8. Духовная праведность
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The main essence of the Gospel teaching is divine love and faith. And in this essence, the Gospel is original, as original as a creative work of an individual, an intimate experience, can be. In the question of evangelical sonship with God, we stand entirely on the basis of evangelical experience, although evangelical history, with which the teaching of the Christian faith is connected, already has external stages. And the language in which this essential gospel teaching is presented, without having a single new philological element and remaining the language of the Old Testament Bible, however, does not reveal almost a single feature of a specifically Jewish character, is almost a universal language. In this matter we have not yet left the sphere of religious life; here we rather contemplate the inner experience of the Son of God than listen to His teaching - we rather observe His own religious life than follow His historical work.
His historical teaching is given in the remaining sections of the gospel gospel - about spiritual righteousness, about eternal life, about salvation and about the kingdom of God, and in these sections the main grain of the Gospel is inserted into the system of concepts of the Jewish religion. The main of these concepts - righteousness, eternal life, salvation, the kingdom of God - are forms in the evangelical gospel that are filled with the content of the evangelical religious experience and which, without this content, turn out to be empty forms. However, in this regard, a certain gradation in the degree of generality and content can be established between them. The most general of them, the concept of the kingdom of God, which embraces the rest, has the least of its own content in the gospel system; on the contrary, the concepts of righteousness and eternal life are more imbued with gospel content. From this it is easy to deduce in what systematic order we should place the departments of the gospel doctrine.
If the Gospel teaching about righteousness, eternal life, salvation and the kingdom of God presupposes the Gospel experience of divine love and faith, then the more general of these concepts, the concept of the kingdom of God, presupposes the sections on righteousness and eternal life, and of the latter, for the same reasons, the section on righteousness should precede.
In the system of evangelical teaching, the concept of righteousness directly follows the root evangelical concept of sonship with God and directly embodies this grain of the New Testament gospel. Divine experience, giving the absolute content of the human personality, necessarily becomes a new principle of entire life activity, a new ethical law. And at the same time, the religious-legal concept of the Old Testament law is decidedly alien to the gospel spirit. All this together results in the form of the doctrine of spiritual righteousness. Here the starting point is a specific Old Testament word, but new content is put into it, since the righteousness of the disciples of the Gospel must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. The formula: “You have heard what was said by the ancients, but I speak to you,” a formula that characterizes the relationship of the entire Gospel teaching to the Old Testament, and most closely defines the relationship of New Testament righteousness to Old Testament righteousness.
Adapting to Old Testament concepts, the Gospel designates the structure of life of the sons of God in the name of righteousness, but teaches that this is not legalistic righteousness, but righteousness as the fruit of the spirit 760.
The difference between the New Testament righteousness and the Old Testament is that the Old Testament law was a conditional law of social improvement, while the Gospel principle of life determines the absolute nature of personal life arising from the filial basis. All the Old Testament commandments established the order of social life, they all related to forms of social structure and had the sole goal of the good of the social system, so Jewish law necessarily presupposes a given social system and relates to the individual solely as a social element. On the contrary, the gospel principle presupposes a religiously free, creatively and internally acting personality, and all the New Testament commandments relate solely to a free, creatively acting personality, marking the path that a person with God-filial self-consciousness must inevitably follow.
And although Christian love is not an abstract love for God, but real love for man, and this binds the Christian personality to society, however, for the gospel principle, society acts only as an object of personal love, while the subject of both divine love and the gospel principle of life is a free person. The Old Testament law acted through the social system on the individual, the New Testament principle acts through the individual on society. Therefore, the unchangeable properties of the Old Testament law are convention and nomystical externalism. The Old Testament law was conditional because it was directly applied to social forms - and it was in the strict sense a law, paving the way for nomystical externalism, because it was an external commandment for the individual, directed from the periphery of the individual to its center, which it could never reach.
In contrast, the evangelical principle is imprinted with the character of absoluteness and does not have the specific features of legalism: it only reveals the absolute basis of the evangelical experience, applied to the entire breadth of personal life, covers with internal absoluteness all relationships of the individual, and it does not add anything in content to this basis, nor does it command anything, since it is directed from the center to the periphery, from free personal creativity to external relations.
