Notes for  30 July 2026

Perhaps the most important thing Holy Scripture tells us about the end of the world is that it will come. The Lord explains to the disciples in considerable detail that the end will be like a harvest, when creation brings its fruit to the Creator. But what He adds next is also very important: we do not know the hour at which our Lord will come. Later, after the Resurrection, the Savior will say this even more definitely: it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority. It follows that we need to know the fact that the end will come, since the Lord Himself bears witness to it, but we are not meant to know the time of its coming. Moreover, in His parables Christ calls us always to be ready for that day.

The ancient Christians expected the end of the world to come from day to day, and this expectation, on the one hand, inspired them and gave them strength to withstand persecutions and temptations, but, on the other hand, after two or three centuries had passed, it became the cause of a certain perplexity, disappointment, and rethinking of the Gospel. In our time we have so forgotten the very essence of the coming end that dates and signs of its arrival trouble us more than what we will say at the Last Judgment.

The point is presumably that the news of the end of time is necessary for us not so that we might determine our actions and deeds in some different way. We must live in God’s truth always: on the day after the creation of the world and on the eve of its end. Rather, the fact that history is to be completed is needed so that we may have the right attitude toward this world and its realities. The heavens will grow old like a worn-out garment, and together with them evil and suffering, violence and lies, which we bring into creation, will disappear. This is at once a day of judgment and a day of hope. We will see Christ and we will see His creation in all the beauty He intended. Compared with this, the whole burden of dependencies and illusions that fills our consciousness and from which we will in any case have to part recedes into the background.

The apostle seems to contrast praying “with the spirit” and praying “with the understanding.” What does he mean? By “spirit” Paul means what today, without any theological background, we would simply call breath. This may be the “breath of life” God gave humanity at creation or God's breath, whose presence the prophets feel within themselves during ecstasy. In any case, this is precisely an ecstatic experience, the sensation of a certain power of God that acts upon a person and sometimes not only embraces him from without but also enters within. As a rule, God's power is felt as something impersonal, so a person can only surrender himself to it, assuming that behind it stands God Himself, who abides beside him and leads him after Himself. It often happens that while under the influence of God's power, a person not only lacks control of himself but does not always remember everything that happened to him after the ecstasy ends. Glossolalia may, or may not, be an element of such an ecstatic state.

Such ecstasy, however, is of little benefit to those around the person. It can only become a vivid demonstration of how God's power works and what it can do with a human being. That is why Paul calls such phenomena a sign for unbelievers: by observing such an ecstasy, a person with no idea what God's power and action are can form a more or less clear impression of them. But such an ecstasy brings nothing new to Christians themselves.

Praying “with the understanding” is another matter. By understanding, the apostle means here not the intellect but the spiritual center of the human person that the Bible usually calls the heart. Greek philosophers called it the “mind,” and Paul uses this word in his epistles, which were written in Greek. This is conscious prayer, conscious communion with God, which may also become prophetic if God gives a person such a revelation. Here not only God's power but also His will is revealed, a will the person senses and recognizes as part of his own spiritual space. He can therefore follow this will consciously, commune with God consciously—in short, live a conscious spiritual life. And if God entrusts this to him, he can therefore also instruct others: he does not merely experience certain ecstasies but understands the meaning and significance of what is revealed to him and what is happening to him. This is how an inhabitant of the Kingdom should live.

In ancient times, the end of world history drew the attention of both the Church and pagans like a magnet. In our own time, by contrast, a kind of tacit convention has arisen, and speaking about it has become somewhat improper. The ancients expected the end to come any day, while we prefer to pretend it will never come. So will it be tomorrow or never?

When the end will come matters only if you are concerned about whether you will have time to prepare for it. Subconsciously we calculate that for a while we can live as we please and then still have time to prepare for the end of the world. During exams, for example, you calculate: there are four days until the next exam, so you can spend two days having fun, one day recovering, and one day reading the textbook. Whether you expect the end of the world very soon or not at all soon is only a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

Jesus' words about the last day mostly lie outside this perspective. He emphasizes only that the heavenly Father alone knows that day and hour. The Gospel seeks to bring something else home to our hearts. The essence of what happens at the end, at the Last Judgment, is separation. In today's reading the Lord Jesus says: “and shall sever the wicked from among the just.” The Greek ἀφορίζω, aphorizō, means to separate, set boundaries, define. As He said in the parable of the wheat and the tares, both are left to grow together until the day of harvest, when they will be separated.

