Notes for  4 May 2021

Jesus' words about the dead, who should be left to bury their dead, can seem too harsh. Yet He is speaking here about what constitutes the essence of the new life that entered the world with Him. The situation itself raises questions. It is not very clear whether the issue is an already dead father awaiting burial, or an elderly man whose son asks permission to live with him so that he will not be left alone in old age. In any case, one thing is clear: the issue is helping a person finish his life. To die calmly. To accompany him on his last journey.

In short, everything in one way or another connected with death. And Jesus brought the fullness of life into the world. A fullness the world does not know. What we habitually call life here turns out in reality to be delayed death. Gradual dying. The only question is how much we can delay the inevitable end in the fallen world. The Savior offers an alternative to all this. The fullness of life. It can be accepted, but then the semblance of life so familiar to us will have to be left behind.

To stop dying and begin living. This is strange, incomprehensible, unfamiliar. More than that: it seems impossible. Even today. Even for Christians. And today, in hospitals and hospices, Christians help other Christians finish dying. They see them off on their last journey. And they keep finding new ways to reconcile these departing Christians with inevitable death, which for those very Christians, in the normal case, simply should not exist.

And if it does exist, if today this problem stands for Christians finishing their earthly path as sharply as it did for Jews of pre-Christian times, and sometimes even more sharply, not even as for Jews but as for genuine pagans, then something is wrong with our Christianity. With life and death. With the path. With the Kingdom, not in general, but in our life. If both those leaving and those staying feel with their whole being that ahead for the departing there is not the path of the Kingdom, but death and death only, then in truth neither group has ever lived by the life of the Kingdom. And Jesus orients us precisely toward such life. This is not maximalism: only it deserves the name of life without qualifications. And only it is worth living.

Several points closely connected with our lives stand out in today’s account by the evangelist Luke of the risen Christ’s appearance to Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus. First, there is the central meaning of the Lord’s words that it was thus “necessary for the Christ to suffer and enter into His glory.” He tells Luke and Cleopas that the Crucifixion and Resurrection were not merely a tragic accident in which Christ died as a result of human malice. As the authors of liturgical texts insistently emphasize, they were a voluntary manifestation of God’s love, a sacrifice offered by Him for our salvation.

Second, there are the disciples’ remarkable words: “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us on the road...?” We often wonder why we hear God so poorly and why we fail to recognize His presence. This burning of the human heart when it comes into contact with truth is the Creator’s greatest gift to us, the gift of recognizing the time of visitation. Luke and Cleopas were the first and gave us a most important example. Now, after their testimony, we know that this is what happens when we experience an encounter with the Risen One.

And finally, third, there is the fact that definitive, clear, and complete recognition occurs in the breaking of bread. Interpreters differ in their explanations of these Gospel words. Some say that perhaps the Lord broke the bread with a characteristic gesture that Luke and Cleopas might have seen before. Others suppose that at the moment of breaking the bread the disciples saw the nail wounds on the risen Christ’s hands. Still others think that, as the Lord gave them the bread, He said, “This is My Body.” A fourth group regards it as a mystery that cannot be explained rationally. One thing cannot be reinterpreted: the sure and complete encounter with the risen Christ takes place in the Breaking of Bread—that is, in the Eucharist. This is true not only for Luke and Cleopas, but for everyone who loves Jesus from that day until the end of the age.

“Through many tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of God”... What does this mean? Are troubles necessary for salvation, or are they simply inevitable? In other words, where should the emphasis fall in this sentence? Apparently, it should fall somewhere quite different from where we are accustomed to placing it. The main thing in this sentence is not “tribulations,” but “enter the Kingdom.” Tribulations exist and will exist for everyone, Christians and pagans alike. Sometimes Christians suffer considerably more tribulations than others; sometimes people find themselves in such a disadvantaged position not because of their religion but, for example, because of their nationality... Paul proclaims the good news: these tribulations can and must become our path into the Kingdom of God. It depends only on us whether we will seize this opportunity—to entrust everything to God's hands, receive everything anew from Him, and thus enter the Kingdom.

