NOTES for Mat 10:24-42

At first the words that a disciple cannot become greater than his teacher can appear to limit his possibilities. But if we take into account that to become like the teacher is already no small thing, and that not everyone is able to become equal to him, then here we can see a call to growth. If the matter is discipleship to Christ, then the call to become like the Teacher reveals to us His special attitude toward those who follow Him. For the matter concerns the high level to which Christ intends to raise fallen humanity - He wants to deify us.

And even in the stern words of warning that Christ will deny the one who denies Him, we can see how highly He has placed the human person. For relationships are implied here that almost make one think of equality...

Of course, it would be enormous insolence on such a basis to forget reverence before His majesty and to introduce familiarity into relations with Him. He did not become one of human beings so that we would bring into spiritual life what is "human, all too human," that is, in the words of one author, "always something animal." But what draws us near to God is a gift that imposes responsibility.

Many times, when God addresses people, He begins with the words "Do not be afraid!" And now Jesus encourages His disciples in the same way. They are to preach "from the housetops" and bear witness to their Teacher. Is it frightening? It is! But fear departs when love comes, because "there is no fear in love" (1 Jn 4:18). Love the Father, who cares for you so deeply, and everything will become possible.

People are characterized by fear of the unknown, the hidden. One can try to prepare in advance for something known; in any case, it is clear what to expect from it. Hidden danger is always sudden and unpredictable; it is impossible to "lay down straw" and somehow soften undesirable consequences. And this is natural. Only this naturalness does not mean rightness before God; it comes from human nature distorted by the fall, from the habit of living in distrust and, consequently, in fear. Fear is the basic state of the fallen human soul, and a person fears not only real dangers but imaginary ones as well. At the same time imaginary dangers are always more frightening, because they are inevitably "hidden," since only realities can be known.

It is no accident that God, in practically every contact with people, says: "Do not be afraid." He calls us to trust, because there is no fear in trust. After all, the most incomprehensible One for a person is God Himself. If anyone is to be feared, then only Him, not some of His creatures and their "secret conspiracies." But in Christ God reveals Himself as true love; therefore even He should not be feared, but loved, and with reverence and trembling one should seek the meeting.

"...Even the hairs of your head are all numbered..." What does this mean? No one dies apart from the Father's will, but does this mean that those who die die by His will? This is a very difficult question, and the abyss of unbelief lies very close here. But it can be avoided if we trust our heart and the Word of God.

Priest Georgy Chistyakov writes in his work "Martyrdom as a Phenomenon":

"To endure September 11, the almost daily explosions in Israel, and other horrors. Or does He behave the way a strict teacher sometimes does? No, that too is impossible! If God is merciless, then Job's wife is indeed right when she advises him to curse God and die. How can one not remember Voltaire here? 'How could God create this terrible cesspool of misfortunes and crimes? It is supposed,' says Voltaire, 'that God is powerful, just, and good, while we see madness, injustice, and malice on every side. Therefore people prefer denying God to cursing Him.' At the same time Voltaire himself believed in God, although he said that he preferred to believe in a God who was not almighty and was limited in His possibilities, but good. [...]

Yet despite everything, and above all despite what is obvious, we somehow feel God's presence in the world. [...] We feel this precisely, not knowing it, and understand not with the mind but with the heart, that the Lord shares with us every misfortune of ours in all its fullness. He is with us where things are bad. And this is the main thing. Descending with us as if into hell, into the depths of our misery and despair, He also leads us out of those depths, giving us wisdom and patience. As this is depicted on the Paschal icon 'The Savior's Descent into Hades'..."

How should we understand Jesus' words about household members who become enemies? One can, of course, see in them a reference to a fairly ordinary family conflict, when people living under one roof differ so much in views and worldview that they become ideological enemies. But there would be nothing special or unusual in that; it has happened in every age and for many different reasons. Meanwhile, Jesus' words clearly receive their meaning only in the context of everything He said about the Kingdom. Here the matter is no longer a question of worldview or ideological disagreements, but of something far more serious.

What, in fact, can one expect if one tries to combine under one roof life according to the laws of the Kingdom and life according to the laws of this world? Clearly, nothing except conflict, and a conflict almost impossible to resolve. When the matter concerns ideological or worldview disagreements, it is still possible to look for some compromises, mutual concessions, and, in the end, mutual acceptance. But the Kingdom and the world that lies in evil are in no way compatible, and here no other ties or relationships will save the situation, not even ties of blood.

Moreover, blood ties can turn out in this case to be the main problem, since they are perhaps the strongest natural tie possible in human relationships. But their nature remains part of the untransformed world; in its untransformed form it by no means brings the people bound by them closer to the Kingdom, but instead only leads them away from it.

Paradoxically, open conflict and even a break in this case can be more spiritually useful than a situation of ambiguous peace, full of things left unsaid and fraught with daily low-grade conflicts. Only when everyone living under one roof has made the Kingdom their chief goal can the situation change radically and family ties become part of the relationships of the Kingdom. But these ties will no longer be based on blood kinship, but on spiritual kinship.