From a practical standpoint, what matters for us is this. On the last day the separation, the distinction between the righteous and the wicked—Greek πονηρός, ponēros, one who causes much trouble, bad—will occur as a matter of fact, and it is not clear that our opinions and wishes will be taken into account. But today we can choose on which side of that boundary we will stand. By choosing to trust Jesus today, we enter the day that follows the last, for “he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24).

Christ is already widely known among the people. They are glad to receive Him and therefore await His coming. Alas, His popularity so far has little connection with an understanding of who He is and why He came to humanity. How much we resemble the ancient inhabitants of Judea when we turn to Christ and His saints mainly with practical needs, forgetting what is more important! It is no surprise that Jairus asks Him to heal his daughter, and Christ responds to the request. But neither Jairus nor his household yet knows that He came to defeat death, so the request not to trouble the Teacher after news of the girl's death spreads is quite understandable. Still, it is monstrous that we hear laughter at this moment: even at a tragic time, people find it possible to laugh at the One who called the dead girl asleep. In this laughter we can already hear the mockery that will sound when He is seized and handed over to be killed. Yet He is not mocked with impunity; those who mocked Him were put to shame.

On the way, the woman with an issue of blood touched Him. Not long before, He had broken the rules concerning defilement by touching a leper, and now the suffering woman also broke the rules governing uncleanness by touching Him. He approves her boldness—not because, as some think, He wants to destroy the existing norms, but because His mercy is higher than ritualism pursued as an end in itself.

The prayer Jesus offers for His disciples sums up everything said during the Last Supper. It is usually called the prayer for unity, and one can undoubtedly agree with this. Yet it concerns not only outward unity. Jesus again asks the Father to preserve between Him and His disciples the same union that He has with the Father (vv. 21-23). Apparently no testimony is possible without such unity; without it the world will not believe that the apostles truly were sent into the world by the Savior Himself.

Yet bearing witness to the Kingdom and revealing the Kingdom to the world are precisely the chief task of those who are sent. Addressing the Father, Jesus in a sense hands over to the apostles the mission the Father entrusted to Him, while entrusting the apostles themselves to the Father. He says: I have given the life of the Kingdom that You gave Me to everyone who wished to receive it; I have accomplished everything You entrusted to Me (vv. 1-5). I revealed Myself, You, and Your Kingdom to those whom You sent Me, and they accepted everything (vv. 6-8). And now, Jesus says, I am leaving while they remain, and I pray for them, for those who belong to You (vv. 9-11).

Such a request was entirely natural, for the apostles were now becoming witnesses to the Kingdom about which Jesus had previously spoken to the world, and the apostolic community was to become the nucleus of the Church. Previously Jesus Himself had kept His disciples safe in a world hostile to them. Now, as He goes to the Father, He asks the Father to help the apostles preserve the joy of the Kingdom that they knew during the Savior's earthly ministry (vv. 12-13). This does not mean removing the apostles from the world to some other, special reality. The Kingdom had to be revealed here, not somewhere on another planet or in another dimension (vv. 14-16). But to reveal it, the apostolic community had to be sanctified by receiving the fullness of God's living revelation, which the Savior Himself embodied (v. 17). Only then could the apostles become witnesses to the Kingdom and their community the nucleus of the Church, whose very purpose would be to preserve the Kingdom in our still not fully transformed world and bear witness to it. This nucleus would grow, and the Church would expand, including everyone who sought the Kingdom and eternal life (vv. 18-21).

Every state has certain “branches of government”—a ruler, a court, police, a council of elders, and so on. At first glance, Israel is no different from other states: it too has its leaders, judges, and elders. But God's people are organized not like a state machine but as a community, a prototype of the Church. The ministries in this community are given by God. God entrusts His prerogatives—judgment, authority, counsel, and others—to the people, just as in the early Church the Spirit distributed among the faithful the gifts needed for the community's life and ministry. Both then and now, God's ministries differ from secular service in that God's people must carry them out in constant contact with God, listening to His will and fulfilling His commandments. By replacing ministry in the Church with a merely formal discharge of our duties, we risk finding ourselves outside the bounds of God's people.