Notes for  18 October 2020

What the prophet Zechariah is talking about here? God chose for Himself a holy habitation - the temple of Jerusalem. There, in the very inside of the place, "Holy of Holies", where is kept the holiness of the Old Testament, the hidden presence of God. Such was the case, before the cup of the sins of Israel got overfilled. God then left His temple; Jerusalem was destroyed, Israeli people taken to the Babylonian captivity.

But here is, the prophet sees a new picture. God returns, He visits again His habitation and calls His people. And there are no human strengths capable of resisting His will for the salvation of Israel and their return on His land. But there is another sense in these words. God will come into this world and will settle down in the middle of His people and will open His face - and what can then say man before God's face? Questions, complaints, justifications - everything will turn out worthless. Only meeting face to face will have an importance.

The commandments that the Lord Jesus gives His disciples look impossible and excessive at first glance. Impossible because no human being is able to act as the Lord commands. Excessive because our measure of justice is narrow and limited, and is satisfied with far less than mercy toward enemies. Of course, compared with the boasting of Lamech, who in deep antiquity counted it to his credit that he killed for a single scratch inflicted on him, the idea of adequate repayment that has soaked into our psychology, good for good and evil for evil ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), can be considered great progress. But the Lord looks not from the viewpoint of the depth of moral fallenness from which we need to climb out, but from the viewpoint of the height to which we need to ascend. He concludes His word about our attitude toward others with a call for us to be merciful, as the Father is merciful. Indeed, it is God who loves us, who have become His enemies and rejected Him; it is God who gives infinitely much to us, who can repay Him with nothing.

Often we think that these commandments about love for enemies and mercy toward those who hate us were given "for us to grow into," that someday we will "grow" enough to become able to fulfill them. This position has meaning, but it is still far from satisfying. Who, indeed, can "grow into" the perfection proper to the Creator? And the time of our life is so short that we have no chance to wait. Therefore the Lord, who fully knows our nature, offers us an astonishingly practical principle: "in everything, as you want people to do to you, so also do to them." It cannot be said that this is easy to fulfill, but still, when we try to understand how we should act in a concrete situation, we can be guided by it.

The main place where the Lord calls us to apply this principle is forgiveness. Many times He repeats that if we want to be forgiven by God (and by people), we ourselves need to be able to forgive. It is clear that the principle proposed by Christ is much broader than it appears at first glance. It can be extended not only to relationships with people, but also to our relationship with the Almighty Himself. In other words, in everything, as we want God to act toward us, we ourselves should act that way toward God and toward people.