Notes for  10 August 2026

Like every aphorism, this short phrase is very profound. What is a “haughty soul,” and where does haughtiness lead a person? Haughtiness is perhaps a very rigid form of pride (there are subtler forms), in which a person inwardly sets themselves apart from everything else in the world, considering themselves “above all this.” How can such a soul find peace? Only by becoming convinced that this is indeed so, that everything really is beneath it and cannot “get to it.” But this is not what happens in reality. First, we all inhabit a world that “gets to us” every second, and there is no practical way to shut ourselves away from it in an “ivory tower.” Second, there is God, who, whether we want it or not, is above us, and all human claims to supremacy, all attempts to satisfy our haughtiness, are hopeless. Thus every encounter with the real world and with God deprives a haughty person of peace.

Now for the righteous person. A righteous person is one who does everything rightly in life, according to God's law—let us suppose that such people exist. Yet the waves of life's evil batter even such a person, and they feel its injustice very keenly (see the Book of Job). Every misfortune in their life is an undeserved punishment that wounds the heart and deprives life of meaning. Only faith can bring true meaning and light into such a life: faith in God's goodness, faith that troubles have nothing to do with punishment, and that suffering is the place of a special encounter with the One who accepted suffering and death for our sins.

The denunciations directed against the Pharisees and teachers of the Law are better compared to road signs warning that there is a cliff beyond this bend or that ice may lie ahead. In other words, these words should serve primarily as a warning of spiritual danger, rather than as an occasion to share the Saviour's anger against particular people.

In Russian, the word “Pharisee” has lost all its positive connotations and retained only negative ones. Yet these were highly educated people, many of whom became disciples of Jesus. We must not forget this.

In this passage, Christ speaks of those for whom the temple is more important than God. And how often this happens to us as well. How often people whose upbringing has endowed them with the finest aesthetic sensibility nourish their church life solely on the beauty of ritual. And how often people go to church only for companionship that saves them from the loneliness of the metropolis—or indeed from loneliness of any kind—forgetting that God is the most important thing in the Church.

The thought of a soul that must be hated may seem strange and even absurd. Why, indeed, should a person hate the most precious thing he possesses, the very thing that makes him himself? For the sake of precision, however, it must be noted that the subject here is not the soul in the sense in which we use the word today, but simply life. Yet even with this understanding the question remains: why should a person hate his own life, given to him by God?

The simplest answer might be to refer to the Fall, which distorted this very life and turned it into a pitiful likeness of what it was meant to be according to God's plan. Such an answer, however, would be more characteristic of a Pythagorean or a Platonist than of a believer in Yahweh. In the pagan world, the idea that earthly life was an improper state for a human being was fairly widespread, among philosophers, mystics, and ascetics, of course. They saw the life of fallen humanity in all its ugliness and could imagine no other way out than rejecting it, a rejection which they thought freed a person from the power of the evil in which the world lies and in which the life of everyone who inhabits it unfolds. The Bible, however, nowhere speaks of rejecting life as a way of escaping evil; the spiritualism of the Platonists or Pythagoreans is alien to it. And Jesus' words about hating one's own life can hardly be understood in a spiritualist sense, whether that spiritualism is of the Greek or the Indian kind.

One Indian parallel, however, might be relevant here: the parallel with Buddhism and with the concept of nirvana that is central to Buddhism. Contrary to the widespread view, this is not a departure into non-being, but rather an experience of being, a being that is revealed only when a person distances himself from illusory, imaginary, inauthentic being, which he usually regards as real life. The Buddha suddenly realized that authentic being and true life are not at all where most people see them. That is why he came to hate life in an almost Gospel sense, not with the hatred that desires the destruction of what is hated, but with hatred in the biblical sense of the word, when a person distances himself completely from what is hated and excludes it from his life. To exclude illusion for the sake of reality: such was the Buddha's experience.

Christ Himself is this reality. He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and everyone who comes to Him faces a choice: whether to remain with his own life, which sooner or later will run dry, or to renounce his own separate existence, giving his life to Christ and allowing Him to dispose of it. This is somewhat reminiscent of Buddhism, with the difference, however, that Buddhism is apophatic, while Christianity is cataphatic. With Christ and in Christ, the authentic being and true life that the Buddha sensed at the moment of his enlightenment entered the world. And to find them requires the same renunciation of what is one's own, separate, finite, and therefore inauthentic. Without such a renunciation, reality cannot be attained, whether it is the enlightenment of the Buddhists or the fullness of Christ's Kingdom.

The coming of the Kingdom of God is a mystery perhaps no less profound than the mystery of the Kingdom itself. The Lord therefore calls the disciples to keep watch, lest they miss or sleep through the Kingdom's coming into their lives. This probably does not refer merely to constant readiness for death or for Christ's Second Coming.

Christ also enters a person's life when that person least expects it: at any moment we may find ourselves facing a vitally important choice or a decisive encounter. Woe to the person who fails to notice Christ at the moment when he is called to take part in bringing about God's Kingdom. It is not that God will take offence and punish him, but that, by passing this Kingdom by, he will miss the most important event and the most important encounter of his life. Therefore, as the final Encounter approaches, the Lord calls people not to miss His presence even now, here on the way towards the triumph of God's Kingdom.

The warning that most of the people will be destroyed sounds terrifying, addressed as it is to those rebuked for their lawlessness. But should we forget that the very sins for which retribution must be borne are themselves monstrously terrible? Yet when we yield to sinful temptations, sin does not seem so dreadful to us, so mortal a danger that we must flee from it. The destruction of three parts of the people is not an arbitrary sentence, but a direct consequence of the lawlessness they committed, just as delirium tremens is a result of alcoholism.

The sins denounced in the prophetic discourse exceed the lawlessness of the pagans, and their consequences are therefore far more dangerous. But if the people were raised above the pagans, the consequences of their fall from that height inevitably become more traumatic. Pagans who have no communion with the living God do not know the fullness of the moral law; yet even they will suffer less from the consequences of the evil they have done than those who turned away from God and His commandments.

The conditions attached to the blessings and curses in this chapter are expressed in two requirements: to listen to the voice of the Lord and to carry out His commandments. This reminds us of two fundamental aspects of a person's relationship with God: receiving revelation and responding to it appropriately. It is no coincidence that the apostle (Heb 11:1) defines faith as “the assurance of things unseen” (hearing God) and “the realization of things hoped for” (the human response).

These two aspects are inseparable. For if we know God's will but do not carry it out, we turn away from Him. Conversely, if we carry out the commandments without listening to His will, the commandments themselves threaten to lead us away from God into legalism and pharisaic blindness. Blessing, however—the expression of God's love for us—is the fruit of hearing and doing.