So, in the gospel principle, the old law is removed from society to the individual and raised to absoluteness. This is not an abstract relationship of the Old Testament to the Gospel, but this is the actual transition from the first to the second. The Gospel draws the final logical conclusion from the Old Testament, completes its own beginnings, completes it, completes it. It says to the Jews: “You do such and such in the name of God. But if you do for God, then you need to do infinitely more. There is no need to stop halfway through the sacrifice; you need to reach the last limit of the path.” There were hints of such consistency and sincerity in the Old Testament itself, but only hints, and only in the person of Christ did man dare to step over all kinds of halfway points, all kinds of compromises. For example, Gen. XII, and: “Jehovah said to Abraham: get thee out of thy land, from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house”... Deut. XXXIII, 8.9: “The holy man says of his father and mother: I have not seen them, and he does not recognize his brothers and does not know his sons”... Gospel (Luke.
XIV, 26): “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers and sisters, and also his own soul, he cannot be My disciple.” Or Gen. XVII, 9 – and: “God said to Abraham: ... this is my covenant... circumcise your foreskin”... Deut. X, 16: “circumcise the foreskin of your heart”... Gospel (Matthew XIX, 12): “there are eunuchs who castrated themselves for the kingdom of heaven”; (Matthew V, 29 - 30 par.): It is better for a crippled person to enter the kingdom of God than for a healthy person to enter Gehenna. It is truly said about Christ: “He came to His own and His own did not accept Him.” 761: He drew the last conclusions from the Old Testament, which the Jews, who did not accept Christ, were afraid of. However, this relationship of New Testament principle to Old Testament law contains a complexity that needs to be revealed. Bringing a conditional social law to personal absoluteness is fraught with a reductio ad absurdum, or at least its possibility. The conditionality of social law serves as a necessary assumption of both the legalistic regime and the rational one, which always leads to the abolition of nomism, and in some cases leads to obvious absurdity.
A law that has taken on absolute expression ceases to be a law, and its impracticability in some cases is confirmed by the obvious hopelessness. And we are forced to include this method of interpreting Old Testament legalism into the sphere of plans of the Gospel teaching, so that the Gospel commandments jointly express both the absoluteness of the personal principle and the impossibility of legalistic absoluteness. A detailed study of the Gospel commandments will show us the inevitability of this method from the Gospel teaching about righteousness.
“You have heard that it was said to the ancients: Thou shalt not kill; whoever kills is subject to judgment” 762. In the Old Testament it was said: do not kill 763, but whoever kills a person must be put to death 764. Apparently, the strict Old Testament law received a softer form, according to which a murderer is subject to trial rather than death, in later Judaism, when the Jews lost the right to carry out death sentences 765. But the Gospel does not only restore the severity of the Old Testament, it goes further: it prohibits not only murder, but even anger, it forbids everyone to call someone an empty person, or insane, i.e. consider him unworthy of human relations. In the Old Testament, murder was interpreted as a social crime, and the death of the criminal was required to restore social truth; on the contrary, the Gospel commands non-anger as an unconditional rule of personal life, personal relationships between people.
And in Jewish writing, anger is condemned from the point of view of everyday prudence, as a mental cause of social disorder 766, and non-anger is prescribed for the sake of matching the mental mood with the social order 767. Not so in the Gospel. Here, non-anger is required as an unconditional principle of personal activity: here the slightest movement of anger is expelled from the heart and the most insignificant manifestation of it is not allowed. Mental disturbance may be negligible, and public indecency or disorder may not follow; but from a fundamental point of view, the anger held within and its manifestation in the words “empty man” or “mad” are also important. The Gospel teaching is that everyone retains the unconditional value of his personality only if he unconditionally respects the personality of every person, and the humiliation of a brother necessarily entails the loss of his own dignity.
This gospel principle does not quantitatively strengthen the Old Testament commandment, but changes it qualitatively, abolishing its inherent social convention. In the Old Testament, murder was so strictly forbidden that the murderer was put to death; in the Gospel even the killing of a murderer is prohibited. The Old Testament commandment did not contain an internal contradiction, since the murderer was eliminated by society from its midst; however, it already concealed within itself the possibility of such a contradiction, which is revealed on the basis of Gospel absoluteness. From an absolute point of view, the commandment to kill a murderer cancels itself. But the Gospel not only prohibits the killing of a murderer: it also prohibits all anger, it forbids treating someone as an empty person or a madman. This absoluteness not only cancels the conditional Old Testament commandment, but it itself cannot be expressed in the form of a law or commandment. There is no person who, for the sake of the law, could refrain from the slightest movement of anger or its slightest manifestation.
This is only possible as a spontaneous mood. The absolute law of non-anger cannot be fulfilled; absolute non-anger is possible as a free principle. Thus, this New Testament commandment jointly outlines the absolute norm of personal behavior and abolishes the form of legalism as applied to an absolutely acting individual. In this understanding of the New Testament commandment, we are strengthened by comparing it with other gospel facts. Christ Himself was angry 768 - so He made an angry accusatory speech against the scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, called Peter Satan, and proclaimed woe to the cities. Having brought to earth not peace, but division, restoring three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father 769, He resolutely commands His disciples to hate for His sake father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters. Without such hatred no one can be His disciple 770 . Again it can be noted that this evangelical requirement is as unconditional as it is impossible to fulfill as a formal requirement.
