Notes for  13 August 2026

For Paul, Christianity is first and foremost life with Christ in His Kingdom, and witness to Him and to this life. This is why the apostle says below that the Kingdom is “not in word, but in power.” Judging by the apostle's words to the Christians in Corinth, for them it was different. It is no accident that Paul speaks of authentic Christian life as the life of people who are persecuted, poor, and unsuccessful. He seems to contrast such a life with the life led by many Christians in Corinth who had found their place in the world. It is possible, of course, that some of Corinth's church leaders had indeed built something resembling an ecclesiastical career—although at that time it was naturally quite unlike what it became later, when church institutions were not only legal but even official and highly influential.

Yet the problem was not one of scale but of the inner condition of those who pursued such a career. The problem was precisely that these people had found themselves in this world and had settled into it, perhaps not as luxuriously as ecclesiastical careerists in other ages, but quite comfortably. The trouble was not that they had become leaders of certain local church or church-adjacent groups and movements; it lay in their inner condition, which the apostle describes in a single word: you have become rich. They had lost the spiritual condition that Jesus—and Isaiah of Jerusalem centuries before Him—called poverty. What matters here is not what a person has or how much, but what they rely on, and whether they think they truly possess anything. God's poor person understands perfectly that they are empty and ready to receive into themselves, into their life, soul, and heart, whatever God may wish to fill them with. With their whole being they sense that they have nothing in this world on which they could rely, and indeed nothing valuable at all, nothing worth clinging to.

The rich person, on the other hand, is certain that they possess something of the sort—something that belongs to them by right, not because God gave it to them, but because they earned and deserved it. One can rely on what one has earned and deserved; it will not fail. It is yours. You are rich. Yet this wealth proves earthly, of this world, and unrelated to the Kingdom. The rich person may be rich in words about the Kingdom. But only the poor person attains its power, and the apostle knows this perfectly: he himself was richer than many, yet chose poverty for the sake of Christ and the Kingdom.

Christian eschatology—and herein lies its uniqueness—has two dimensions. The first is the end of days, spoken of in the Creed as the expectation of the Lord “Who shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” The second is connected with the fact that almost every historical era contains a fulfilment, albeit incomplete, of certain eschatological prophecies.

Similarly, philosophy has a conception of a person's death as a continuous process: on the one hand, biological death occurs at a certain moment, but on the other, we change irreversibly every instant, which means that the person we were only recently ceases to exist forever.

The Lord's words are therefore filled with special significance: “Take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.” These words bring salvation not only to those who happen to live at the end of days; they bring salvation to all of us, because we need only look around to see without difficulty false prophets, false christs, and the “abomination of desolation” in the “holy place.” There is, however, no need to explain this to people living after the events of September 11 in the United States of America—after a catastrophe that Americans themselves had predicted down to the details in their cinema. After all, forewarned is forearmed.

At the heart of the Gospel is the message of love. At the heart of love is forgiveness. The parable told by the Lord places forgiveness at the very centre of human relationships. It is impossible to want to be forgiven and not desire to forgive. Forgiveness is a two-way bond between people, in which both sides are responsible for sustaining it. To forgive not when someone has atoned for their fault, nor even when they have asked for forgiveness, but beforehand, in advance, leaving no unforgiveness in one's heart—this is the essence of Jesus' words in verse 22.

When speaking of the Kingdom, Jesus never tires of reminding His listeners that they still have to enter it and that this will not happen by itself. For the sake of the Kingdom one must leave everything behind and be ready to take up the cross. These words of the Saviour were perfectly clear: His listeners still remembered how, a little over a century before the events of the Gospel, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus in the then independent Judea, those who took part in an uprising against the government and demanded that the authorities strictly observe the norms of the Torah in the country were crucified. The rebels wanted one thing: the Kingdom, the kind they knew about, of course. And for its sake they gave up everything. Their ideas about it bore little resemblance to what Jesus speaks of, but He holds up their determination as an example to His listeners. They truly did leave everything behind.

Not like the characters in Jesus' parable who refuse to come to the feast, for reasons that might seem perfectly reasonable, but still refuse and lose what matters most. Their places are taken by those who have nothing in this world and no reason to decline. Is it a matter of priorities? Yes, of course, priorities too, but not priorities alone. It is no accident that Jesus speaks of a feast, of the first and the last, and of the places that many strive to occupy even at the risk of being driven from them.

The Kingdom is not a place, a structure or a hierarchy. The Kingdom is a state in which one can abide, but which one absolutely cannot, so to speak, fix in place, however much one may wish to do so. The desire to occupy better or worse places comes from this. For in the Kingdom there are, in fact, no good or bad places. There is only one criterion: is a person in his or her own place, in the very place God intended, or in one chosen personally because it seemed more suitable?

This also gives rise to the question: should one go to the feast or to the field just purchased? The wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom. If a person does not know which to choose, it means that he does not know what the Kingdom is. If he did know, it would never occur to him to compare the importance of the life he lives with anything he owns. Life is fullness, whereas a purchased field, possessions and even family are merely derivatives of that fullness. What matters here is not to confuse the part with the whole or the principal with the secondary. Only one thing can help us do this: the experience of the true life of the Kingdom, that very life which is salvation.

Whenever prophecy denounces the pagan inclinations of sinners, especially when they are shown in such detail and at such length as they were revealed to Ezekiel, it is difficult to escape the impression that these rebukes apply not only to the Jews of the Old Testament. Even in our own day, when talk of a “revival of traditional religious values” can be heard everywhere, newspapers are filled with advertisements for countless sorcerers and fortune-tellers. This means there is demand for their services, and yet these are merely trifles and the visible tip of the iceberg... Time and again we have to remind ourselves (first of all) that paganism does not necessarily consist in a theoretical allegiance to Astarte or Svarog; it is rooted in a way of life that considers indulging sinful inclinations reasonable and necessary. Sin is deadly in itself: it leads to death even when it appears to go unpunished. Therefore, the picture of the destruction of the lawless is not intimidation but a figurative warning about the danger arising from within people themselves.

Yet in the midst of everything that is happening, we hear the command to place a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and sigh over all the abominations. The meaning is not immediately clear, but these words contain hope, and not only for those who lived many centuries ago among the wicked. What the Synodal translation neutrally calls a “mark” sounds in the original like “taw”—a letter which in ancient times had the shape of a cross. Before us is one of the prophetic prefigurations of what will bring salvation to all who do not wish to be slaves of sin.

Apparently, to avoid unnecessary responsibility, we have grown accustomed to living in a world of abstractions. What could be more abstract than “good” or “evil”? Since they are remote from us and neither true good nor true evil is within our power, we can all sleep peacefully and worry about nothing. But that is precisely the point: it turns out that nothing is more concrete or closer to us than good and evil—these direct manifestations of our spirit. This is why the biblical commandment is close to us—closer than our own skin—in our mouth and in our heart.

This is what today's chapter of Deuteronomy tells us: do not say that this has nothing to do with you, for it is about your heart and your life. With this approach, the Word of God becomes truly close to us.