Notes for  15 June 2026

Paul can hardly be accused of fearing death. And yet there were situations when he preferred to avoid it. Clearly, in his life he was guided by far more than fearlessness alone. Of course, in Paul's life, as in the life of every Christian, God's providence played the central role. It was not Paul but God who decided what the apostle should do in one situation or another.

But still, is there any logic in everything that is happening? There is, for a witness can bear witness not only by his own life but also by his own death. Everything depends on how one lives and how one dies.

Yet it makes sense to bear witness only to people who can and want to hear at least something. It is impossible to bear witness to a fanatic wholly absorbed in fanaticism, or, for example, to a raging crowd. In such situations even the Savior Himself was silent. And Paul, judging by all this, also considers witness in such cases absolutely useless. If people have vowed neither to eat nor drink while their enemy is alive, then they hate their enemy to madness, to the point of losing their mind, so there can be no question of witness here. One might as well try to bear witness to a hungry crocodile.

And since suicide bears witness to nothing except the witness's lack of wisdom, Paul does not consider it necessary to sacrifice himself to those who want only his death and nothing more. He escapes from the hands of his potential murderers - escapes precisely so that he may still have time to bear witness to the Kingdom to those who were ready and able to hear.

Paul draws attention to the paradoxical position in which everyone who wants to follow the Law finds himself. It turns out that sin appears, "comes to life," only when the Law appears in a person's life. Here, of course, the issue is not only, and not so much, the external Law as the inner Law.

When a conscientious person who is honest with himself recognizes the Law as an inner spiritual and moral imperative, he naturally tries to follow it. That is precisely when his own sinfulness is revealed in all its fullness. So long as the issue is external - a legal or even moral code - the one who keeps it encounters only specific sins, from which he hopes eventually to free himself by learning to observe commandments that seem to him merely rules for righteous living. But when the Law is recognized precisely as an inner imperative, spiritual and moral, as something that must define a person's life completely, every minute and every step, it turns out that the issue is not separate sins that can be removed as one removes flaws of character, but a fundamental damage to human nature itself.

And now this damage ceases to be a theological abstraction and becomes a completely concrete inner obstacle. The more a person strives to unite with the inner core felt by his whole being, the more strongly the chaos that separates him from the goal appears. Righteousness, which seemed so close, proves unattainable, and the closer one comes to it, the more insurmountable the barrier becomes. The chaos of sinful existence only intensifies against the background of the inner Law - like an echo in a mountain cave multiplying a cacophony. The closer a person is to the inner Law, the deadlier sin becomes. The commandment seems to become the instrument that sin uses to put a person to spiritual death and destroy his whole life ("taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me," as the Synodal translation renders the apostle's words). But the matter, of course, is not in the external or the internal, but in the very corruption of human nature, for which neither God nor the Law given by Him is in any way to blame.

Of course, the first impulse is to denounce wicked Jezebel and vile Ahab, but perhaps there is no need to talk about them - everything is clear enough in substance. What is not quite clear is this: does Naboth's stubbornness make sense? It must be admitted that this concern for his fathers' vineyard looks completely out of step with our times. Ahab would have given him good money, and that would have settled it. But no: for some reason it is crucial to Naboth that this is not just a vineyard, but his fathers' inheritance!

Of course, one may say that you and I have no vineyard or ancestral estate - in fact, almost no inheritance from our ancestors at all - so there is nothing to discuss. And yet, what does the idea of "my fathers' inheritance" mean for me personally? And should this idea be filed away in the archives?

Today's reading continues the prophet's denunciation of God's people, but now a new aspect appears in it, directly connected with the theme of judgment. It concerns God's attempts to heal the people spiritually, mentioned in Hosea's preaching (v. 1). It is no surprise that the healing exposed all the people's sins, and so the reaction to it was expected: the people recoil from God, preferring to remain as they are and forgetting God in the hope that in some incomprehensible way everything will work out and He will close His eyes to their sins. But God clearly remembers everything and has no intention of forgetting anything (v. 2).

It would seem that the very thought that God might forget the sins of those He considers His people, or that He could remain indifferent to human sinfulness at all, should seem at least strange to a believer. But in this case the issue is not reflection on the situation; on the contrary, it is completely irrational behavior.

The situation in the Northern (Israelite) Kingdom, where the prophet preached, was highly contradictory in religious terms. On the one hand, the authorities encouraged actual paganism under the guise of double faith (this was the official religious policy of almost all the kings who ever ruled in the North); on the other hand, they wanted to show themselves greater Yahwists than the authorities of neighboring Judah (the Southern Kingdom), where officially no reforms were carried out and Yahwism formally remained in the original form in which it had existed in the still united Israel under David and Solomon. But they did this poorly, for Jeroboam, the founder of the Northern Kingdom, had already broken completely not only with Jerusalem but also with the traditional Levitical priesthood, founding an alternative religious center in Bethel and establishing a new priesthood that had nothing in common with either the Torah or tradition. "Political expediency" prevailed over both, and the prophets who opposed this were persecuted.

At the same time, the authorities could no longer simply abandon the religious policy they were pursuing: every king who ruled the country understood that if he took such a step, he would have to part with the throne. His subjects, in turn, realized that they would have to live in some different way, and many of those who had acquired their wealth not merely by sinful means but by openly criminal ones (vv. 3-5) would most likely lose everything. No one, it appears, was ready for such a development, yet neither the rulers nor their subjects could justify their unwillingness to change, for everyone understood that both the Torah and tradition testified against them. All that remained was to cling to any possibility, even a phantom one, if it seemed to allow them to solve their problems without changing anything in substance (vv. 8-12).

Such a position can only lead to a dead end - both spiritual and political (vv. 13-16). This is what the prophet warns his fellow countrymen about, but neither he nor God Himself can change the choice of those who prefer to cling to their own ways while pushing away God's saving hand.

It is impossible not to notice the prophet Nahum's confidence that the Highest Court is just. The Lord's justice is shown both in His goodness toward those who hope in Him and in the retribution He sends for evil. These are two sides of justice, and without either of them it cannot be realized on earth. But evil exists by parasitizing living people, and therefore it is impossible to defeat it in the earthly world without causing pain to its victims, who have become carriers of evil.

Nahum's reproaches against Assyria might seem merely one expression of national hostility, but such a view would be superficial. Behind his denunciations of a concrete earthly enemy, it is not hard to see a deeper understanding of the meaning of the events unfolding before the prophet's eyes. Assyria in Nahum's day is a real embodiment of evil: not simply a hostile state, but an aggressive pagan empire that not only seeks to conquer neighboring kingdoms but by its very way of life challenges the God of Israel. Its destruction is more than a military defeat; it is the natural end of ungodly claims.

But then, unexpectedly, words are heard about the feet of the herald who proclaims peace, and we see that the enemy's defeat is not an end in itself for the prophet. He rejoices not in that, but in the coming possibility of finally beginning a normal, peaceful life.

The hopes for peace in 1945 must have been much the same. Peace did not come then once and for all: the interval between the defeat of the old enemy and the appearance of new dangers proved short. But by turning to that time, still recent by historical standards, we can better sense what Nahum and his contemporaries felt in the days of Assyria's collapse.

What is freedom? If we do not have the right to leave a path we do not like, are we free? Can we say we even have such a right if an attempt to exercise it is punished by death? In general, is life under a law, even one we accepted voluntarily, freedom? Is freedom exclusively following a path chosen earlier, and not the possibility of choice at every point along it?..

And what if this path is the path out of slavery?