In the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew that we read today, the Lord says two things that are important for our understanding of holiness. First, a disciple of Christ is someone for whom the Lord Himself and the confession of Him matter more than anything else in life; someone ready to lose everything, even his own soul—that is, his life—for Christ. Neither deeds nor spiritual or other achievements, nothing makes a person Christ's disciple except the concentration of his entire life around one center, the “one thing needful”—Christ.

No less important are the final verses of chapter 10: the Lord speaks of how the holiness of His disciples is expressed. It is the ability to receive other people and do good to them. The scale of the good deed is entirely unimportant—even if you can do nothing but give a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty, you will not lose your reward. The holiness of Christ's disciples is expressed precisely in their attitude toward people; everything else is beside the point.

Of course, in today's Gospel reading, the words of Christ that draw the most attention are those saying that whoever loves his household more than God is not worthy of God. First, they concern everyone without exception, and second, one immediately wants to test oneself by them. Besides, these words often provoke a fairly decisive protest in us, because we are used to treating home as a fortress and considering close relatives the only safe and reliable circle. And Christ's words deprive us of this illusory security and call us to be open to the world. This is difficult, and therefore the human being does not like it.

But it is important to consider the Lord's words about relatives in the context of the whole Gospel passage, more precisely, of the whole second half of chapter 10. The Lord calls the disciples to confess their faith before people without fear. Then He says that in relationships characteristic of this world in its fallen state, the disciples' faith will inevitably meet resistance. This concerns relationships not only with authorities, but with people in general. This very resistance largely explains why the path of following Christ is the way of the cross. And this word of Christ ends with a call to the disciples to build their relationships with people not by the standards of this world, but to receive one another for God's sake.

"And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water..." Only a cup of cold water... These are very important words. Goodness has no measure. "For God gives the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34). It is bitter for us to see how immeasurably smaller the good we do is than the burning of our heart, than our thirst to embrace the whole world with our love and make everyone happy. If we suffer too much over this, then our suffering is supplied by pride, which has pushed some people into terrible crimes in similar situations. And here before us there is only a cup of cold water...

To give, or more precisely to give a thirsty person water to drink each time, may be no less precious to God than all the apologetic theological treatises written over the past 2,000 years taken together. For goodness has no measure. Only evil has a measure.

It obviously results from these words that we should not love any Man more than God. Does it mean that we should love God more that Men? I don’t think so! I think these words are saying we should stop perceiving love as something we can talk in terms of “more-less”. Who do I really love more: my father, my mother or my daughter? Foolish question, because I love each of them differently. Here is one question again, who does he Heavenly Father love more: His only-begotten Son or me? His Son? Then why He sends Him to suffer and die for my salvation.

Whilst we use the logic “more-less”, we apprehend love as emotion, as feeling, that can really be stronger or weaker. But Love isn’t emotion; it is interpersonal relation, thus all these relations will be different and incomparable between themselves, just as “Soft” and “green” are incomparable. We draw near to the way God loves when we renounce from this logic of “more-less”, we have His method of love in the basis of our own love to any one. Love to God and love to the neighbor turn out then to be two sides of one and the same medal.

Can human life be considered an absolute value? This question follows from the phrase we have read, if we take into account that on Jesus' lips the word "soul" means not some immaterial component of our personality, but rather bodily life.

How often we think that life in itself is the greatest good, and death an irreparable and terrible loss. Fearing death, we are ready to do anything to preserve our life. And once again Jesus overturns all our ideas: the only life that has value is life filled with love and self-giving, and such a life, even if interrupted by death, does not cease.

Jesus' words are very difficult for us. We would like things to be simpler... Is everything really so stark? Are His ways of ordering the world truly incompatible with ours, and does following Him necessarily require us to give up what seems right to us? On the way to unity, must we really pass through division; on the way to love, through hostility; on the way to glory, through the cross; on the way to true life, through death?

Christ brings not peace, but a sword into human society. For centuries many have tried to justify their own militancy with these words. True, in doing so, such would-be warriors did not want to notice that the word sword here is not a synonym for the word war. After all, Christ did not say, "I have brought not peace, but war." Let us not forget that a sword, or in the Slavonic translation a knife, is not only a weapon of killing but also a cutting tool. With this sword, ties between close people are cut when on the most important spiritual questions they can neither find agreement nor attain religious tolerance. But the choice that cuts old ties is often unavoidable when the old ties pull a person not simply toward old acquaintances and family relationships, but toward former sins.

It does not follow from this that Christians should start hostility. No, we are called to bring love into the world around us. But the reality is that it is not always easy for others to understand those to whom faith has opened another life. Therefore the break often happens without being initiated by Christians.

