Notes for  7 October 2026

More often people call love a certain feeling, an internal sensation of agreeability from the memory of someone or something, joy upon meeting with this someone or something, and the sharp desire to possess it. Maybe that is why it comes to hear all the time from very various persons something as «I don’t feel loving God or I can’t love my enemy».

All that the Bible says about love is completely different. Love is not feeling, nor sensation, although it can be accompanied by these. Love is not something which lives in the soulful, but rather in the spiritual sphere, and its bearer can be only a personality.

Love is a special means of the spiritual life appearing in relationships and actions. Which? But those, when a certain other person, towards whom are directed these relationships and actions, is more important for me, than myself. God's love is really such, besides, God is love (1Jn 4:16).

We then understand that love is not some kind of my quality, but something superior to me. And we can in particular "put on" love, enter into it - such that all our relationships and actions are fulfilled by God's perfectness. Jesus is exactly Such, and, being bound to Him, we become partakers of this life-love.

The Lord experienced our entire lot except for sin, walked the most difficult paths of life, and brought light to the darkest places. He experienced the depths of the greatest and most terrible struggle into which every person and society as a whole inevitably enter, the struggle against Satan. Let us consider in order what the three temptations through which Jesus passed mean.

The first is about turning stone into bread. The Lord created this world so that it contains enough of everything for a person to feed himself. But Satan proposes breaking this order, playing on human weakness, and buying a person's soul. Yet the Lord also arranged things so that a true soul cannot be bought.

The second is the temptation of power. Christ overcomes it. But has Christ's Church overcome it? Not so long ago the Church in Russia was rigidly bound to the state, and in practice this meant that a person needed a baptism certificate in order to pursue a career. This is truly terrible, because all spirituality is emptied out. Many today want these nineteenth-century realities repeated, forgetting that they ended in revolution.

And finally, the third temptation. There is a saying: “Trust in God, but do not fail to do your part.” The same thought is expressed here in a very simple form. The Lord helps us, but to tempt this help, that is, to put it to the test, means having no faith in it or, even if one has faith, abusing it. The Lord expects from us, on the one hand, maturity, self-reliance, and independence in the inner sense, and on the other, complete trust.

In the Lord's Prayer we ask the Father to give us our daily bread, meaning those material goods without which life could not continue. For example, when the Bible was translated into the Eskimo language, the specialists had to use the word “fish” instead of “bread,” since for this people bread is more a luxury than the basis of their daily diet.

This can also be interpreted more broadly, understanding this line of the prayer as a request for strength for each day. But precisely for each day separately, not for an entire lifetime. Christ calls us to ask for “daily bread,” for today, and not to worry about tomorrow. Yet how often we begin asking for something in the future — something that for now exists only in our plans and dreams...

The proclamation offered in today's reading seems to sum up everything Babylonian Isaiah says about the Kingdom. On the one hand, the image of the new, messianic Jerusalem rises before us again (vv. 17–25). But here, in addition to the image of the city itself, there also appears a vision of a new heaven and a new earth (v. 17), completing the picture of a transformed world renewed by God. Now the issue is no longer only Jerusalem or even Israel, but the whole universe, and so the messianic Kingdom becomes a reality on a universal scale. Babylonian Isaiah speaks of a change in the laws of nature using the same metaphor as his predecessor, Isaiah of Jerusalem: the picture of a wolf and lamb lying together. He supplements it with a lion peacefully chewing straw and a snake with no thought of harming a human being (v. 25; Isa 11:6–8).

But not everyone will enter this messianic Kingdom. It is no accident that God says through His prophet that He “revealed Himself to those who did not ask for Him” and that He was “found by those who did not seek Him” (v. 1). In the history of God's people, God often knocked at the houses and hearts of those in no hurry to open (vv. 2–5). If the people nevertheless escaped historical destruction, it was only for the sake of those who remained faithful to God and the covenant amid general apostasy (vv. 8–10). They are the remnant from which, after all the trials, a new people now grows. The rest are left to their fate (vv. 11–15).

At first glance, God appears utterly merciless in this instance. But it is important to remember that the natural historical life of the Jewish people ended after the Babylonian conquest. By every historical law, Judea and its people should have shared the fate of the many other small states and peoples that vanished after the Babylonian invasion and dissolved in the gigantic melting pot that the Babylonian Empire became for them. If this did not happen, it was only because the faithful remnant, who did not abandon the God of their fathers, managed to preserve their faithfulness throughout decades spent far from their native land and ancestral altars.

For their sake, God intervenes in events, performs a miracle, and gives His remnant a second historical life. Every person who belonged to God's people during that catastrophe faced a choice: enter the remnant or vanish with the people, assimilating and dissolving into Babylon, which was an immense metropolis by the standards of the time. God can do nothing for those who leave: they themselves chose their fate. For His remnant He does everything possible, giving it not only new life but also the Kingdom.

The words of the prophet Isaiah testify with horrifying clarity that Jesus was tormented though innocent, voluntarily going to His death. In those rare moments when we draw near to this mystery, the heart is pierced by pain at the injustice done to the Innocent One and by reverence for His meekness in this voluntary self-surrender.

He went to the most terrible death known to humanity for our sake — for all the people who have lived on earth and for those who are yet to be born. And the most terrible — and most beautiful — thing is that I am among those people... For my sake He endured these sufferings, to redeem my sin through His sacrifice; and through this He grants life, because “He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him” (Heb 5:9).

For those to whom the Lord addressed His parable of the vineyard, the most important thing was its parallel with Isaiah's similar parable of the vineyard (Isa 5:1–7) and its unambiguous rebuke of Israel's religious leaders. Speaking on behalf of the Almighty, Isaiah concludes the parable with the words: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are His cherished planting. He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry.” The Lord Jesus' words about the stone rejected by the builders make this parable another prediction of His suffering on the Cross.

But it is no less important to notice how in this parable the Lord portrays the relationship between God, people, and the world in which He placed us. From this perspective one can see both the command to “till and keep” the Garden of Eden and the words that the Heavenly Father sent the Son into the world “that the world might be saved through Him.” In essence, before God every person is in the position of a tenant in this parable, choosing whether or not to give the Son of God authority over God's vineyard, which is the life of each one of us.