At the end of today's reading there are words saying that the love of Christ embraces us. The apostle explains why this happens, and what is required of us in order to be embraced by Christ's love. His thought is expressed in our Russian Synodal translation with less than full clarity. It says here: "the love of Christ embraces us, reasoning thus: if One died for all..." In the original, however, the apostle Paul writes: the love of Christ holds us, κρίναντας τούτο, having understood that One died for all. The Slavonic text at this point says: "we who have judged this," and it uses a simple past form, not the present tense used in the Synodal translation. Blessed Jerome of Stridon, translating this text into Latin, emphasizes this aspect even more: in the Vulgate these words read, "nos aestimantes hoc..." This verb means "to evaluate," like the English word "to estimate" derived from it.

So this is what is being said: the love of Christ embraces us and fills our whole life when we estimate the greatness of His sacrifice, when we understand and realize that in Him all of us truly died. More than that, it is important to realize this as an accomplished fact. Not to speculate, searching for meaning in a religious phenomenon, but to judge, to understand that this has already happened and, as a historical fact, has direct relevance to us. Only in this way can one receive this love, without which life loses its support.

For the apostle, Christian life is one in all its fullness and at all its stages. Before, prior to the coming of Christ, every person's life was clearly divided into "before" and "after," into life and life after death, which could not be called life in the full sense of the word even under the most optimistic view of it. For most people, life after death meant a world of shadows, where there is no life but only its likeness, where a person turns into his own shadow, forgetting earthly life and almost losing awareness of his own existence.

There were, of course, less pessimistic views of life after death, which assumed the immortality of the soul and recompense after death, but even then the matter concerned only the soul, not the whole person. Paul speaks of something else. He starts not from hope in the immortality of the soul, but from the expectation of the resurrection of the whole person, entirely and completely. And for him this process has already become reality, together with the Kingdom that has entered the world.

For a person living the life of the Kingdom, the difference between "before" and "after," if it does not disappear completely, becomes nonessential. The life of the Kingdom is one, and a person who has come to share in this life is no longer subject to death in the form in which it is present in the fallen world. Of course, insofar as the Kingdom has not yet entered the world completely, a person cannot be completely free from death. This refers first of all to the physical body, which in its fallen state can become a barrier between a person and God.

It was not intended to be this way. God created man so that he could remain with Him in the fullness of communion. But after the fall everything became different, and the embodied nature that had once been the place of meeting between man and God became a barrier separating man from God. A barrier that can, of course, be overcome, but one noticeable enough that it cannot be ignored. That is why the apostle says that the fullness of communion with God presupposes liberation from the body in its present state, not in the sense of complete rejection of it, but in the sense of its transformation, such a change in its nature that it would not hinder communion with God, but would instead help it.

In any case, this communion with God begins not somewhere in another world and not sometime after death, but here and now. The first stage of the path into the Kingdom begins when a person decides to follow Christ and enters the Church. And already at this first stage, more is decided than one might think when looking at fallen man.

At the first stage it is determined what the following stages will be, if not entirely, then to a great extent. God prepares the heavenly dwelling for a person, but the clothing that will be on that person when he stands at the threshold of that dwelling is prepared by the person himself during his earthly life. Life in the Kingdom begins here and now, and it is precisely here and now that what we will become later, at the next stage of our path, is determined. This is what the apostle reminds the readers of his letter.

In its view of history, humanity has still not invented anything beyond the alternative of progressivism or catastrophism. In exactly the same way, in its view of the human being, we stand before a choice between philanthropy and misanthropy. It is not hard to be convinced that the view of history naturally correlates with the view of the human being: a misanthrope will hardly believe in progress leading to universal happiness and prosperity, while one who believes that the human being is originally good will almost certainly also believe that in the life of humanity there are no insoluble problems and that universal happiness is attainable, at least in principle.

The biblical view of history, however, is antinomic: on the one hand, the entire history of the Christian era is nothing other than the history of the advancing and ever more fully revealing Kingdom, the projection of which into the untransformed world is the history of Christian righteousness, or, as it is usually called, Christian holiness; on the other hand, the whole history of the "Christian" world is the history of that evil in which, according to the word of the Gospel, the world lies, and which manifests itself in "Christian" history. The biblical view of the human being is just as antinomic: on the one hand, the path of righteousness was open to the human being in every age, and God gave His people the Torah as a guide on this path; on the other hand, as God says through the author of the Prologue of Genesis, "every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth", and nothing can be done about this before the full transformation of human nature. Thus it turns out that the coming of the Kingdom, neither in the life of an individual person nor in the history of humanity, resembles in the least that progress of which philanthropists of all times and peoples dreamed, being sure that gradual improvements both of technology and of morals would finally bring humanity into a golden age.

On the contrary, the coming of the Kingdom presupposes the polarization of the mutually opposing forces of the Kingdom and the forces of that evil in which the world lies. This is so both in the history of humanity and in the life of an individual person. And the more such a person is rooted in the life of the Kingdom, the more noticeably that evil connected with his fallen nature manifests itself in his life, both inner and outer. As in humanity in the course of world history, it does not, of course, appear anew from nowhere and does not even increase in size; it simply becomes more noticeable, just as its opposition becomes more noticeable.

But this opposition is pushed all the more toward the "external", to the periphery of life, the more the seeker of the Kingdom is rooted in its life. Then less and less periphery remains; it gradually disappears, while there is more and more of the inner, that in which the life of the Kingdom manifests itself. Only this process cannot be completed in an untransformed world wounded by evil. It is completed in the Kingdom, and the one who does not see the Kingdom does not see its completion either. A completion that coincides with the triumph of the Kingdom and the full transformation of creation.