NOTES for Luk 6:17-36

Like several other episodes of the Savior's earthly ministry, Luke describes the Sermon on the Mount somewhat differently than Matthew does. For Luke, the basis for presenting what Jesus said during this sermon becomes the contrast between two ways: the way of the rich, which the evangelist identifies with the way of the Gentiles, and the way of the poor, which turns out to be the way into the Kingdom.

The idea of two ways is not new in itself; it is well known from Old Testament texts, and for Luke it becomes the very prism through which he perceives the Savior's words. In mentioning the poor, Jesus undoubtedly meant not simply those without possessions, but those who understood poverty as a spiritual state. The Old Testament prophets had already spoken about such poor people. And the rich differ from them not by a property marker, but by a spiritual one: if the poor find their consolation only in the Kingdom (vv. 20-23), then the rich receive what is theirs in this world, having no need of the Kingdom (vv. 24-26).

But in order to enter the Kingdom, one must remain faithful to it to the end. Therefore those who thirst for the Kingdom cannot live by the laws of this world, which has not yet been transformed, even though the laws of the Kingdom do not yet operate in it. It is no accident that Luke singles out in Jesus' sermon the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 31), making it the compositional center of that part of his account in which he presents Jesus' instruction to those who want to live according to the laws of the Kingdom (vv. 27-36).

At first glance, this call resembles the universally known "golden rule," but there is one difference in the Savior's formulation that is not immediately obvious: if in its traditional version the "golden rule" calls us to treat people the same way they treat us, Jesus advises us to treat people as we would want them to treat us. In other words, if we are truly seeking the Kingdom, then in our relationships with people, according to the Savior's word, we must in a certain sense "work ahead," giving them our good attitude in advance and not waiting for them first to show themselves in relation to us.

According to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, this is of course completely irrational behavior: everyone knows that fallen man is very little capable either of good works or of a good attitude toward neighbors. But, on the other hand, any other approach to the people around us does not presuppose openness, and without openness it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. The Kingdom is arranged in such a way that one cannot enjoy it alone. One cannot acquire it by fencing oneself off from everyone. The Kingdom can be acquired only if one becomes part of it oneself, and one can become part of it only when what we have received we pass on to others, to those who, like us, seek the fullness of life in this Kingdom. And then we become servants of the Kingdom - those whom Jesus chooses so that through them the whole world created by God may become the Kingdom.

"...And He spent the night in prayer to God..." From these words, which let us touch our Lord's experience a little, there came a huge and remarkable tradition of night services. Strictly speaking, an "all-night vigil" means staying awake and praying all night. It is a pity that now it has been reduced to a service from 6 to 8 in the evening... But we always have the opportunity to stay awake at home, and this is an amazing experience. It is very hard to explain what it is to someone who has never lived through it.

The main thing night gives is silence and solitude; only in this silence can the voice of God be discerned. The whole world is plunged into peace, and space and time lose their meaning. Have you noticed how differently time flows at night? This, of course, is also ascetic discipline, because at times, especially after a hard day, it is difficult not to fall asleep, just as the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

One can endlessly list reasons for the advantage of night for prayer. The main thing, it seems, is the desire never to part from God, even for a few hours of nightly insensibility.

In the sermon "on a level place," as this passage from the Gospel according to Luke is traditionally called, the Lord speaks to His listeners about what true life and true righteousness are, about the meaning and moral foundations of life. And precisely in connection with these words of Christ, the evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him, because power went out from Him. This is a very important remark, for we need to remember that the truth of God possesses real power, and precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious. Understanding and accepting His words, and still more fulfilling them, is very difficult. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness: none of this follows at all from the experience of human life. But we have been given the possibility of feeling and experiencing in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because this is not simply the invention of an idle mind, but the word of God addressed to us.

That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another turn out to be the place where, at times quite unexpectedly for ourselves, we meet the Living God.

Over two thousand years of Christian history, more has perhaps been said and written about the Beatitudes than about any other Gospel text. Most often, commentators have tried to discover in them some new word, whether in the moral, theological, or spiritual-ascetic sphere.

But a natural question arises: how necessary was it for Jesus to begin His conversation with the people listening to Him with ethics, or asceticism, or theology? He was addressing believers, many of whom were surely very religious. There was little point in speaking to them about moral norms: the commandments of the Decalogue were already well known to them. And theological or ascetic subtleties were hardly suitable for this rather mixed and not very educated audience.

