Notes for  2 August 2026

Ezekiel lived in an age of catastrophes. So do we. Human beings generally live in times of catastrophes that they inflict on one another. In a vision, the prophet sees a field of dry bones. Only a field—in those days, destruction was not carried out on the scale it is today.

The Lord asks the prophet the same question that confronts us today: “Can these bones live?” What will become of you? What will become of these people? How will you go on living? “Lord God, You alone know.”

The prophet sees that even dry bones can become human beings again when God's creative word intervenes in history. The Fathers of the Church saw in this prophecy a prefiguration of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. At the end of history, despite all its horror and darkness, God can restore everything that we have disfigured, ruined, and destroyed. If we believe this, then, in fulfilling our Christian prophetic calling, we must address this world filled with human bones: “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!”...

In today's passage about walking on the water, there are words that enable us in the most direct way to feel that we are God's own children. These words resound within us whenever we face the most difficult moments of our lives: “...it is I; do not be afraid.”

The world is frightening. When we look around, we realise how frightening, cruel, and bloody it is. But just as a child who has been put to bed and imagines terrifying monsters in the darkness of the room is calmed as soon as their mother looks in, so we, on hearing these words, find the strength within us to step out of our boat into the raging sea. This teaches us to rise above the animal fear for our own lives and the lives of those close to us, and to cling to just one fear: the fear of grieving God.

There is one more thing we must understand as we reflect on these words. Our breakthrough toward God always takes place in solitude. Just as Peter stood up, left his friends in the boat, and went alone across the waves to meet Christ, so we attain true communion with God only when we have shut the door of our room behind us and remained alone with God.

In essence, every Christian witness is always a witness to the Kingdom. This is hardly surprising: the chief task and central meaning of the Savior's earthly ministry was to bring the Kingdom into the world, while His chief work thereafter, today, and henceforth until His return in glory, became the nurturing of this Kingdom in our world, which is being transfigured but is not yet transfigured. Yet there are different ways of bearing witness to it, and one of the central forms is witness to the love that permeates it. This is only natural: the Savior Himself spoke of mutual love as a “new commandment.” What, one might ask, can be new about something as old as the world? And had little really been said about love before the Messiah came?

And yet there is something new and important in Jesus' words. Love, of course—at least in the sense in which the word is used in the books of the Bible—had always meant, first and foremost, a certain attitude toward one's neighbor: one in which a person wished them well. But Jesus speaks of something greater: He speaks of the Kingdom, where love becomes not merely an attitude but the very environment in which its inhabitants live, the spiritual environment without which there is no Kingdom. In a certain sense, love constitutes its foundation, its spiritual substance, just as natural substances form the environment of our untransfigured world.

And if a person has become a participant in the Kingdom, has become one of its inhabitants, and has immersed themselves completely in this spiritual environment, it is truly no longer possible to tear them away from it. For the Kingdom does not belong to our world or live by its laws; it enters our world, transfiguring it and changing its very nature, yet without becoming a part or an element of the former order of things that it is called to transform. It is hardly surprising that in the untransfigured world there is no power capable of affecting the bonds that connect a person with the Kingdom and with its inhabitants. What binds them is the love of which the Savior Himself gave His disciples an example, and which people of righteous life belonging to many different Christian confessions have manifested time and again: a love that no one can truly take away from a person unless that person betrays it.