Notes for  18 June 2026

Paul draws attention to a fact repeatedly discussed in the rabbinic debates of his era: Abraham heard God, came to know Him, and believed Him before the giving of the Torah and even before the day when he was circumcised. Circumcision was a most important moment: for Jews in those times (and for Orthodox believing Jews today as well) the world is divided into the circumcised and the uncircumcised, one's own and strangers, Jews and Gentiles. In connection with this, rabbinic circles argued a great deal about the exact moment when Abraham becomes the "father of all who believe."

The apostle affirms that Abraham became such at the very moment when he trusted God. The Torah and circumcision came afterward. This is understandable, for the Torah is ultimately not an end in itself, but only a means on the path of righteousness - the very path that, according to Paul, is now possible after Christ's coming only together with Him.

Therefore faith is the main thing. The issue, of course, is not what we often call faith today: not dogmatics whose correctness we are convinced of, not creeds we are ready to defend, and not even a worldview we regard as the most correct and adequate. The issue is faith in the biblical sense of the word, faith as trust and as the relationships that flow from such trust. And relationships are always dynamic and exist in the present - always here and now.

The Torah merely helps us build our life (inner and outer) in such a way that relations with God, relations with Christ, always remain for us the center around which everything else is gathered. And the "works of the Torah," including even such an important work as circumcision, are already the third, external level of human existence. It is also significant, of course, but it does not determine a person's relations with God and people. This is how the apostle builds the hierarchy of levels of existence (or, as a modern philosopher might say, existential layers) without which full Christian life will be at least difficult, if not altogether impossible.

Christ's words, foretelling imminent persecutions and encouraging believers, may at first glance call to mind the way adherents are "pumped up" in totalitarian sects: "We alone are right, and everyone else is foolish. Therefore they will beat us, but we will stand firm because we are right, and for this we will receive a reward. And we cannot be wrong, because that can never happen." Or something in the same spirit...

There is, however, one essential difference between what Jesus says and what people may say. It lies precisely in who is speaking, because only Christ's words are backed by genuine truth. Only God Himself can truly promise anything, because only His promises are unshakable.

Although our reward is invisible, our patience is all the more precious, for "if someone sees, why does he still hope?" (Rom 8:24). And if Christ says that nothing will happen to us apart from the will of our Father, then we can be sure it is so. For everyone understands, and many of us know from our own experience, that God truly cares for us: even if we are walking down the street and no brick falls on us, there is every reason to see in that a gift from God...

Jesus, in essence, makes a revolution in the understanding and practice of prayer. It turns out that God has no need at all of our prayer requests. Moreover, the one who asks also does not need prayer. Someone may object: "Well, everything is clear with God, but people, when they pray, sometimes grasp their needs more clearly by putting them into words, and in a peaceful state become aware of their inner needs - as, generally speaking, their outer needs as well. In the end, prayer often serves precisely as a source of resolve to pursue conscious and clearly defined goals." All of this can be acknowledged as true to some degree, but such inner self-reflection can no longer really be called prayer - rather, meditation with elements of verbalization.

Still, meditation (in the sense of reflection or in the sense of silence) is not such a useless thing. But it too should have as its content not so much our isolated psychic life as the openness of heart and mind toward God and the circumstances of life. And the emphasis here should be placed precisely on God, who gives perspective and space to human life.

Jesus is speaking precisely of prayer as the striving of the whole human being toward God - the Source and Foundation of all. And the only real goal of prayer understood this way is to gain inner sensitivity to the movements of the Spirit, who alone makes people co-workers and like-minded friends of the God revealed in Christ. In that case every Christian man or woman receives the possibility of taking part in building His Kingdom and fulfilling His will, and therefore of realizing his or her calling and gifts, receiving His forgiveness and freedom, and giving them to those near us who are deprived of them.

Enemies are approaching Jerusalem, yet the prophet Isaiah promises salvation to King Ahaz and the people. This promise will be confirmed by a wondrous sign: the Virgin will conceive in her womb and bear a Son whose name is "God with us."

Seven centuries later the evangelist will apply this prophecy to the birth of the Savior of Israel, in whom God Himself will visit His people. Thus the news of the coming Messiah becomes salvation for God's people - Christ saves those who believe in Him even seven hundred years before His birth.

The fear of God, as we see, does not exclude the boldness with which Habakkuk asks the Creator his questions. To some they might have seemed impious, for one could view it as Habakkuk, by demanding an answer from the Lord, almost challenging Him. And yet He does not reject these questions and answers them. Here we unexpectedly discover that the Lord does not shut Himself off from us - He is ready to give answers to any of our hard questions, provided we are ready to hear and understand them. More than that, He not only wants us to grasp and accept His will, but also does not reject our desire to enter into dialogue with Him. In the end, it was He who endowed the human being with reason, and His gifts were given to us not so that we might let them rot in the far corner of the pantry.

It is another matter that human reason alone is not enough to comprehend the highest wisdom; trust in the One whose reason is immeasurably higher is necessary. For what the Lord reveals to us is often hard for our consciousness to assimilate. Trust in God is all the more necessary because the law on which the pious had relied until now is called powerless. The law, of course, did not thereby become untenable, but its constant violation greatly weakened the possibility of its full action. This will have to be paid for: in place of the old evil, already grown familiar, a new evil will be brought by the Chaldeans. In them, violators of the weakened law will encounter "elemental materialists" who worship only understandable earthly things. Their god is named as strength: they worship everything that serves to increase their power.

The pagan Chaldeans are compared to fishermen who catch people in a net and send them into slavery, and here we paradoxically recall Christ's call to be fishers of men, addressed to the Galilean fishermen. But those who agreed to be caught in the apostles' nets are, on the contrary, freed from the nets of sinful slavery.

In the statutes about ritual purity and the cleansing of the unclean, what matters for us is that only a clean person, one who had not defiled himself by contact with uncleanness, could perform the cleansing, and only by means of a burned, unblemished sacrifice whose blood had been sprinkled on the tent of meeting. The apostle says that these ritual laws were only prototypes of our cleansing from sin (Heb 9:23). And only the One who Himself has neither sin nor blemish can accomplish this cleansing, becoming the perfect sacrifice that sanctifies all who believe in Him.