Besides, the people listening to Jesus were expecting an answer to a completely different question. At that time messianic expectations were very strong among the Jewish people. Quite a few claimants to messiahship had already appeared, and although all of them, unsurprisingly, had failed, the expectation did not become any less intense. The people looked with hope at anyone in whom there was even a hint of the Messiah.

It is no wonder that Jesus' listeners looked at Him Himself with such hope. And He did not want to deceive their expectations. But if He had declared His messiahship openly, that would almost certainly have happened. In rabbinic circles and in popular consciousness alike, the person of the Messiah was associated with something militant and heroic. According to these ideas, the Messiah had to be a great earthly king who would restore Israel's independence and make it a strong state governed according to the laws of the Torah. Jesus, of course, could promise the people nothing of the kind. So He simply reminds His listeners of what the messianists of earlier ages had awaited, beginning from the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem.

It was then, apparently, that the first messianic movement arose, whose participants came to be called "the poor." They accepted this name, which later became attached to those who lived a righteous life and awaited the coming of the Messiah. It is of the blessedness of these messianists, these poor ones, that Jesus speaks. He truly bears witness to His messiahship and to the nearness of the Kingdom, which is already entering the world. But it enters not to the sound of battle trumpets, but quietly, in that silence in which a spiritually sensitive heart hears God. It is a Kingdom whose blessedness is understood only by the poor.

The words of the Sermon on the Mount always shake us with their radicalness. Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich; rejoice, you who weep; weep, you who laugh... Christ calls us to a radical understanding of life, in which what is habitually white for us may turn out to be black. From the point of view of an ordinary person, these norms were invented for madmen, because they contradict the logic of life and the commonly accepted idea of a successful life.

But Jesus offers His disciples a look at their life from eternity, from that Kingdom whose unconditional value and beauty He tried to convey to them in many parables. And from this divine point of view our usual problems may appear completely different: insignificant, or, on the contrary, sources of great joy.

Jesus speaks these words immediately after many people came to Him in order to touch Him and be healed. Often we come to God bringing our burdens and wanting to be freed from them, but the Lord calls us to look at them in the light of His eternity, in which reproach, thirst, and poverty of spirit are the greatest blessings.

Jesus strikes at what is most precious. "Woe to you when all people speak well of you!" He says. And this is the greatest desire of many of us... We act with an eye to others. We can allow ourselves a small, or large, meanness - but only if no one sees it. Yet we are afraid to take a step against common opinion. Why? Because we want all people to speak well of us. This is what the Lord warns us against. In such a situation the main thing disappears: objective truth, honesty. If we are honest, by definition we cannot please everyone. But if we adapt a little here, there, everywhere... then we can indeed manage to have everyone speak well of us. And then - woe to us. Because then we are not in the Truth.

The “Beatitudes” in the Gospel of Luke sound somewhat different from those in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 5:3-12). A social appeal is clearly audible in them. The Kingdom of God, of course, is not of this world, but it takes root in this world. All our “spirituality” is worthless if we are prepared to tolerate the suffering of other people while repeating, “The Lord endured and told us to endure.” Us—yes; but a person can call only himself to suffering (as to humility and repentance). And not only to suffering, but also to compassion. Only such spirituality—the spirituality of grace, mercy, and compassion—is genuine; this is precisely the kind of spirit God promises to give us.

It is possible to imagine what fear and bewilderment Jesus' words about the coming Kingdom produced in His listeners. There everything will be unlike human ways. After all, wealth, prosperity, happiness, and a person's good reputation were all signs of God's blessing; all of this meant that God was pleased with him and would reward him even more when the appointed time of the Kingdom's fulfillment came.

But in Jesus' preaching, the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those cast out of society are at the center of God's love, while the rich and respectable will experience His judgment. In this paradox, the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, between "good" and "bad" people, become confused and erased: none of them can be compared with the infinitely merciful God. Therefore "to us who listen" there remains only to imitate this mercy, making no distinction between the righteous and sinners; our judgment will not stand in any case before the paradoxical judgment of Christ's Kingdom.

"Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Luke. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Matthew (Matt 5:6). These two texts have completely different meanings, despite the fact that, by all appearances, they originate from one source. And this produces bewilderment and unease in the rational consciousness. But let us see whether it is truly so terrible.

We all remember well the prayer of the second antiphon, taken from Psalm 145: "His hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps truth forever, who executes judgment for the wronged, who gives food to the hungry." But in fact there, in Psalm 145, there is a more concrete word than "food"; the word there is bread, panem, a circumstance also reflected in the Synodal translation. So it is bread that the Lord gives to the hungry.

