Now Paul addresses his fellow countrymen from the steps of the Roman fortress. To understand the situation better, one needs to see how unfavorable his position is. Accused of renouncing the Mosaic law, he is seen in the city in the company of the "Gentile" Trophimus, accused of defiling the Temple, which was punishable by death, and people want to punish him. Let us note that the Jerusalem Christians from among the Jews are not even mentioned in this episode; evidently they did not sympathize much with Paul's position. But the unit of the Roman centurion, occupiers in the eyes of the Jews, prevents the carrying out of this judgment, which in their opinion is lawful. They arrest Paul, thereby ensuring his safety, and allow him to address the people.

It would be completely natural to hear from Paul a word in defense of Christianity, a description of his meeting with Christ, an indication that it is lawful and righteous for a Jew to believe in Jesus because He is the Messiah. But to speak about mercy for the Gentiles and their calling to eternal life - not here and not in this situation, not from the tower of the occupiers' garrison! Christians of the Soviet Union were in a similar situation during World War II, when in the occupied territories the Germans allowed them to open churches destroyed by Soviet power and bring the Gospel to people - by the mercy of enemies. Paul is willing to respect the feelings of his people, to respect their views and customs, as we saw in the previous reading. But Paul cannot renounce the words of the Lord Jesus, his calling to bring to the Gentiles and to the enemies of his people the message of forgiveness of sins and salvation by faith in Christ.

The most serious test for a religious person is the test of freedom. And that means not only one's own freedom, but another person's freedom as well. Especially when it concerns someone whom that religious person sees as "one of us." When Paul came to Jerusalem, he fully experienced the anger of "his own," who were outraged by his freedom. The apostle, of course, was not an opponent of religion as such. He fully shared the view of the apostolic council: religion is permissible in the Church, but it must not be obligatory and it must not be imposed on anyone. The Jerusalem church consisted almost entirely of Jews, and therefore of religious people.

Paul, of course, was not going to establish in Jerusalem the order and practice of the churches of Asia Minor, which were made up largely of recent pagans and therefore of secular people. His own religious tradition did not burden him at all: without any inner protest he performs the prescribed purification rituals, well known to him from childhood, and comes to the Temple, familiar to him since his youth, from the time of his studies under Gamaliel. But it turns out that being a religious person oneself is not enough to calm religious consciousness.

Religious consciousness has a kind of wholeness that excludes every alternative. If a person does not belong to religion entirely, if religion is only part of life for him and not all of life, his religious conscience is not calm. For Paul, his religiosity was not an absolute, and his conscience was no longer the conscience of a religious person. He had long since gone beyond the limits of his religion and his religiosity. His spiritual life was connected with the Kingdom, not with religion. Religion, of course, did not frighten the apostle, but it did not stand in first place for him. And the religious crowd gathered in the Temple courtyard sensed this very well.

It even expressed this feeling through the mouths of people who accused Paul of urging others not to observe Jewish traditions. One might ask, why would those whom the Jews themselves regarded as Gentiles have to observe Jewish traditions? And why would Paul have had to impose those traditions on them? He had never turned anyone away from Judaism; he simply did not try to make Jews of everyone to whom he preached. But precisely this kind of behavior is apostasy for religious consciousness.

There is only one truth in the world, life can have only one goal, and if a preacher is not preaching my religion, he is an unbeliever. And if he was "ours" and preached our religion, but now preaches something else, then he is an apostate. At that point it no longer matters whether the Ephesian Gentile whom Paul supposedly brought into the courtyard where he was not allowed to be actually existed. If he did not exist, he had to be invented, and he was invented. Thus begins the final stage of Paul's ministry and earthly path: a collision with religion, with the very force he considered the chief threat to the Church's spiritual formation.