NOTES for Luk 6:35-36

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These words seem deliberately to contradict ordinary human ideas. Why are the poor and hungry, the weeping and rejected, suddenly blessed, while woe is pronounced upon the rich, the full, and those who laugh? One might think that Christ is proclaiming a revolution that will turn the world upside down! The Kingdom of God that He brings to earth really is radically different from the order of the world familiar to us. Relationships within it are founded on the Father's mercy, not on the struggle for survival. Even as believers, we often forget that entirely different laws prevail in this Kingdom. We call happiness what Christ calls woe, and conversely regard His blessings as misfortune. How greatly we must change to become true citizens of this Kingdom!