the Torah, Paul writes to the Galatian Christians that refusing circumcision does not mean refusing the Torah at all. He reminds them of a well-known rabbinic saying, which the Savior Himself quoted more than once: love your neighbor as yourself, and you may consider that you have fulfilled the Torah (v. 14). Freedom in our world, not yet transformed, is only a potential; it can be used for good or for evil. In the Kingdom, however, freedom is not only a possibility but its realization, the embodiment of love that every relationship in the Kingdom becomes, if it truly belongs to the Kingdom. It is no accident that the apostle speaks of love as the only right use of freedom and, for Christians, the only possible use of freedom (v. 13). He calls the Galatian Christians to the simplest and at the same time most difficult thing: to life in the Kingdom, to walking by the Spirit (vv. 16-17).

The apostle reminds the Galatian church of the same thing he had said more than once to other churches: in love is the whole fullness of the Torah. Love is the very foundation of the Kingdom, the substance that permeates everything there, including all the relationships that bind its inhabitants to God and to one another. The Torah ceases to be a fence protecting from sin; its protective function is no longer needed in the Kingdom. Instead another function appears, one almost unused in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed: it becomes the form that allows the love permeating the Kingdom to take shape and quality. Paul does not list the works of the spirit and the works of the flesh in such detail by accident, setting them against each other (vv. 19-28). He wants to remind his readers that the system of relationships among people forms a definite environment, and that environment can be formed either according to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, or according to the laws of the Kingdom. He calls the Galatian Christians to make the formation of an environment living by the laws of the Kingdom their chief task. This, and not playing religious games, is truly spiritual work, work worthy of the inhabitants of the Kingdom.

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!

Like several other episodes of the Savior's earthly ministry, Luke describes the Sermon on the Mount somewhat differently than Matthew does. For Luke, the basis for presenting what Jesus said during this sermon becomes the contrast between two ways: the way of the rich, which the evangelist identifies with the way of the Gentiles, and the way of the poor, which turns out to be the way into the Kingdom.

The idea of two ways is not new in itself; it is well known from Old Testament texts, and for Luke it becomes the very prism through which he perceives the Savior's words. In mentioning the poor, Jesus undoubtedly meant not simply those without possessions, but those who understood poverty as a spiritual state. The Old Testament prophets had already spoken about such poor people. And the rich differ from them not by a property marker, but by a spiritual one: if the poor find their consolation only in the Kingdom (vv. 20-23), then the rich receive what is theirs in this world, having no need of the Kingdom (vv. 24-26).

But in order to enter the Kingdom, one must remain faithful to it to the end. Therefore those who thirst for the Kingdom cannot live by the laws of this world, which has not yet been transformed, even though the laws of the Kingdom do not yet operate in it. It is no accident that Luke singles out in Jesus' sermon the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 31), making it the compositional center of that part of his account in which he presents Jesus' instruction to those who want to live according to the laws of the Kingdom (vv. 27-36).

At first glance, this call resembles the universally known "golden rule," but there is one difference in the Savior's formulation that is not immediately obvious: if in its traditional version the "golden rule" calls us to treat people the same way they treat us, Jesus advises us to treat people as we would want them to treat us. In other words, if we are truly seeking the Kingdom, then in our relationships with people, according to the Savior's word, we must in a certain sense "work ahead," giving them our good attitude in advance and not waiting for them first to show themselves in relation to us.

According to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, this is of course completely irrational behavior: everyone knows that fallen man is very little capable either of good works or of a good attitude toward neighbors. But, on the other hand, any other approach to the people around us does not presuppose openness, and without openness it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. The Kingdom is arranged in such a way that one cannot enjoy it alone. One cannot acquire it by fencing oneself off from everyone. The Kingdom can be acquired only if one becomes part of it oneself, and one can become part of it only when what we have received we pass on to others, to those who, like us, seek the fullness of life in this Kingdom. And then we become servants of the Kingdom - those whom Jesus chooses so that through them the whole world created by God may become the Kingdom.

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.

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.

In the Sermon on the Mount, as the passage from Luke’s Gospel that follows today’s reading is traditionally called, the Lord tells His listeners what true life and true righteousness are, and speaks about the meaning and moral foundations of life. 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, because we must remember that God’s truth possesses real power precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious; it is very difficult to understand and accept His words, and still more difficult to fulfill them. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness—none of this follows from the experience of human life. Yet we are given the opportunity to sense 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. That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another become the place where, sometimes quite unexpectedly even to ourselves, we meet the Living God.

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.