NOTES for Hag 1:1-15

Through the prophet Haggai, God tells the Israelites who returned from the Babylonian exile and are trying to establish a new life in the resettled land that they are beginning in the wrong place. It appears that the people have succumbed to a perfectly understandable temptation: first to provide homes for themselves and only afterward for God; first to care for the body and only afterward for the soul. Do you remember the not-so-distant “philosophical” slogan, “Being determines consciousness”? Marxism now seems to have been discarded, but “creeping” materialism, the obsession with possessions, and consumerism remain strong. “The new generation chooses Pepsi!” Two and a half thousand years ago, God already explained what this leads to (v. 6) and proposed the right order of action (vv. 7-8), flowing from the right order of priorities: spirit is above flesh!

We sow much but cannot gather what we have sown, because we do not remember where or what we sowed. For we did not sow wholeheartedly. We can neither eat our fill nor drink our fill, because whatever we do, we never do it with our whole being. When we eat and drink, we think about the next task; when we do something, we think about wanting to eat and how good it would be to prepare dinner. We lack wholeness. God created us whole and united, but we tear ourselves into pieces because our life has no center, no purpose. That is why our heart and our path are separated from each other. The heart speaks truly and senses the right path, but we take another path. If we make God the center of our life not only in our heart but in our living, if we labor, rise above ourselves, and make our soul the Temple of the Lord, where God will be at home, the Lord will come into it, take pleasure in it, and be glorified in it.

We could understand the words of the prophet on the uselessness of all the attempts, by expressing oneself in modern language, to increase the level of the well-being of the nation completely literally, in this concrete historic context, in which they were said. In this period Judah really experienced a spiritual decline accompanied, as it happens usually, by the growth in the society of this mercantilism and the thirst of the profit, which characterize not the declarative, but practical materialism. But such a practical materialism almost always leads to the growth of individualism, to the destruction of this social solidarity, without which we can forget about public prosperity.

But it is only an external level purely historical semantic, which we could moreover consider typical and character not only for the times of Haggai. There is also in the words of the prophet another deeper semantic layer echoing the words of the Savior concerning the Kingdom, for which it is necessary to look first of all. Of course before the coming of Christ it was still remaining a few centuries, but indeed, even before His coming the system of priorities of the normal spiritual life was the same as in the time of the earthly ministry of the Savior: at first the relationship with God and the neighbor, according to the Torah, the observation of the commandments given by God, and only after all the rest. When the priorities changed their places, when "the rest" comes to the fore, the result turned out corresponding. And the problem here is not in the fact that God, punishing those who do not want a normal healthy spiritual life, sends failures to their works, but in the fact that a man, not living such a life, is somehow or other inevitably in prey of the disasters, if not natural, then social, and we do not yet know, which of the two would be the worse for him. Jesus (of course, much more later) will indicate the antinomy of the intention of God and the Kingdom with the words about every hair counted on the head of the believers, which will not just fall like that from their heads, accidentally.

And on the other hand, in answer to the question on the destruction of the righteous killed on the decree of Herod, He will remind of those, on whom collapsed one of the fortress towers of Jerusalem: just like that, not at all because they deserved it. And He adds: if you do not consider your ways, then you will all die. Indeed: the fallen world is inequitable, it is full of fates, and there is no requital for sin and no rewards for the righteousness here. Only solid, deep and deliberated relationships with God can give stability either for a separate person, or to the whole people in such a world. They still do not of course guarantee in themselves the external prosperity, but, at least, they free from fates. Well then in life appears the sense, which makes this life complete.