Today’s reading tells us about Peter’s confession (vv. 13–20), which is preceded by a conversation with the Pharisees about signs (vv. 1–4) and with the disciples about “the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (vv. 5–12). It concludes with an account of Peter’s conversation with Jesus, during which Jesus speaks quite sharply to His disciple (vv. 21–28).

Clearly, the central event here is precisely Peter’s confession: he recognizes in Jesus the Messiah, the Christ promised by God, while the people regarded Him as a prophet (vv. 14–16). Then Jesus, confirming Peter’s conclusion, says that he could have understood this only through a revelation from God (v. 17). One might think that it was not only Jesus’ disciples who awaited the Messiah; in Gospel times, messianic expectation among the Jewish people was very intense. But the point is that Jesus least of all resembled the Messiah whom both the people and learned rabbis expected. The people expected a Messiah-king who would free Judea from Roman rule; learned rabbis and scholarly theologians wanted to see a Messiah who would conform to their theological theories. It is no accident that the Pharisees and Sadducees ask Jesus to show them one of those messianic signs by which, according to their own concepts, alone the Messiah could be recognized. But Jesus refuses. Not, of course, because it was difficult for Him, but because He did not want to “fit” any theological concept and had no intention of “conforming” to anyone’s expectations. Such a Messiah, conforming to no generally accepted norms or views, in whom most people were ready to see an impious man and a violator of the Torah rather than the Messiah, could truly be accepted only through revelation. Then the time came for Peter and the other disciples to learn about the cross and the Resurrection (v. 21).

And then it became clear that this knowledge was beyond human strength. It was still possible to accept a persecuted and suffering Messiah, especially since the image of the suffering Messiah was well known to every believing Jew from the Book of Isaiah. But it was utterly impossible to accept His total defeat. Peter and the other apostles perceived death on the cross only as defeat; the reality of resurrection in general, and of Christ’s Resurrection in particular, was for them only a distant prospect. Thus, even after He rose, for a long time they still could not fully believe it.

It is not surprising that Peter cannot accept the thought that the Teacher’s death is inevitable (v. 22). But here too Jesus is unyielding: one cannot stop halfway; one cannot accept the Messiah without accepting His way. A person who acts in this way turns from a disciple into an enemy (v. 23). There is only one road into the Kingdom (vv. 24–27), and one can reach it only by following it to the end.

“Who is Paul? Who is Apollos? They are only servants.” How often we forget this... How often we put human, fleshly things first. We choose a community, a parish, a Church on the basis of “I like it”—and then declare that only here, among us, is everything genuine and correct, while everything unlike us is wrong and worthy of every condemnation, if not immediate destruction. But what matters to God is not who plants and waters His field, or by what means. Only one thing matters to Him: our unity with Him and with one another.

The story of the “strange fire” is revealing in its own way: once again it clearly demonstrates that, when worship is concerned, it is not simply a matter of ritual. It is a matter of sacred space, and that space has its own laws and logic. Even merely remaining within it is subject to this logic. Nadab and Abihu quite clearly wanted to make a sacrifice—the very prescribed sacrifice that priests offered on that same altar.

But the result was completely unexpected for them and wholly unlike what they had anticipated. Outwardly, everything looks as though these men had violated a certain rule that permitted sacrifice only to certain people after specific purification and other rituals.

In reality, however, the problem lies first of all in those who offer the sacrifice themselves, in their spiritual condition. Unlike ordinary space, sacred space responds directly to the spiritual condition of a person entering it. This is not, of course, because it possesses some special magical properties, but because its very mode of existence is defined by God’s presence directly rather than indirectly, as in the ordinary space of the fallen world.

If, in the fallen world, the response to a person’s spiritual condition is usually either indirect or entirely absent, in sacred space it follows immediately, because there a person, wherever he may be and whatever he may do, comes face to face with God. The same is true of the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world: in it, as in sacred space, at every moment and in every place one comes face to face with God. If what happened to Nadab and Abihu does not happen to us every minute, it is only by the mercy of the King of this Kingdom. Before God, everything is always real and serious—a truth whose discovery cost God’s people dearly.