The love for Christ and His kingdom that fills the heart can cause hatred towards father and mother, children and brothers; but for the sake of the law, no one will hate their relatives and their children. Much more important is that the two commandments about non-anger and hatred are on the same pages of the Gospel. This alone certifies that neither one nor the other represents a formal law. True, they are trying to reconcile these commandments through mechanical coordination and mutual restriction. Thus, the word “in vain” is inserted into the commandment about non-anger, as if the Gospel prohibits only vain anger. But let alone the fact that an authoritative reading of the text does not allow this word to be included in the commandment about non-wrath; not to mention the fact that absoluteness is an integral property of the Gospel commandments - adding the word “in vain” does not help the matter at all.
By narrowing the commandment about non-anger, we will never come to the commandment about hatred, even if again this last commandment is understood in a limited way, in the sense of not hatred itself, but only abandoning one’s own for the sake of Christ 771, or less love for one’s own than love for Christ 772. Limited lack of anger or just anger is not the same as hating one’s own or abandoning them for the sake of Christ. These are different feelings. Both commandments of the Gospel must be accepted absolutely, applying them to different relationships. As both are equally absolute, but heterogeneous, they fit on the same Gospel pages, they pave different paths of absolute personal life, reconciling in this common absoluteness, but equally do not allow nomystical interpretation.
We see the same method of interpreting Old Testament nomism in the Gospel commandments about chastity and the indissolubility of marriage.
The Old Testament law prohibited adultery 773. The Gospel says that anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart 774. Adultery (μοιχεία), violation of marital fidelity, is entirely and exclusively a social sin. In later Judaism, apparently, only actual adultery was considered a sin, but in the Old Testament legislation we see a prohibition of those mental movements that lead to actual adultery - the prohibition of the desire of another man's wife 775. This is accompanied by disapproval of disordered love in the spirit of worldly prudence in later biblical literature: “turn away your eye from a comely woman... be ashamed to have thoughts for a married woman” 776, etc. However, the Gospel is not only directed against the Pharisaic exegesis and not only restores the purity of the Old Testament law.
The Old Testament law, as the law of social life, has as its only subject the prosperity of marital relations: it eliminates only disorder in the social side of marriage and sees in lust an exclusively mental cause of social troubles in marital relations. The most characteristic thing of the Old Testament is the prohibition of the desire of another man's wife. On the contrary, the Gospel, establishing an absolute norm of a personal nature, gives absolute expression to the Old Testament law and at the same time eliminates the possibility of its application. In the Old Testament, God served the interests of the people, but the Gospel calls man to serve God alone. The Gospel teaches: if chastity is to be observed for God, then it is not enough to avoid the desires of another man’s wife, for this is in the own interests of the family and the people, but one must avoid every lustful desire. Just as there are eunuchs who were born this way, and there are eunuchs who are castrated from people; so chastity for God must be absolute 777.
Christ does not say: “do not look at a woman lustfully,” for this would mean abolishing the original law of human birth; He says: if the law of chastity is thought through to the end, then just one lustful look at any woman will be adultery from a legalistic point of view. Christ does not give the law of absolute chastity; He only teaches that chastity for the kingdom of heaven can only be absolute. Absolute chastity as a law is unthinkable, since not a single person, except eunuchs, can, for the sake of the law, preserve himself even from lustful thoughts at the sight of a woman; but for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, i.e. by the action of an all-encompassing spiritual good, under the inspiration of an all-consuming heavenly task, some divine work, a person can completely forget about a woman and see in her only a person.
Absolute chastity is not a distant ideal, which can and should be gradually approached in marital relations, since marital relations can be realized only by lust and can only be regulated by relative chastity: there is no transition from absolute chastity to marital lust and from the second to the first. The New Testament commandment is least suitable as a regulator of married life.
Along with the commandment about absolute chastity, the Gospel gives, in contrast to the Old Testament law on divorce, another commandment - about the unconditional indissolubility of the marriage union 778. In the Old Testament, 779 it was allowed, or more precisely, it was conditionally commanded, divorce in the event of a husband’s hatred of his wife, and the legislation in this case was intended to prohibit the husband from marriage with a hated wife, and then to alleviate and legally formalize the position of the hated wife; in addition, it was forbidden to re-marry a released wife. In this form, the commandment about divorce is quite appropriate in the Old Testament legislation that determined the improvement of marriage: cohabitation with a wife in whom the husband finds something disgusting violates the sincerity of marital relations; Such sincerity is also impossible later, when the marriage is restored, since the offense of “hatred” and “dislike” is not forgiven by the wife.
