Notes for  5 December 2022

What does Paul call "teachings of demons," and why? Above all, evidently, those religious prescriptions of Judaism that are connected with kashrut, with the division of food into clean and unclean. It would seem hard to expect this from a man who never renounced his Jewishness. But after becoming a Christian, Paul no longer ever absolutized his religion or considered its norms obligatory for every Christian.

Meanwhile, in different church communities there often appeared "teachers" who considered it their duty to demand from their brothers, as obligatory, what only recently had been completely non-obligatory for them as pagans and what Jews themselves had never demanded of them. Another problem was preachers of sometimes excessive asceticism, what the apostle calls "bodily exercise."

The issue here is, of course, not physical exercises and not sports, but ascetic exercises; the word "ascesis" in Greek itself means "exercise." And Paul speaks sharply against bodily asceticism for its own sake. As can be seen, in the Church at that time there were also such "teachers" who demanded extremely strict bodily asceticism from their disciples without really understanding why it was needed. It should be noted that the Synagogue knows its own tradition of very severe asceticism, rooted in antiquity, though of course asceticism in the Synagogue never reached the scale it reached in the Church.

It was to this tradition that the "teachers," the zealots of strict ascesis, appealed. Meanwhile, both the absolutizing of religiosity as such and asceticism, especially bodily asceticism that has become an end in itself, represent the two main dangers on any spiritual path, and especially on the Christian path. Both distract a person from the main thing: from spiritual work as such and from that dynamic of spiritual formation which is its content.

Instead of spiritual dynamic, spiritual life, a person begins to concentrate on what at best forms its remote periphery, and at worst has no relation to it at all. Indeed, both religiosity and asceticism can easily exist outside the context connected with the relationship between God and the human person, and outside the space of the relationship of the Father and the Son in which the life of a Christian should normally unfold. And then instead of spiritual life there is a serious danger of receiving its substitute, leading into a spiritual dead end, which is what Paul reminds Timothy about.

Faithless Israel murmurs again. Frightened by difficulties, the people do not want to follow Moses into the Promised Land. The situation described here contains a serious warning: by rebelling against God’s plan, we condemn ourselves to fruitless wandering in the wilderness, for its fulfillment requires us to trust God—and that means overcoming our fears through His Spirit and love. Because of its unbelief, Israel loses God’s help and must wait forty years, until the generation of Egyptian slaves dies out and a generation of God’s people grows up.

Before us is a picture capable of causing deep sorrow. The land is devastated, and joyless scenes are everywhere. We see either the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe or the result of using weapons of mass destruction—in general, something of which we are abundantly capable today. It is therefore difficult to determine where the prophet is speaking in parables and where he has a literal vision of what human wickedness is capable of doing to the world the Lord has given us.

Yet even amid the man-made desert in which the surviving remnant of the people has once again found itself, we hear a call to praise the Lord. Even the utmost calamities, which have disfigured the world once created beautiful, cannot annul the triumph of the Lord and His truth. Precisely when it seems to many that the world is perishing, He will triumph and defeat the wicked kings who oppose Him.

At first glance, this speaks only of the Lord’s triumph in Jerusalem and in the Promised Land. But when we reflect, we also notice something else: the prophet’s gaze penetrates into a very distant age, when the power of sin on earth will be overthrown. There will be no more earthly kings, because the Lord Himself will become the only King.