The image of the two ways of which the apostle speaks, the way of salvation and the way of destruction, has roots that go deep into the Yahwist and then Jewish tradition. The way of righteousness, both in the Torah and in other biblical books, is regarded as the way of salvation, and the way of sin as the way of ruin. And yet the picture turns out not to be so simple.

Already in the pre-Christian and even pre-biblical period, many wondered why the righteous person suffers from the evil in which the world lies, and why his righteousness is not rewarded according to its merits. This theme sounds especially sharply in the biblical books, which is not surprising: the God of the Bible is a good God, who gave His people the Torah and calls them to the path of righteousness. Why then does He so often leave His people at the mercy of the evil with which the world is full?

The Savior's death on the Cross is the answer to this question. Of course, for fallen man with the best intentions it would be simpler to imagine an ideal world where righteousness would be immediately rewarded and evil just as immediately punished. But in such a world no one would have any chance of salvation, for there are no sinless people on earth. Jesus could have entered the world as a triumphant victor, but then He would have had to remain alone in the Kingdom. And His Father's will was not for this. Such a triumph of the Kingdom would not have left the slightest chance to any human being. The will of the Father, expressed through one of the prophets several centuries before Christ's coming into the world, is that the sinner should not die, but turn and remain alive.

That is precisely why the Kingdom enters the world as if unnoticed, not imposing itself on anyone by force and not hanging over anyone as a threat of immediate punishment for the slightest sin. That is why all attempts to create on earth a kingdom of universal justice, whether on a religious or anti-religious basis, have always ended in grand bloodshed having nothing to do with any justice. And Paul points to the way of the Kingdom as the only way on which the triumph of righteousness is possible. A triumph leading not to destruction, but to salvation.

The apostle Paul starts from an anthropomorphic view of God that was common in antiquity and is still common now. It cannot be said that nothing worthwhile can be found along this path: some sound judgments are still possible here. Thus, starting from our own small strength, we think of God's omnipotence; comparing Him with our reason, we imagine His wisdom and omniscience. Comparing Him with our limitations helps us touch the truth of His boundlessness and transcendence.

But this way of thinking about God conceals a serious danger: we think that God is like us and imagine Him as a human being, only a very "big" one. Instinctively it seems to us that where a weak little human can accomplish nothing, God will accomplish everything. Where we suffer and die, God will come out victorious. That is indeed what happens, but not at all as we imagine.

By ordinary logic, it would have been natural for Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane to "mobilize" the very twelve legions of angels He spoke about to Peter, and for the angels to scatter the guards and expose the chief priests. But something completely different happens, something absurd, in the words of the apostle Paul ("foolishness" in the Synodal and Slavonic translations is moria in the Greek text, meaning "folly, absurdity, madness"). Either the power of God does not consist in what we think it does, or His victory is not won by power at all, as the prophet Zechariah says. And the Lord accepts death on the Cross.

The Greeks and the Jews, the apostle Paul's listeners, turned away from him as soon as they heard that God suffered on the Cross. God cannot suffer - this was the common conviction of the entire ancient world, the source of all theological reasoning about the impassibility of the deity. From this point of view, the absurdity of the Gospel events produced a whole series of conflicts and heresies in the New Testament era: Christians could not manage to join the Greek-Jewish certainty about God's impassibility with faith in the crucified Jesus. Not years, as one might expect, but centuries upon centuries were spent on this... Because behind the word of the Cross stands the greatest mystery of God's love, the incomprehensible foundation of biblical Revelation.

"We venerate Your Cross, O Christ..." What do these words mean for us? Boundless compassion for the innocent, beaten, naked righteous one hanging on this wood. Love for Him, limitless gratitude. And also the understanding of how infinitely lighter our own cross is. All the problems that seem impossible to carry are nothing compared with the measure of suffering He took upon Himself for our sake. "You, who so loved Your world..."

And there are other words: "Then He says to the disciple, 'Behold your mother.'" On these words the Church is built, the strongest of strongholds. We have all been made sons and daughters, and therefore we can never be orphans. Orphanhood is a word from some other life. We often enter prayerfully into the Passion of Christ, but it is much harder to enter into the passion of Mary. His inconceivable physical pain and her inconceivable pain of soul. The whole world is embraced by this pain.