Notes for  9 November 2019

The question posed by the king was, as is clear, far from simple, and the answers sound unexpected: one is sure that nothing is stronger than wine, another is convinced of the power possessed by the king. Most interesting is the third answer: the man who gives it first places the power of feminine charm in first place, and then, as if correcting himself, speaks of truth. What stands behind these answers? The one who speaks of the power of wine hardly has to be a drunkard. He has simply, perhaps more than once, seen how wine made strong people weak and deprived them not only of physical strength, but also of that strength of will without which there is no person.

The second, on the contrary, affirms the superiority of the will over everything that relaxes it. He is convinced that the king's power is stronger than the power of wine: the king, and Persian kings were taught from childhood restraint in everything that concerns pleasures and the ability to control themselves, is able to resist his own lusts. He finds in himself the strength to fight everything that may prevent him from making a decision and issuing the orders he considers necessary. Here there is clearly a deeper view of things: the power of the will over an unbridled striving for pleasure is nothing other than the power of the spirit over the body.

Yet the power of the human spirit also proves not absolute. The third of those who answered the question had more than once had to face the fact that a person who is unquestionably strong-willed and decisive sometimes yields to ingratiation, flattery, and especially feminine caress. All this relaxes not the body, but the soul and will, touching a person not from the physical side but from the spiritual side. That is why it is so difficult to resist feigned feminine tenderness, behind which cunning is so often hidden.

There is something stronger than flattery and feigned feminine caresses: truth, or more precisely, faithfulness to truth. The third of those who answered, judging by his answer, knows this. In his answer he does not reveal what truth is in question. For him truth is not abstract knowledge, but something very concrete, so concrete that knowing it frees the soul from every other power.

For a believing person such a reality is God, God's commandment, the path of righteousness, and in the end the Kingdom that comes into the world at the end of time. A person who has given himself to God truly becomes free from every other power except one: the power of that living Truth which has been opened to him.

Spiritual existence is not subject to the limitations characteristic of a material object: shape, location, confinement to the present moment, movement through time in only one direction, and so on. When Jesus, speaking with the Samaritan woman (John 4:24), says, “God is Spirit,” He shatters human ideas that “bind” God to a particular place—a country, a city, a temple. The apostle Paul has something slightly different in mind: he says that the Spirit can act not from outside but from within, destroying our inner bondage through His grace of forgiveness and peace.

As we have already seen, the figure of the Old Testament priest is an image, a type of the holy mediator between God and the world. In this sense, he foreshadows Christ as the perfect and sole Mediator and—because we partake of Him—also us, as bearers of God's grace to the rest of the world. From this perspective, the ordinances concerning the priest's constant purity, that is, his constant readiness to stand before the Ark of the Covenant, are very important to us. The priest is a special person. He may not defile himself even where this is permitted to an ordinary mortal. For him there are no non-sacred or profane moments in life. Therefore, the commandment concerning his particular holiness becomes for us the ideal of unceasing prayer: the dedication to God of every moment, every thought, every inhalation and exhalation.