Main news for 8 October 2025

In the Book of Acts there are special passages that, as it were, sum up everything said before, and at the end of the second chapter of the book we see exactly such a passage. It would seem that, considering how much happened during the time described in the first chapters of the book, this summary should have concerned some fundamentally important things - for example, the Ascension or Pentecost, since in the end those very events determined the existence of the Church itself.

But the author of the book speaks about something else: he simply tells about the life of the Church at that time, about the process of its existence, its dwelling in the world - and its dwelling in the Kingdom. It is no accident that the passage speaks of the breaking of bread, prayer, and fellowship with the apostles. This was the life of the Kingdom in the early Christian Church, and so it remains today. Nothing new was invented, and nothing new could have been invented, because the Savior Himself defined this life during the Last Supper.

But community life was more tightly knit than ours is today. Of course, the text hardly speaks of some common life like that characteristic of medieval monasteries, which often resembled large dormitories. Such forms of shared life were not very characteristic of Jewish life.

But there was something else: a community fund, replenished by generous donations from wealthy brothers, a community fund from which everyone in need could receive help. Of course, the Synagogue in every age was also marked by charity. But here, it seems, there is something more than charity as such - here there is poverty in the sense in which the prophets spoke of it, poverty as a spiritual state and not as a material condition. The recognition of the simple fact that everything belonging to you is yours only conditionally, until it becomes more needed by one of your brothers. The understanding that unconditional ownership on earth does not exist - here there is only the right of use, determined by concrete circumstances, circumstances that require us to consider nothing our own and to use everything that is needed. And this is the projection of the life of the Kingdom into society, a life where there is nothing of one's own; and if there is, then it is a lost life. Whoever wants to keep his life for himself loses it, as the Savior Himself says, but whoever gives it to Christ, making it part of the Kingdom, receives it back in a fullness unimaginable in an untransformed world.

The community life of the first Christians was a kind of practice in the life of the Kingdom. After all, it is better to get used to the new life as early as possible, so that later, when the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness, one may enter it as naturally as possible for a fallen person.

The Church is young and full of strength, strength breathed into it by the Spirit of the Lord. Those being saved are added by the thousands, many signs are performed, all the believers have received the gift of the Holy Spirit and remain in the fear of God; their life is a model of the full life of a Christian (see Acts 2:42). Not life at all, but a dream... But a dream is still something mostly unattainable, something invented to ease the conscience. People say: this is an ideal incompatible with reality. But what the first Christians live by is precisely the real reality, more real than what we live in now.

And in His conversation with Nicodemus, the Lord speaks exactly about this new being, about the Kingdom of God that is within them and among them (see Luke 17:21, Matt. 18:20). Through repentance, through baptism by water and the Spirit, through birth from above, we can enter, or more precisely, we give Christ the opportunity to bring us into this other life (see John 3:13). We may not yet have noticed it ourselves, but He has already done everything. What remains for us is only to believe this as we believe nothing else, to believe so that we gradually become aware of what has happened to us...

Today's reading tells us about that triumph of the Kingdom which Jesus promised His disciples. And this triumph proved to be nothing other than the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, described by the evangelist in such detail (vv. 1-4). At first glance, this description contains all the traditional elements characteristic of the Old Testament prophetic tradition: in ancient times the action of the Spirit of God at times manifested itself as the blowing of wind (2 Sam. 5:22-24), and the presence of God, usually called "glory" in the Bible, often resembled fire or light (Exod. 40:34-38). But now this presence touches not only those who were in the room. It spreads also to those who listened to the apostles in the streets of Jerusalem. And they perceive the apostles' preaching as though the apostles were speaking in the native languages of the pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem for the feast from many different countries (vv. 5-13).

The point, of course, is not that the apostles suddenly acquired some supernatural ability with foreign languages. Even if this had been so, in the streets of Jerusalem during the feast of Shavuot (Pentecost) so many nations and languages were represented that the apostles would not have been able to preach to everyone at once, even if each of them had actually begun speaking some foreign language: in the list given by the evangelist, which is plainly incomplete, there are clearly more than twelve. The point, it appears, is that those who listened to the apostles also found themselves in the Kingdom, where there are no language barriers. Here meanings are perceived not through the word but directly, from heart to heart, while their embodiment takes place already in the listener's soul, which naturally expresses what has been received in the words of its native language. Thus the Savior's words about the Kingdom and the Spirit, spoken to the apostles during the Ascension, were fulfilled (Acts 1:8).

But Pentecost was only the beginning of the history of the Kingdom entering the world, and now the apostles understood this perfectly. Thus Peter, on the one hand, speaks of the end of time, which has already come (vv. 14-21), and on the other hand, of the new era that began after the Savior's resurrection (vv. 25-36). The main meaning of his preaching is that it is still not too late to turn and accept the crucified and risen Messiah; although the last day has already arrived, the gates of the Kingdom are still by no means closed. On the contrary, they are thrown wide open for everyone who is ready to enter (vv. 37-40).

Such witness was extremely unusual: according to traditional ideas, only judgment was associated with the end of time, and there was no talk of conversion; it was thought too late to repent on the day of judgment. But now it turned out that the history of salvation was, in essence, only just beginning, and that everyone had a chance for it, even those who were directly or indirectly involved in the death the Savior had to die on the cross (vv. 36-38). Thus earthly history ended and the history of the Kingdom entering the world began.