Notes for  2 July 2026

Evil can affect us in many different ways: through enmity and violence from other people, catastrophes, illness, death... But none of this defeats us as long as we do not let it into our inner, spiritual world. The victory of evil is when vindictiveness, grumbling, and despondency seize us from within. It cannot be defeated by just retribution; there is only one path to victory, and Christ has shown it: active love, self-sacrifice for the salvation of sinners.

What has Christ's coming given us? Salvation from evil? Yes, of course... but evil and suffering did not vanish from the world by the wave of a magic wand. Jesus Himself not only endures terrible sufferings on the Cross; He endures them innocently. And He also says that those who want to be His disciples should likewise take up their cross and follow Him. In what, then, does this salvation from evil consist?

Perhaps this is too human an approach. In one of the Gospel readings Jesus reminds us that if you have merely been freed from an evil spirit, but its place in your heart remains unoccupied, in the end something even worse will overtake you. Salvation only from what we consider bad is, alas, too little. Too little for a person who looks the truth in the face. But, fortunately, it is too little for the Creator as well.

And therefore He offers us something immeasurably better: adoption. We can enter the family of Jesus of Nazareth and become His adopted brothers and sisters. More than that, the possibility of an exceptional, essential union with Him is open to us, the same as His Mother's. To be brothers of Jesus, and therefore to be adopted by His Father and His Mother, to share His divine-humanity with Him, only one thing is required: to say to the Father as Jesus Himself says, "Not My will, but Yours be done."

Salvation from the unpleasant, the bad, the evil is a human approach. Such escapism is hardly proper to God. He does not flee from evil, but confronts it on the Cross and conquers. You may seek comfort and sweet piety, but then from the hell of violence you will go straight into the hell of hypocrisy; or you may agree to adoption by the Heavenly Father. Yes, this is a difficult path, at times painfully difficult, and your adopted Brother, Jesus, died on it. But by becoming His brother, you will also share His victory over evil. The choice between defeat, flight, and victory is yours.

It is no accident that there are so many stories of healing in the Gospel: every healing is a witness to the Kingdom. But, as can be seen, not everyone understands the essence of what is happening, even when everything happens right before his eyes. Hence the displeasure of the Pharisees around Jesus: Jesus speaks of the forgiveness of sins, and who can forgive a person's sins except God?

Yet even from the point of view of the ideas generally accepted in those days, the situation in this regard was not so unambiguous. The fact is that the question of a person's forgiveness of sins was connected above all with the day of Judgment and the day of the Messiah's coming, which in the Judaism of the Gospel era coincided. And the Messiah took a certain, though not fully defined, part in God's judgment, testifying for or against the accused; His testimony could become decisive. Then, depending on the outcome of the Judgment, a person received, or did not receive, the right to enter the messianic Kingdom.

Jesus, however, somewhat corrects these familiar ideas: He speaks of the Kingdom entering the world, giving everyone the opportunity to begin with a clean slate. He speaks of the forgiveness of sins with reference not to the Judgment, nor even to the judgments a person may pass through before the day of the final Judgment. He speaks of the fact that the sins of everyone who touches the Kingdom and shares in its life are forgiven precisely because that person begins a new life in the Kingdom, leaving the old one behind. And every healing is an act of faith, faith as trust in God and in the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. That is why Jesus says to the healed man: "...your sins are forgiven."

For the Pharisees, as can be seen, what is happening has no relation to the Kingdom. At best they see simply a miracle, an action of God which by itself gives the One through whom it is performed no right to substitute Himself for God, or His own determinations for God's judgment. Here passes the boundary between the world and the Kingdom, the very boundary that is so clearly visible from the Kingdom and often completely invisible from the world.

Today's reading offers us Ezekiel's parable of the unfaithful wife, by whom he, like other prophets who use this image, means Israel. For the full perception of the image it is important to keep in mind that, unlike in Russian, in Hebrew the word "Israel" is feminine.

Similar parables are found not only in Ezekiel: Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Jeremiah also compared Israel to an unfaithful wife. But Ezekiel's parable is remarkable because it describes a kind of divine pedagogy: here the attempts of God to direct His people onto the path of repentance are clearly visible. The parable begins by recalling that without God the Jewish people simply would not have existed on earth: they would have perished like an infant abandoned on the road, and only God's direct intervention in the situation allowed them to become what they became (vv. 3-14).

But everything God had done for His people was forgotten by the people themselves, and forgotten very quickly. The reason for this, as can be seen, was self-reliance, a readiness to rely not on God but on His gifts, which came to be perceived not as gifts but as something self-evident and inalienable (v. 15). It is no wonder that the people considered themselves entitled to dispose of God's gifts at their own discretion (vv. 16-26). But God does not break off His relationship with the people despite their obvious and open infidelity; on the contrary, He makes attempts to bring to their senses those who have completely forgotten Him (v. 27).

The people themselves would perhaps have perceived such measures as punishment from God, but judging by the prophet's words, this was only the Lord's attempt to remind them of Himself and of the relationship that had once bound the people of God to their God. But no measures guarantee either repentance or conversion, since both are possible only voluntarily, and God does not need "repentance" obtained by force. Therefore He does not compel anyone to turn; He only lets His people understand that the path they have chosen leads to a dead end. Even then the choice remains, for in such a situation not only conversion but also rejection of God is possible.

In the case of rejection, however, the situation becomes completely unnatural. Apparently, in the relationship with God of an individual person, as of an entire people, there are stages, not only when the person or people are going toward God, but also when that person or that people are moving away from God. At the beginning of the path leading away from Him, God may still take certain actions in order to stop the one who is leaving. It may be that the disasters He permits in such a situation mark precisely the boundary that can be considered a kind of "point of no return."

And after passing this point, a person can no longer easily and without serious consequences return to God; now, even in the case of conversion and repentance, he will have to bear certain consequences of the sins he has committed. And for a people, to pass the "point of no return" in relations with God means to doom itself to an inevitable catastrophe, which for the Jewish people was the defeat of Judah by the Babylonians and the subsequent Babylonian captivity.

The chain of themes through which the Lord persistently leads the Samaritan woman has been and remains for many an image of how a person seeks the most important thing in life, and at the same time of how God seeks the human soul. The Lord takes the first step by asking for a drink, thereby prompting the woman to take a responding step that requires some effort from her: out of mercy toward a weary traveler she has to step over the religious ban on communication with Jews. The following steps also require ever greater openness from the woman and trust in the Man at the well. She has to admit to Him that everything in her life is very complicated, but after trusting Jesus she asks Him about what seems to her the most basic question in life: where to worship, how to believe? Then she opens to Him her deepest hope: even if life is not coming together and religious disagreements have reached a dead end, there is One who, when He comes, will be able to set everything in order, explain everything, and answer the most hidden questions and desires: the Messiah.

As a result she is the first, even before the disciples, to learn of Christ's coming into the world. She turns out to be the most suitable person for this, because the desire to know Him overcame in her both distrust and shame and despair.

During the holy war against the Midianites, Israel is under the Lord's protection. The fruit of this protection is rich spoil and the miraculous preservation of the Israelite warriors. Several centuries later the apostle will also call us to struggle against the forces of evil, and in this battle, where evil is conquered not by weapons but by good, the Lord helps us, protecting us and leading us to a glorious victory.