Notes for  7 November 2026

Sometimes it seems that in Scripture the Lord constantly expects incredible efforts from us, that we must struggle and labor. In the commandments, we primarily hear what we must not allow ourselves, not always realizing why. It turns out that our life must become a constant overcoming. And although sometimes this is so, it is only partially true.

Through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord says of Himself: “who teaches you what is profitable, who leads you in the way you should go.” Each of us has our own path, and finding it on our own is quite difficult; how then to understand—where is it, that road to which we are called? And the Lord gives us to understand that the commandments are pegs marking the edge of the road, protecting us from falling into the abyss. They are like the banks of a full-flowing river, giving it direction, but guarding it from overflowing into the meadows and flooding everything around. It is exactly such a river, according to the word of the prophet, that our life can become if we begin to trust God and understand that the commandments do not limit our will, but only warn of danger.

What kind of faith exactly did the Lord not find in Israel, as He said about the faith of the centurion from Capernaum? First of all, the centurion confesses his faith in the divine nature of Christ. He does not expect that the Teacher of Nazareth will perform the healing by touching the sick servant or by any other means requiring His personal presence. According to the centurion's words, he believes that the will of Christ alone, expressed by His word, is sufficient for healing. Thereby he confesses His will as a creative power, operating in the world outside the framework of physical laws, the laws of nature. Just as those hundred men who are placed under his command obey the centurion, so the whole world is obedient to Christ. Thus can one think of the omnipotent and omnipresent God, the Creator of heaven and earth, or of the One Who is sent into the world by God Himself.

And secondly, this faith compels the centurion, first of all, to look at himself. He thinks of God not as a means to solve this or that problem, but as a Person before whom he will stand when Jesus comes into his house. And therefore he says that he is unworthy of this visit.

It is these two aspects of the centurion's faith that make him an example for us to imitate.

Faith and faithfulness are words with the same root not only in Russian, but also in the languages of the Bible. Faith in the biblical sense always implies faithfulness. If Christian faith is what opens to us the possibility of union with Christ and, consequently, the path to eternal life, then it is precisely faithfulness to this faith that keeps us on this path, while unfaithfulness casts us into the outer darkness. Thus, our entire destiny is determined by the acceptance of God's salvation through faith and faithfulness.

But is it possible to combine faithfulness in this extremely important direction of life with unfaithfulness in something partial, secondary? A joke from Soviet times comes to mind: “Today you cheated on your wife, and tomorrow — on the Motherland!” — the words of Jesus show that He would hardly have treated this exclusively as a joke.

Faithfulness is a general attribute of the human personality, not so much innate as it is cultivated and developed, and the level of development of this attribute is reflected in all aspects of human behavior. How many times has one had to observe with sadness how people who are unfaithful to their word then turn out to be unfaithful in friendship, in marriage, in their belonging to the Church.

Today's reading once again forces us to think about the place of religion and religious tradition in church life. As can be seen, despite the decisions of the Apostolic Council, anxiety was brewing in the Jerusalem church regarding the Torah (the Law) and its observance by Judeo-Christians — Christians who had come out of a traditional Jewish environment (vv. 18-21). This is not surprising: after all, these were people for whom the Torah was an unquestionable and indisputable authority, and Jewish religiosity was a familiar and customary way of life since childhood. It is not excluded that they perceived the decisions of the Apostolic Council as a diminishing of the significance of the Torah and the Jewish religious tradition. The problem was more than serious, and not only because the Jerusalem church consisted, apparently, entirely of Judeo-Christians (v. 20).

The question stood as follows: is there a place for religion in the Kingdom? And Paul, by performing the rites prescribed by the Torah, testified that in the Kingdom there is a place for both the one and the other (vv. 23–26).

And the point here is not only about not contradicting a church that adheres to its customs. The point is how a person enters the Church and the Kingdom and what he takes with him when doing so. For a Jew, taking his religion with him into the Kingdom was a completely natural thing, since it concerned the only fully organic form of inner, including spiritual, self-organization for him. Of course, it was possible to enter the Kingdom with another religion and even without any religion at all. But for a Jew who grew up in a traditional Jewish environment, any other option would turn out to be a kind of violence, a coercion to renounce that which he did not need to renounce at all. It is a different matter with those converted to Christ from among the Gentiles: to demand of them the acceptance of such religiosity as a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom would indeed mean laying an “unbearable burden” upon them. Yet for the majority of the members of the Jerusalem church, paradoxical as it may sound, the demand for an obligatory renunciation of Judaism would have become just as much of a burden.

And Paul by his action testified that in the Kingdom, and therefore also in the Church, everyone can indeed remain themselves: a Jew — a Jew, and a Hellene — a Hellene. The only indispensable condition was that no one's traditions and no one's religion should hinder others, obscure the Kingdom from them, or erect insurmountable obstacles on the path to it.

Under such a condition, one can take everything with them into the Kingdom — except, of course, sin, for which there is no place there.