The word "bread" occurs a huge number of times in the Bible and is understood in most cases in the most ordinary sense. Therefore the translation "food" given by the Church Slavonic Bible may not change anything essential. But one can look at it from another side as well. "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread..." - supersubstantial, such would be the translation exactly corresponding to the Latin "supersubstantialem": super means above, substantia means essence (the above-mentioned circumstance of the lost letter is noted, for example, in the book by the well-known Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, "Axioms of Religious Life"). Thus the bread of Psalm 145, which the Lord gives to the hungry, can be understood in the light of the New Testament as supersubstantial bread. And what is supersubstantial bread if not righteousness?

Christ raised Old Testament morality to an unreachable height. It is one thing to call on God concerning one's enemies: "Let death come upon them, and let them go down alive into hell," and another thing to love them. Perhaps this is how it should be: moral laws should be impossible to fulfill; we should strive toward them. All the greater is the tension of this striving. Remember Kant's famous statement that there are two things that fill him with awe: "the starry sky above us and the moral law within us." And the stars draw a person into the sky with unimaginable force, but they also serve as guides on earth. Such is the New Law of Christ. On the one hand, we understand how much we still have to grow in order to grow into its full measure; on the other hand, it is a guide in the world of relationships with people and with God.

There is, however, one more danger here: turning this unattainability, say the unattainability of the commandment to love enemies, into a cult. In this connection one can recall such an ambiguous and still controversial phenomenon as Tolstoyanism. You know, there is an amazing property in the word of God. It is so complex and multidimensional that it attains truth only in its full wholeness.

Being a kind person, it is easy to lend without expecting anything in return, especially if one's material situation is more or less stable. Even if you understand that you are depriving yourself of something, on the contrary, because of this you somehow grow in your own eyes. But here is the trap. In return you expect personal growth, first; you expect God's favor, second; you expect the favor of those people to whom you have shown mercy, or, if you do it anonymously, of those people through whom you do it, third. And getting rid of these three things is not at all simple; sometimes it even appears impossible.

Let us try to analyze them. It would appear that the favor of people and of God is a sign of the increase of love between us, and therefore also lies in the line of God's commandments and should not be a source of shame; but in reality, although this is very hard to understand, this is not so, because love is in principle an act between two absolutely equal people. The feeling of the person who has become the object of your charity, that he is now obligated to you and has nothing with which to repay you, can destroy the relationship between you, although outwardly it will look like love. And only for this reason, only in order not to destroy love, one should try with all one's strength to make it so that the person you benefit, even if he is very close to you, does not know that it was you, so as not to ruin that equality of love that exists between you.

As for personal growth... One can, while doing a mercy, immediately do something that cancels out all the good; one can do something such that no good deeds will count anymore. We, our fate in eternity, remain in question until the moment of our death, and what of it if we have grown a little? This may be one step forward after which there will be two steps back, and we ourselves will not even notice how. So all of this is trifles: growth, falling... One cannot keep a finger on the pulse all the time; one cannot always keep a ruler in one hand in order to mark daily how much I have grown, because one cannot keep one's hands occupied; they are needed for the work. As experimental physicists joke, every reasonable operation requires three hands. At least two, but certainly not one.

The commandments that the Lord Jesus gives His disciples look impossible and excessive at first glance. Impossible because no human being is able to act as the Lord commands. Excessive because our measure of justice is narrow and limited, and is satisfied with far less than mercy toward enemies. Of course, compared with the boasting of Lamech, who in deep antiquity counted it to his credit that he killed for a single scratch inflicted on him, the idea of adequate repayment that has soaked into our psychology, good for good and evil for evil ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), can be considered great progress. But the Lord looks not from the viewpoint of the depth of moral fallenness from which we need to climb out, but from the viewpoint of the height to which we need to ascend. He concludes His word about our attitude toward others with a call for us to be merciful, as the Father is merciful. Indeed, it is God who loves us, who have become His enemies and rejected Him; it is God who gives infinitely much to us, who can repay Him with nothing.

Often we think that these commandments about love for enemies and mercy toward those who hate us were given "for us to grow into," that someday we will "grow" enough to become able to fulfill them. This position has meaning, but it is still far from satisfying. Who, indeed, can "grow into" the perfection proper to the Creator? And the time of our life is so short that we have no chance to wait. Therefore the Lord, who fully knows our nature, offers us an astonishingly practical principle: "in everything, as you want people to do to you, so also do to them." It cannot be said that this is easy to fulfill, but still, when we try to understand how we should act in a concrete situation, we can be guided by it.