In later Judaism, the Old Testament commandment about divorce was understood almost in the sense that “a man is allowed to divorce his wife for any reason,” 780 so that the commandment became a cover for debauchery. The Gospel not only does not allow divorce for any reason, but also unconditionally prohibits divorce, so that the very Old Testament law is declared to be a compromise with human weakness, a concession to the hard-heartedness of the Jews. As an unconditional principle, the Gospel sets forth the natural primordial law of male-female completeness of the body, the law of the natural combination of husband and wife into one flesh. Divorce is a humanly voluntary interference with this divine institution, and therefore it is inevitably a sin. If the law of marriage is thought through to the end, if dissolution is viewed from a religious point of view, sab specie aeterni, then every divorce is adultery. Any dissolution of a marriage for the sake of new marriages and any combination with those who have been dissolved from the point of view of the absolutely understood law is adultery.
Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery 781; and if a wife divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery 782 ; whoever marries a divorced woman also commits adultery 783 ; he who divorces his wife gives her a reason, by marrying another husband, to commit adultery 784. The Gospel, thus, brings absoluteness into marriage life, formulates the norm of marriage relations for an absolutely active person. But this absolute gospel commandment, firstly, is the norm of an absolutely active person, and not a law that determines the prosperity of the family, since it is easy to see that this norm, at best, does nothing for the prosperity of the family, and in some cases it can turn the family into hell. Secondly, this absolute norm is not exactly a law, since the absolute law on the indissolubility of marriage is unenforceable for the sole reason that the course of married life does not depend on one person.
For example, a Christian husband will introduce a stream of absoluteness into his marital relationship, but it will not create the actual indissolubility of the marriage if his pagan wife leaves him. Here a whole abyss separates the Old Testament conditional commandment from the New Testament absoluteness. The most important thing here is that personal absoluteness has no social force and does not extend to the social form of marriage relations 785.
The two Old Testament commandments about chastity and divorce were in complete harmony with each other, since, despite their conventionality, both had as their subject the prosperity of married life. On the contrary, the two Gospel commandments regarding marriage, one of which unconditionally prohibits lust, and the other also unconditionally prohibits divorce, these two commandments are diametrically opposed to one another. they have a common point that reconciles them only in their absoluteness, in the fact that both determine the modus of absolute personal life, applying themselves to two different paths; but, in any case, they cannot be accepted in the sense of a formal law. In a nomistic sense, they destroy one another. Legally, the Gospel does not prohibit lust, without which a marriage relationship is unthinkable, and does not require unconditional marital indissolubility. The Gospel does not teach which of these two paths a person should organize his natural life, and even less does it say that these two paths can be brought together and even merged into one.
And although the natural life of a Christian can only be chaste, although wild debauchery, unrestrained throwing of lustful glances at every passing woman is certainly irreconcilable with the gospel spirit, although the gospel commandment about not looking at a woman with lust can be understood in the general sense of chastity; Nevertheless, the Gospel commandment of chastity is not exhausted by this general ethical meaning, and there is no basis for a mutually limiting merger of the two Gospel commandments. The absurd idea of a completely dispassionate marriage union is just as alien to the Gospel as the equally absurd idea of a church-legal extension of a marriage that was actually destroyed. The Gospel implies either the actual breakdown of the family or a natural marriage based on natural passion and the “primordial” law.
And if the two named Gospel commandments outline the path of personal absoluteness, revealing at the same time the impossibility of unconditionality in the sphere of nomism, then a more direct expression of the Gospel spirit should be seen not in the commandment about chastity and not in the commandment about the indissolubility of marriage, but in the commandment about leaving a wife for the sake of the Gospel 786. Married life for the Gospel is a natural universal human marriage life in the fullness of natural passions and social feelings, but for the sake of the kingdom of God, when God calls, you need to leave your wife, like father, mother, children, brothers - to hate them.
The considered gospel commandments concern the natural aspects of life, its “original” depths - personal integrity and the holiness of the marriage union: they bring human absoluteness into the natural depths of life and jointly express both the logical and religious inevitability of personal absoluteness and the impossibility of unconditional nomism. The following Gospel commandments relate to conditional, consciously free forms of human coexistence, to more superficial areas of life that are less resistant to the pressure of spiritual infinity. These commandments more decisively outline the path of personal-religious absoluteness and almost do not highlight the negative results of nomistic infinity; they already sound like direct commands, although they invariably turn to personal-religious creativity, not having a communal system as their positive goal.
