NOTES for Luk 6:46-7:1

For an adequate understanding of the Savior's words, it is important to imagine how houses were built in Judea, and in all Palestine, in Gospel times. The soil in most of Palestine is rocky; the powerful foundations needed when building on clay or sandy soils are not necessary there. It was only necessary to clear away the upper alluvial layer (usually thin enough) in order to reach the stone. After that, the simplest strip foundation was laid, its basis being large corner stones (cornerstones). But removing the upper layer was absolutely necessary; otherwise, in winter, during the rainy season, when turbulent streams flow from the mountains down the slopes into the valleys, the house would almost certainly "float."

The Savior, as we can see, compares spiritual life with a house that makes sense to build only on rock, after first clearing it of everything that can get in the way of construction. Clearly, the image of a house built on rock was meant to remind the listeners that listening and hearing are not the same thing. The one who has heard will certainly move from words to action, applying what he has heard in practice. But, of course, there will also be those who, after listening to everything, will not want to change anything in their life.

And this is no surprise: in spiritual life the main role is played not by intellect and not by feeling, but by the will. It is precisely through acts of will that the spiritual "I" of a person, which constitutes the center of the human person, manifests itself. But often the person himself does not realize this, at least when it comes to practical life. And he lives without realizing either the true causes or the true significance of his decisions and actions.

Such unexamined spiritual life really resembles a house built on sand: the acts of will that determine a person's spiritual life remain for the most part unconsidered, and often entirely unnoticed, so that a person, in a spiritual sense (and sometimes not only in a spiritual sense), literally lives without knowing how.

Any thought that unexpectedly comes to mind and any feeling that seizes the heart can lead to decisions and actions completely unexpected even for the person himself, decisions and actions that he often can neither understand nor explain. And only full awareness of every choice made and every decision taken makes a person's spiritual life (as well as his life in general) inwardly whole and consistent. In that case every action of the person comes from the depth of his spiritual "I." And his spiritual life turns out to be founded not on the shifting sand of random thoughts and feelings, but on the rock of conscious choice.

When the Lord tells us that it is useless to call upon Him without doing what He says, when He tells us that everyone is known by the fruit they bear, this reveals His utmost strictness. We are not accustomed to this. For us it is often most important that a person be good; as for the fact that he is unsuccessful and has accomplished nothing special, we are often quite ready to forgive that. Indeed, the opposite is more likely: if a person is not very kind, his real achievements even irritate us and seem somehow out of place. Yet we should accept such strictness from the Lord with joy, because it gives us confidence that if we follow these words, we are firm as rock and nothing can shake us.

But even this is not the main thing. The main thing lies in our love. Love is an astonishingly creative feeling. Recall being in love with another person. It seems that you could run around the whole world three times to find what your beloved needs. Our love for God should be just like that. We should burn with the desire to do everything for Him, to do everything as He wants and commands. If we have this feeling, akin to passionate love, and if we do not allow it to fade, we are like the person who built his house upon rock.

For many centuries now the debate has died down and flared up again over what matters more: faith or works, theory or practice, which is primary and which secondary. Meanwhile, from the Gospel it is clear that formal religiosity has no meaning and will be rejected by God, and temples built for prayer that is not supported by deeds and by keeping the commandments of real, not verbal, love for God and neighbor will collapse. And not only temples, but we ourselves, praying in those temples, like the Pharisees, will prove bankrupt with all our knowledge of biblical interpretation and liturgics.

So let us hope not in our own education, but that our knowledge will become a launching pad for living deeds that we may not be able to imagine in advance. But the Lord sees us, and He knows at what moment and to what service to direct us.

If only we would recognize His will and not reject it.

Today the Lord tells us that merely listening to Him and calling on Him is not enough. Only putting His words into practice can form a firm foundation for human life. Putting Christ's words into practice is the rock on which you can stand firm. Without that rock, you have no chance of standing firm.

This matters because failing to put God's word into practice is itself a sin. Consequently, the less effort a person makes to do so, the less hope there is of escaping a sinful state. Conversely, even a small effort to put Christ's words into practice gives us a foothold from which we can resist sin with ever greater strength.

