Notes for  7 July 2026

The attitude toward the prophets, as we can see, is from the Torah's point of view an indicator of faithfulness to God. There is nothing surprising here: a prophet is above all God's witness, and therefore to believe the prophet means to believe God Himself. Yet, on the other hand, the Torah itself contains everything necessary for those who want to fulfill God's will. Why, then, is prophetic ministry mentioned here, in the Torah, and mentioned as something without which the Torah is not complete?

One can say, of course, that this concerns a special charismatic component of the Torah, that the Torah itself presupposes constant development, that revelation is not completed either by Moses or by any of the later prophets. All this is so, but this mention of prophetic ministry by the Torah has one more aspect, one that concerns everyone.

Of course, not everyone is given prophetic ministry. Even so, everyone has, or at least should have, living relations with God. And the Torah itself is not simply legislation; it is not a collection of rules of behavior or moral norms. The Torah is a description of the path that leads to God. It can be compared to a map, which has value only when it is used for its purpose, to chart a path toward the goal.

But as a rule, a map alone is not enough for this task; a compass is also needed. Relations with God, personal revelation, become such a compass for a person. And the Torah itself points the reader to this compass, making clear that without direct revelation it is useless, that it is impossible to follow it on the basis of the letter alone. And in order not to be limited to the letter alone, it is necessary to feel that breath of God, that spirit of which the prophets spoke. Then the Torah will come alive, turning from a code of laws into the living word of revelation.

"For now salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed." From the moment of our conversion to Christ, we look at the world with different eyes. For each of us something changes in life. And, receiving Communion, we become closer to Christ: we receive Him and the path of salvation that He offers us. And each of us "will be upheld, for God is able to make him stand."

We fall and rise on our path after Christ. A fall in the eyes of this world is prepared for us as the path of salvation. We ourselves will see the depth of our fall in repentance - but He will raise us up by His mercy, raise us on the day of the resurrection of the dead into eternal life.

Constant fatigue, or, as today's reading says, exhaustion, is the ordinary condition of modern people. A hard, tense life, constant problems, and the struggle to survive force a person to gather all strength into a tight fist.

And sheep without a shepherd are a very exact image of how a person behaves in such a situation. Rushing from side to side, not finding the road, falling into the wolf's teeth, crying out in terror, not finding the way, running without knowing where - anyone who has seen lost sheep knows how quickly they lose all their calm.

A person left alone with himself sooner or later falls into the same existential panic before a cruel and frightening world whose laws he does not understand and cannot understand. Only by lifting his head and acknowledging his connection with God and his need for communion with Him does a person receive the help and support that give strength to live.

The lament over the chosen people, which the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 19 casts in the form of a kind of parable, is very important, if one may put it this way, in the emotional context of his book. Through almost the entire first half of it, the prophet gives the words of the Almighty, who with bitterness and sorrow exposes sin, calls for amendment, and foretells calamities. And if you do not know Him very well, you may hear in these words shades of vengefulness and even of some strange sadism. There is nothing of the kind there; we simply at times do not know how to perceive the essence of prophetic words. And this lament puts everything in its place.

It is hard to say with certainty whether this lament sounds from the person of Jerusalem grieving over its sins, or from the person of God weeping over the same sins. But something else matters: in the previous chapter the Lord says directly that He does not want the death of the sinner, but wants him to live. And the lament is needed here so that we understand: a person's destruction in his own sins is not the triumph of higher justice, but a tragedy. A tragedy for us and, most importantly, for God Himself. For the sake of our salvation He Himself will do what is great and incomprehensible - and will weep over Jerusalem, because "My heart has turned within Me out of pity for you, My people."

At times it appears to us that such "experiences" as grief cannot belong to God. This is hard to imagine. But Ezekiel's lament bears witness: this very pity and grief are the true manifestations of His love.

Today's reading helps us better understand what is usually called Jesus' "messianic secret." In speaking of it, people mean the fact that Jesus Himself, until the last days of His earthly ministry, almost never spoke directly about His messiahship, at least not openly. The evangelist's account takes us back to the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves (vv. 1-14). And the reaction to it, as we can see, was an attempt to proclaim Jesus "king," to make Him the leader of a new messianic movement (v. 15). This is no surprise: according to the commonly accepted ideas of that time, the Messiah was to become king, restore an independent Jewish state, and introduce in it laws corresponding to the Torah. But Jesus, of course, was not going to become the leader of any religious-political movement.

But Jesus had another, more important reason to conceal His messiahship. He Himself speaks of it directly to those who went looking for Him in Galilee: most of the people seeking a meeting with Him did so not because they thirsted for the Kingdom, but because they wanted, in time of need, always to be able to receive free bread (v. 26). Jesus, however, speaks with them about eternal life and about the main thing without which one cannot partake of it: trust in the One whom God sent into the world to give people the Kingdom (vv. 27-29).

But they do not understand Him. They ask Him: where are the proofs that Your words are true (v. 30)? And at once they give an example of what proofs would convince them: manna from heaven, as in the days of Moses in the wilderness (v. 31). Jesus again tells them that the Kingdom is greater than any miracle, and that the bread of the Kingdom is more important than manna (vv. 32-33). And again they do not understand Him.

His listeners cannot grasp that with the Savior's coming into the world a new era has begun, and that what happened to them on the shore of Lake Gennesaret was not a miracle in the sense in which manna was a miracle. Simply by being with Jesus, they found themselves in the Kingdom and lived for a while according to its laws, but, as we can see, they did not understand fully what had happened to them. That is why they ask Jesus for bread and expect to receive it just as their fathers once received manna from God (v. 34). And Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that the point is not bread, but the Kingdom and that fullness of God's life which is given there to everyone, so that no manna will be needed there anymore.

A miracle is the Kingdom's invasion of our world, the manifestation of its laws where completely different rules usually operate. But now the Kingdom is entering the world, transforming it, and the times of miracles are passing. The time of the Kingdom is beginning - open to everyone who seeks it and wants to enter.

Among many peoples, the law of blood vengeance prescribed killing the murderer's whole family. The Old Testament Law, however, gradually cuts back the rights of the avenger of blood and even protects the one who has killed unintentionally. This is a long path that must lead Israel to the awareness that the loving God wants not the death of the sinner, but his conversion and repentance.