Many who read the Gospel find it hard to receive the words that whoever loves his relatives more than Christ is not worthy of him. Here one almost imagines despotism, the denial of all natural human ties... Thankfully, here we are dealing with that paradoxical quality of the Gospel which reveals to us the depth of Christ's love for us. For our "natural" love for those dear to us is, let us admit it, imperfect. But by placing Christ at the center of our heart, we can receive from him the resources for a love toward our relatives so strong that we could never give it to them by putting them first.

Sometimes the words of Jesus seem too harsh. What, in fact, does He mean when He says that one cannot love father or mother more than Him? And then comes the explanation: whoever wants to save his life (“soul”) will lose it, but whoever gives it up for Christ’s sake will save it.

At first glance it may seem that this is about some life after death, about the paradise that awaits martyrs. But in fact here too the point is the Kingdom. The Kingdom that is not somewhere “in heaven” and not later, but here and now. And not some other life that awaits the faithful in some other dimension, but that very life to which every Christian can and must, if he truly is a Christian, be joined already here and now.

But in order for participation in the life of the Kingdom to become possible, it is necessary to renounce one’s own life. Not because it is life, but because it is one’s own. And one’s own not in the sense of unique and unrepeatable, given by God to me and to no one else, so that no one but me can answer for it before God, but in the sense of belonging only to me alone: the life into which I will let no one and which I will share with no one, fearing to lose even a small portion of my so precious life. Such a desire to hold on to one’s own life, separate from the rest of God’s world and from the Kingdom, in the end inevitably turns into catastrophe: all attempts to preserve the little that remains to us in the fallen world from the fullness of the life once given us by God end with our losing even that little. Only by renouncing such spiritual and, in the language of modern philosophers, existential self-isolation can we receive the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the Savior has prepared for us.

But then one will have to give up the small for the sake of the infinite, limitation for the sake of fullness. And not only with regard to one’s own life, but also with regard to relationships with people, even the closest. For relationships with them too must cease to be part of our small, isolated little world in order to become part of the Kingdom. Then there will no longer be those irrevocable losses to which this little world condemns us. For the life of the Kingdom is, according to the Savior’s word, “life in abundance.” And it is given to everyone who enters the Kingdom. The one who enters brings into it all the relationships that bind him to those close to him. Relationships that also become part of the Kingdom.

In these days, during the fast dedicated to the memory of the holy apostles, it is entirely natural to read in small portions chapter 10 of the Gospel of Matthew, where the Lord sends the disciples out to preach and gives them instructions. But both this fast itself and the words Christ speaks to the disciples are important for all Christians, because what was said to the apostles in one degree or another necessarily applies to all members of the Church.

In the passage we read today, the Lord calls His disciples to become like the Teacher, saying that this is enough, sufficient for them. But this also applies to all of us, the disciples of His disciples. And Christ tells the disciples that the hostility of the fallen world is a kind of touchstone: if the disciples follow the Teacher, then they too will meet this resistance. But as one contemporary saint said, if you feel resistance, it means you are moving forward.

But a human being was created to be together with other people. Therefore our heart finds it burdensome to experience this resistance, and therefore we so easily join crowds, even for some act of meanness, just to feel like fish in a school, moving together with everyone else. And the world's resistance awakens in us doubts about the correctness of the path we have chosen. Therefore Christ tells the disciples that the Truth revealed to them will in the end become manifest, and that they should fear only betraying it. It is important for us to hear this, because the world's resistance to Christ's disciples does not become weaker, though it changes forms.

Christ's words, foretelling imminent persecutions and encouraging believers, may at first glance call to mind the way adherents are "pumped up" in totalitarian sects: "We alone are right, and everyone else is foolish. Therefore they will beat us, but we will stand firm because we are right, and for this we will receive a reward. And we cannot be wrong, because that can never happen." Or something in the same spirit...

There is, however, one essential difference between what Jesus says and what people may say. It lies precisely in who is speaking, because only Christ's words are backed by genuine truth. Only God Himself can truly promise anything, because only His promises are unshakable.

Although our reward is invisible, our patience is all the more precious, for "if someone sees, why does he still hope?" (Rom 8:24). And if Christ says that nothing will happen to us apart from the will of our Father, then we can be sure it is so. For everyone understands, and many of us know from our own experience, that God truly cares for us: even if we are walking down the street and no brick falls on us, there is every reason to see in that a gift from God...

Today the Lord speaks to His disciples about coming disasters and trials. Betrayal, rejection, exile, and martyrdom await them. What, then, does He call them, and us, to do in this difficult hour? In such situations the world needs the intervention of God Himself, and Jesus calls His disciples to become instruments of this intervention. Let kings and rulers hear the word of salvation through them; let the suffering receive comfort and encouragement through them. They themselves will need nothing, for the heavenly Father Himself will care for them. They need only learn to trust Him. Then their bond with Heaven will become stronger than all earthly bonds, and God will be a greater reality for them than family, property, even life itself.

In the face of trials, the Lord calls us to surrender ourselves entirely to His will and to become His healing presence on earth.