For the elders of Israel who were well disposed toward the centurion, it was important to stress that he cared for the people. This Roman loved the people of Israel conquered by his state and had even built a synagogue; against the background of conquerors’ usual behavior, this could not fail to attract attention. But while the building of the synagogue was a sign of goodwill in the elders’ eyes, for the centurion it proved to be a stage in an inward spiritual search.

Did the centurion consider himself unworthy only because he knew the Jewish rules about impurity and respected local customs? What if he felt his own sinfulness, and his request that Jesus refrain from entering his house was akin to Peter’s plea that He depart from him, “a sinful man”? For some reason the second possibility seems more likely, especially since Jesus, addressing the people, notes that the centurion possesses a faith such as He had not found even in Israel.

The pagan, whose heart had been opened by the law he had only recently come to know, proved more ready to receive Jesus than many Jews who had known the law from childhood. But let us not use this as grounds for exalting ourselves above the Jews of that time. Today too we may encounter both new converts who are open to Christ and long-standing Christians who have grown accustomed to possessing spiritual treasures and therefore forget about them.

The account of Jesus healing the servant of a Roman centurion, an officer commanding a hundred men, shows us a rather unexpected side of the Kingdom. It is difficult to say what the centurion's religious views were, but he evidently respected the Jewish people and trusted Jesus personally without reserve—in a way that, judging by the Saviour's own words, no one among God's people trusted Him. Yet as for the servant, the very person who needed healing, nothing definite can be said in this respect: the evangelist tells us nothing about either his religious outlook or his attitude towards the Jewish people. As for personal trust in Jesus, we cannot even say for certain whether the centurion's servant knew anything at all about Him or had ever heard His name. In any case, in the condition he was in when his master went to look for Jesus, the servant was in no state to reflect on the One the centurion had gone to find.

Only one thing is clear: the centurion loved his servant no less than he trusted Jesus; otherwise he would hardly have made every effort to help the dying man. The fullness of his trust in Jesus was shown, among other things, in his certainty that the Saviour could heal his sick servant at a distance, so much so that he did not even invite Him to his home: why put such a Man to unnecessary trouble if it could be avoided? Such certainty is evidently possible only with absolute trust.

But this is the centurion's trust, not his servant's. The servant himself was somewhere else at that very moment and most likely was not even thinking about Jesus, so there can be no question of any personal relationship, of his trust or distrust towards the Saviour. Only his master's love for him and that same master's trust in the One who can heal connect him with Christ. Such an indirect relationship leading to healing seems rather unusual: as a rule, those being healed were at least within Jesus' sight, if not in direct contact with Him, and entered into an immediate relationship of love and trust with Him.

Yet evidently the Kingdom knows no boundaries, spiritual as well as physical: an indirect relationship in the Kingdom is just as real and effective as a direct one. If someone is bound to Christ by a relationship of love and trust, it will inevitably affect the loved ones who are dear to that person. Perhaps it cannot be otherwise: for the Kingdom is a space of love uniting all its inhabitants, permeated by the breath of God, for which no distances exist.

What kind of faith did the Lord not find in Israel, as He said of the faith of the centurion from Capernaum? First, the centurion professes his faith in Christ’s divine nature. He does not expect the Teacher from Nazareth to heal by touching the sick servant or by any other means requiring His personal presence. The centurion says that he believes Christ’s will alone, expressed in His word, is enough to heal. In this way he professes His will as a creative power acting in the world beyond the bounds of physical laws, the laws of nature. Just as the hundred men placed under the centurion’s command obey him, so the whole world obeys Christ. One may think in this way of the almighty and omnipresent God, Creator of heaven and earth, or of the One Whom God Himself has sent into the world. Second, this faith compels the centurion to look first at himself. He thinks of God not as a means of solving various problems, but as a Person before Whom he will stand when Jesus comes into his house. That is why he says that he is unworthy of this visit. These two aspects of the centurion’s faith make him an example for us to follow.

We all believe that the Lord, who created this world, has complete power over nature. That is as easy to imagine as an officer commanding soldiers on a parade ground: at his command they all turn right, and at another they all turn left!

