Notes for  9 August 2026

For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection of every person from the dead, and on the belief that this process began with the Savior's resurrection. And the point is not merely that without life after death, a person's earthly life proves largely meaningless.

In ancient times, belief in the immortality of the soul and in recompense after death was characteristic of the Egyptians, to some extent of the Greeks, and of certain other peoples. But the Bible speaks of something else. It is not saying that some part of the human person, however important, is preserved after death and that this allows a person to go on living, remembering and remaining conscious of themselves. The Bible speaks of something greater: it speaks of resurrection, of the whole person returning to life—and to a full life, not the partial and limited life that the soul alone would inevitably have. For all its importance, the soul is only a part of the human person, not the entire person.

But for human resurrection to become possible, the world had to change. Death and the evil that gave rise to it had to be driven out of the world they entered after the Fall. The world had to become God's Kingdom once again, as it had been on the first day of creation: on that first day there was neither darkness nor evil in the world; it was entirely permeated by the light of God's presence, which made it the Kingdom of the living and utterly real God. This is exactly how God wants to see the world, and He will accept nothing less. According to His design, the human person must become an inhabitant of this world and attain in it a fullness of life that is unimaginable today.

Christ's resurrection from the dead became the center of this process. Human salvation consists in joining the universal resurrection; otherwise, a person will have to forget about the Kingdom. The apostle understands all this perfectly and never tires of reminding others, for to remain outside what is happening means losing everything. Christianity itself then loses all meaning, turning into a religion, a doctrine—in short, into something that cannot by itself bring anyone into the life of the Kingdom. And to live on talk about a Kingdom toward which one is not journeying truly means being the most pitiable of all people.

In this story we encounter a calamity that human strength has failed to overcome. This often happens to us. What are we to do? “Bring him to Me,” says the Saviour. The Lord shows us the way when it seems that we have exhausted every means and that nothing else can help. The disciples ask why they themselves were unable to cast out the demons. “Because you have little faith,” or “no faith,” as some manuscripts say.

This answer makes us reflect on what our own faith is and how its measure is to be taken—whether it is small or great. Recalling the Saviour's following words, “I tell you, if you had faith even the size of a mustard seed, and if you said to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ it would move,” and seeing that nothing moves at our words, we are often inclined to belittle our faith. But we must not forget the distinctive language of Jesus, full of symbols, hyperbole, and vivid poetic images. In rabbinic literature, teachers capable of interpreting the most difficult passages of Scripture were called “movers of mountains.” When we say that faith works miracles, we must also understand the “miracles” themselves in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel, not the spirit of our sinful desires.

The Jewish people, like every people on earth, have their own history, conditioned in part by the same social laws that generally govern the history of all peoples. But besides this history common to everyone, the Jewish people, as God's people, are part of another history as well: the history of the Covenant, the history of those relationships between God and His people and humanity as a whole that constitute an internally unified spiritual process. In this process the Jewish people prove to be the very axis on which everything rests and around which everything turns. And in this capacity they will remain for ever, until the Second Coming.

But not everyone born Jewish automatically becomes a person of God. The history of Israel itself shows that the boundaries of God's people and of the Jewish nation by no means always coincided. Strictly speaking, only after the Babylonian exile, when Jewry became an ethno-confessional community, did it become possible to speak of God's people at least formally: before the exile many Jews were essentially, and sometimes formally, pagans. Moreover, at that time they were the majority, which made the exile itself inevitable. In exile there emerged the remnant of which the pre-exilic prophets had already spoken, and it was this remnant that became the foundation of a new, post-exilic Jewry, which now existed as an ethno-confessional community where, by definition, there could be no pagans.

But then the Messiah came, and it turned out that religiosity alone was not enough: one had to live a full spiritual life in order to recognise Him and follow Him. And in every religious community there are always more religious people than people living a spiritual life or seeking such a life. Once again a remnant begins to emerge, now no longer according to a religious principle but a spiritual one: those who value their own religiosity more highly are not fit for the Kingdom.

Yet the Covenant remains in force. God does not renounce an alliance once concluded. The Jews have advanced farther along the road to the Kingdom than any other people, and no one will take that from them. In practice, however, such an advantage changes nothing for them: what matters here is not to go farther than others, but to reach the goal. This is what Paul hopes for and what he prays about. He wants his people to complete the road they have travelled only in part. All the way to the Kingdom.