The main place where the Lord calls us to apply this principle is forgiveness. Many times He repeats that if we want to be forgiven by God (and by people), we ourselves need to be able to forgive. It is clear that the principle proposed by Christ is much broader than it appears at first glance. It can be extended not only to relationships with people, but also to our relationship with the Almighty Himself. In other words, in everything, as we want God to act toward us, we ourselves should act that way toward God and toward people.

It is the most difficult commands of Jesus. Going to the Church, most of us understand this exactly as it, by feeling their disinterestedness and their cruelty. And after we get used to, we become "common" Christians, love towards our enemy is replaced by "the unwillingness to hurt him ", we are ready to lead mercy to almsgiving, and we oppose the proposal to lend without restitution to the words of Jesus “be wise as snakes ". Then… we forget that this command is the most difficult to fulfill, we stop aspiring to the inaccessible, we close up ourselves into our blind optimism.

It is the most difficult commands of Jesus. Going to the Church, most of us understand this exactly as it, by feeling their disinterestedness and their cruelty. And after we get used to, we become "common" Christians, love towards our enemy is replaced by "the unwillingness to hurt him ", we are ready to lead mercy to almsgiving, and we oppose the proposal to lend without restitution to the words of Jesus “be wise as snakes ". Then… we forget that this command is the most difficult to fulfill, we stop aspiring to the inaccessible, we close up ourselves into our blind optimism.

Skeptics who rebel against Christianity and Christians often speak of self-interest. They say that, in doing good, Christians are concerned about a reward from above and do everything "for the promises of future blessings." How should we answer them, since we really do say, following the evangelist, "...and your reward will be great"?

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the Lord calls us to absolute selflessness. And today's passage, in which the Lord calls us to give while receiving nothing in return, and even without hope of receiving anything, should also serve as a warning against this pseudo-Christian reliance on posthumous or some other recompense from the Lord.

It is another matter that the Lord is just. And His justice is above all. But it belongs only to Him; we have no right to judge either it or ourselves in its light. That is why the Lord says, "Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay." In these words there is not only the promise of the final triumph of good over evil, or more precisely, of evil being turned into good. In them there is also the condition of our selflessness before Him.

Continuing His preaching of the Beatitudes, Christ speaks about exactly what must be done in order to "be sons of the Most High." If the Beatitudes spoke about a person's states, about the qualities and properties that belong to him, here Jesus lists a number of actions that a Christian must perform. "But I say to you who hear," He addresses those who have already heard and accepted the radical commandments of blessedness, which contradict the usual understanding of life.

It turns out that a Christian must not only accept life passively, but also actively carry Christ into the world. Bless those who curse, give away the last shirt, turn the cheek... The Lord, saying, "As you wish that people would do to you, do so to them," calls His disciples to perform actions that could move other people also to act in a Christian way.

By answering evil with good, trying to love where there is hatred, and showing true mercy to our neighbors, we are only giving others what we ourselves have received from God as His children.

Every person has moments when he realizes that he is sinful. Daniel speaks of common guilt (Dan. 9:5), without denying it and without excusing himself by saying that he was not the only one who sinned. And he contrasts these sins not with some "other fellow," but with the holiness and beauty of God Himself. Daniel looks at the Lord, being purified beneath His merciful gaze, which will be revealed to the world in Jesus.

Jesus also speaks of God's mercy, reminding the Jews of Old Testament truths. But He goes further: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," calling them to action and imitation. Verse 38 appears contradictory, but this is what God's mercy, His law, looks like. In the second part of the verse we read about the eternal inequality of our relationship with God: He simply cannot give less, less than His Incarnation, Love, and Cross. By these gifts of His we test everything we do in the world.

God truly is with us in everything; as a human being He truly experienced everything we can go through, except sin. There are situations in our life when it seems to us that God cannot know this. Fear? But in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus "was horrified and distressed." Sorrow? God wept over Lazarus. The difficulty of choice?

We do not know whether Jesus knew, when choosing the apostles, that one of them would betray Him. Perhaps He did not know who. Because there is choice. We have the same freedom of choice that God has. We may fail to hear Him and fail to obey Him. But we know for certain that God went through the difficulty of choice. We know from this text that before choosing the twelve apostles, Jesus spent the whole night speaking with the Father alone. That means it was not simple for Him to choose. He went through this too. And He showed us an example; He showed us how to choose.