But do we believe that the Lord can heal a sick person before our eyes—just like that: He speaks, and the person recovers? “Well,” we might say, “in theory we believe that too...” Do we see the enormous difference between theoretical belief in God's omnipotence and faith in a miracle that directly concerns us? No such gap existed in the military mind of the Roman centurion: his faith was not theoretical but living—and a miracle occurred. Perhaps the Lord would not find such faith not only in Israel...

Today we return again to such a fundamental concept as faith. In the Bible this word most often means not simply trust in some information, but the ability at a critical moment to "take hold" of God, to lean on Him as on a firm pillar or rock.

Today's story about the Roman officer who asked Jesus to heal his servant, and whom Christ sets as an example for His disciples, illustrates this well. He is a military man, trained in army discipline, and he is absolutely certain that his order will be carried out, just as he himself is ready to carry out the order of his commander. In his relationship with God, such confidence rests not on discipline and military order, where a soldier is punished with death for disobedience, but on something no less strong: namely, on faith.

Strictly speaking, when Scripture speaks about faith, it is speaking about faith that is stronger even than death, so that the sick are healed and the dead are raised.

The Gospels are full of accounts of miraculous healings and even raisings from the dead. But Luke's account of the healing of a Roman centurion's servant clearly holds a special place: it receives even more attention than the Savior's raising of the widow of Nain's son. Could this be because it concerns a pagan, a Roman, of whom Jesus Himself nevertheless said that He had not seen such faith even among the Jewish people? Perhaps: Luke is the Evangelist who wrote his Gospel for the Gentiles. But that is hardly the whole explanation. There is also the somewhat unusual healing at a distance, so to speak.

At first glance this may seem strange: what matters for healing is a person's participation in the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world. Yet here the sick man does not even see Jesus; perhaps he knows nothing of Him at all. What participation can there be in such a case? And yet things are apparently not so simple. Indeed, what is Christianity, in essence? Life with Christ in the Kingdom He brought into the world. And what is Christian witness? It is the Kingdom that each of us Christians takes with us when we go out into the world.

This is possible, of course, if we are in the Kingdom and it is in us. If its breath abides in our hearts. And this, in turn, will not happen without complete and absolute trust in Jesus: that very personal trust without which there can be no love or close friendship. If there is trust, however, there is also the Kingdom. Its power and its breath. Then that power and that breath can act even at a distance: for the Kingdom knows no distances like those that shape so much of life in our world.

And the pagan who trusted Jesus, the Roman centurion, became part of the Kingdom and carried it with him. In his heart. And in his heart there was not only Jesus but also his sick servant. And this servant found himself in the Kingdom, perhaps quite unexpectedly for him, but entirely in reality. And in the Kingdom there are no sick people; everyone there is well. This is how healing happens. But not only healing: this is how the Kingdom enters the world. Quietly and imperceptibly from the outside, but entirely in reality. Relying on no religion and no tradition, but only on a heart turned toward Christ.

Today's reading is devoted to one of the central themes of the Sermon on the Mount—the theme of judgment. Jesus evidently links a person's ability to abide in the Kingdom directly to the way they judge their neighbor (vv. 37–42). At first glance, such an attitude toward others would seem to rule out any assessment of them at all. A closer reading, however, shows that this is not quite so. For Jesus clearly links the prohibition on judging to the possibility that the person making the judgment may be mistaken about their neighbor (vv. 41–42).

It might seem that there is nothing terrible about such a mistake. And that would be true if we did not turn our judgments about our neighbors into absolutes. It is no accident that Jesus compares our assessments to the behavior of a blind person leading another person just as blind (v. 39). The point here is not who is more sinful. The point is that any sin of ours, even if, compared with our neighbor's sin, it really is like a speck compared with a log, prevents us both from seeing the person beside us clearly and from helping them. The only things we can assess more or less adequately are specific deeds and actions, which Jesus advises us to take as our guide (vv. 43–44).