The hymn to liberation, which makes up the 10th chapter of the book of the prophet Zechariah, uses many images traditional for the prophets, and therefore partly resembles messianic hymns and prophecies. But the essence of what the prophet speaks about is different. At the end of the previous chapter, the prophet spoke about the restoration of the spiritual beauty of the chosen people: the hymn of the 10th chapter, in essence, expands and clarifies this thought. Deutero-Zechariah's words about the rain, in which God's blessing will descend upon the Holy Land, echo the prophecy of Joel, which sounded almost simultaneously with them. Perhaps, at the turn of the 5th–4th centuries BC, rain became a characteristic symbol of the outpouring of the Spirit of God, which cleanses people's hearts. Deutero-Zechariah sees such an action of the Spirit as necessary because various forms of pagan magic are spreading again among the people: divinations and dreams that disturb the minds. To a large extent, in the era of Deutero-Zechariah and Joel, this was associated with foreign domination and the cultural assimilation of Israel in the Greco-Persian world.

It is difficult to say whom the prophet has in mind by the shepherds against whom the anger of the Lord was kindled. One interpretation suggests that it refers to the political leaders of the Middle Eastern world, who implanted their culture and their cults by force of arms. But it is also possible that, in accordance with the prophetic tradition, it refers to the spiritual leaders of the people of God, who in this era became increasingly fascinated by a culture new to them and a refined way of life, neglecting the severe and pure faith of their fathers. It is exactly at this time that Sadduceeism is born — a religious-political movement that will hold primacy by the time of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ; perhaps Deutero-Zechariah means precisely them by the shepherds. Both of these interpretations, however, do not exclude one another: it is obvious that the prophet has in mind those who determine the spiritual path of the people. This is precisely why they are called he-goats: the fact is that when pasturing sheep, it is precisely he-goats that are often used as the leaders of the flock.

The prophet sees these people as something deeply alien to the chosen people. The meaning of the deliverance that he speaks about in the 10th chapter is that from among the faithful of Israel the Lord will choose new leaders. They will no longer incline toward foreign gods, and the people will again find strength and joy in faithfulness to the One God. The prophet depicts this through images familiar and close to his listeners of victory over enemies, the gathering of the scattered children of God, and the strengthening of Israel in faith.

This prophecy is very important in the context of the second half of the book of Zechariah. Speaking of the coming of the Messiah — the meek King, the prophet sees how the beauty of Israel — the beloved vineyard of God — blossoms anew. Like fruit, men of faith who will follow the Messiah and lead the whole people along this path rise to meet Him. The prophet sees the events of the future as a new exodus, this time not from Egyptian slavery, but from the gloom of paganism and unbelief. That is why the former enslavers — Egypt and Assyria — appear in his speech, although the paganism from which the Messiah delivers people is predominantly of Greco-Persian origin.

One cannot but remember that precisely this deliverance from the darkness of delusions will become one of the main aspects of God's saving action for the Greek theologians of the Byzantine era.

The alliance, deceitfully concluded by one of the local cities with Joshua, became a lesson to both him and all the rest. To understand the situation, it is important to remember that treaties with pagan nations (and such were all of them then, except the Hebrews) were permissible for God's people only in the event that they lived outside the borders of the land that God had destined for the Hebrews. The point here was not some special religious squeamishness, but rather that a people still far from being spiritually mature needed a kind of greenhouse, where pagan temptations would not exist at all, or at least where there would be a minimum of them. However, the people had to create this greenhouse for themselves, albeit with God's help. Here there was no demand for the obligatory physical extermination of all the inhabitants of pre-Hebrew Palestine — it was rather a question of destroying local altars, but such an attempt meant inevitable war, and wars in those times were waged quite brutally. Besides, the destruction of the altars effectively meant for the people to whom they belonged either assimilation or exile.

This is precisely why, understanding how matters stood, the inhabitants of Gibeon deceived Joshua, pretending that they had come from afar: they knew that in such a case they could pay off the Hebrews, just as they often paid off nomads at the time by concluding a treaty with them for the more or less regular payment of tribute. Such a treaty is what they propose to him, having beforehand concealed the location of the city from which they came. Joshua, as can be seen, is by no means striving for war for the sake of war or for conquests as such: he is ready to conclude an alliance and end the matter peacefully, since such an opportunity presents itself to him. But at the same time he forgets to ask God whether such an alliance is needed by Him, and gets himself into a predicament.

Here before us is a rather common story in a fallen world: it often seems to us that in our life and even in God's work, which is entrusted to us, there are important things about which one can and should ask God, and there are secondary ones, which we can perfectly well figure out ourselves, with our own minds, by our own strength. In reality, however, it turns out that in God's work, as in spiritual life in general, there are no such matters. They may merely seem simple to us and resolvable without God, but even if we do indeed manage to resolve them in this way, the solution will be completely different from what God wants, and can bring an absolutely unexpected and undesirable result. The lesson turned out to be illustrative and memorable, and its consequences affected all subsequent Hebrew history — for in it, as in life in general, nothing passes without leaving a trace.