In a sense, we could say that outside the Kingdom we are all equally helpless before sin, and in this sinfulness and helplessness we are equal before God and one another. Of course, we can try to deny the obvious and begin counting our own sins and those of others, but then God too will count our sins as meticulously as we count our neighbors' sins (v. 37). This is not a matter of forgiving everything, nor of God's desire to “humble” us. The point is that a position which gives us the moral right to count our own and other people's sins necessarily rules out abiding in the Kingdom. For in the Kingdom everyone receives life in all its fullness—a fullness that excludes every sin, even the most insignificant—so that our earthly moral arithmetic loses all meaning there. And if such arithmetic still matters to us, it means we are not yet ready to enter the Kingdom.

But something else also matters for abiding in the Kingdom: the degree of our openness to our neighbor. For the Kingdom is not only a space; it is also a relationship—or rather, an entire system of relationships between people and God and between people themselves. And the relationships of the Kingdom presuppose unconditional openness, a readiness to share what we have been given with everyone who needs what we have received. If we decide to share only with those we consider worthy, there will be no place for us in the Kingdom. For the fullness of the Kingdom can be given to us if we are ready to share it with everyone. Not everyone who is worthy, but everyone who seeks and thirsts for the Kingdom.

The parable of the house built on the rock concludes the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. It also concludes the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus explains what He expects from His disciples and what it means to be "sons of the Most High." In this parable He once again draws our attention to how important it is not merely to listen to and accept the truths of the Gospel, but also to act in accordance with them.

If, after hearing the Beatitudes, we calmly say, "Yes, this is very wise and beautiful," but do not embody it in any way in our life, then we will not be His disciples. Our Christianity will remain only an ethical system, one that can break under the pressure of trials. But if we truly live by His commandments, look at the world with His eyes, and do His will, then this will be a foundation that nothing will be able to shake.

How should we understand the parable of the bad or good tree? After all, all people, including us, sometimes bear good fruit and sometimes bad fruit. Here again there is a temptation to divide people, and ourselves, into good and bad. And sometimes it is even pleasant to say, "Oh, what a bad person I am!" as though that were useful for humility. But here we are judging again, and it is said: "Do not judge."

Here it is more about the inner, spiritual direction that stands behind our actions, and that direction depends on us. Therefore, in order not to be a bad tree, one must bear good fruit; and for the Lord's words to benefit us, they must be put into practice. This is the Christian's basic moral task: to do good, not to judge. Christ will judge.

Comparing the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke makes it clear that Luke generally presents it in less detail. Of course, hardly any of the evangelists transmitted Jesus' words verbatim. At that time it was customary to compile the sayings of teachers and preachers, shaping them into a special kind of literary text and sometimes into entire collections. Even taking this fact into account, however, it is obvious that Luke singled out what he considered most important in Jesus' sermon. For the evangelist, the most important thing is the absence of condemnation. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”—these are the Savior's words that Luke considers most important in the whole Sermon on the Mount. Why these particular words? Matthew, for example, has many other themes that are no less important.

Yet the absence of condemnation really can be considered a measure of the quality of a person's inner life. This is not about making an assessment, of course, but precisely about condemning. It is entirely natural to assess a person's particular action in a given situation. Condemnation is another matter: it concerns not the action but the person himself. A person thus becomes the judge of another person, although God never appointed him to be such a judge. A person's path, its outcome, and its evaluation are the prerogative of God and God alone. Even if someone is clearly heading straight for the lake of fire, only God can sentence him to that lake.

Any human being can only state the fact that a sinner is moving in that direction. Why, then, do we pronounce judgment so readily where no one has given us the right to do so? Evidently because we do not see the situation as God sees it and do not use the same criteria—not absolute criteria but relative ones. We see a person not in the fullness of the life God has given him, but only in his particular present condition. We apply certain formal criteria, usually moral and religious, to this condition and naturally obtain a completely distorted picture of reality. But this is no surprise: as long as our life is determined not by the breath of life God has given us but by our own nature, nothing else can be expected.

If, however, we live the life of the Kingdom, such a distortion of reality simply cannot occur. If it does occur, it means that we are still far from the Kingdom, as the evangelist bears witness to us.