In contrast to the Old Testament commandment about swearing, the Gospel certainly prohibits swearing. The Old Testament required an oath in the types of social structure 787 and prescribed swearing in the name of Jehovah 788; but he armed himself against false oaths and against perjury 789. It is easy to see that the Old Testament on the issue of the oath remains faithful to the social-folk level on which the Old Testament religion stands, since for the improvement of social life nothing more than fidelity to the oath and fidelity to the oath is required from members of society. Judaism contemporary to Christ departed from ancient practice in that, while generally abstaining from using the name of Jehovah, it also avoided swearing in the name of Jehovah and invented other oaths (oath formulas) - by heaven, by earth 790, etc. But the Gospel not only rejects the tricks of Judaism, but also replaces the Old Testament commandment about faithful, oath with new unconditional prohibition of oath 791. The Gospel commandment is repeated with complete clarity, not allowing for reinterpretation, by the Apostle James 792.
Old Testament legislation was designed to improve public life, and it required fidelity to an oath and fidelity to an oath; The Gospel defines the life of a free religious and creative person, and it certainly prohibits oaths. The Gospel does not answer the question of how to improve social life; it determines what a Christian should be in his relationship to God and to people, or society: he certainly cannot bind himself with an oath. From the evangelical point of view, the religious commandment to swear destroys itself, since religious absoluteness has no socially conditional application and does not allow the name of God to be used to serve earthly interests; but this also says that the Gospel commandment itself cannot have meaning, a formal law that determines social life. The gospel does not speak to society; it does not say that social life will go better if oaths are not resorted to in social conflicts.
It teaches that absolute religious consciousness cannot be squeezed into conventional forms of social relations, that a Christian cannot swear, that one cannot swear in the name of the Christian God. Forms of social life must be standardized conditionally and commensurate with earthly interests, but the believer in all his relationships acts according to the divine, i.e. absolutely, the religious action of an individual must always be absolute. The pathetic apologetic theory of the Christian oath is as alien to the Gospel as the sectarian effort to set absolute standards for the social order.
“You have heard that it was said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” 793. This is a literal decree of the Old Testament law 794. It is indisputable that the Old Testament law on retribution determined the order of social structure and the order of legal proceedings. He ordered representatives of society, in all severity, not weakened by a feeling of pity, to restore, through jus talionis, the violated social truth 795. Of course, the fact that retribution was provided to society contained the basis for softening morals: while the offender was ordered to submit to the strict law of retribution 796, the offended person was inspired, by submitting the case to a public court, not to harbor anger in his soul 797. From here the Old Testament everyday utilitarian sermon developed about patiently bearing insults and forgiving one's neighbor, about offering the cheek to the one who strikes and being satiated with reproach 798 . But the whole strength lies in the fact that the Old Testament law in its severity determined not personal mood, but the social system and positively demanded retribution.
Later Judaism could find in the ancient commandment a justification even for personal vindictiveness and derived from it the consequence that the offended person should seek judicial truth. The new gospel commandment cuts off this Judaistic conclusion and breaks the oldest law itself. Jewish legislation, through judicial truth, through public order, improved the individual; Christ determines the behavior of the individual in relation to society, the offended in relation to the offender - with the unconditional requirement not only of invincibility, but also of repaying good for evil. The Gospel forbids resisting evil; it instructs to turn the left cheek to the one who hits the right, to give the shirt to the one who takes away the outer clothing, to give to the one who asks, not to turn away from the one who wants to borrow and not to demand back from the one who took it 799. The Apostle Paul briefly expresses the Gospel teaching: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” 800 .
Attempts by apologetic stupidity to justify violence with the Gospel are too clearly counterfeited to the tone of gloomy reality to be worth dwelling on. The absolute nature of the New Testament commandment remains indisputable. You just need to correctly understand its relationship to the social system and personality. The New Testament commandment replaces the ancient law of religious-social retribution with the absoluteness of personal attitude towards society. Therefore, it is unfair to limit the application of the Gospel commandment to the subjective limits of personal mood, to apply it differently to the social system and to the individual, to understand it in the sense of prohibiting personal revenge and permitting legal retribution and violence. This would be a reduction of the Gospel absoluteness to an Old Testament convention. No, the Gospel commandment provides an absolute norm for the relationship of the individual to society. Without personality there will be no point of support for the absoluteness of the commandment; Without relation to society, there is no real discovery of personal content.
It speaks of exclusively personal resentment and suffering, of retribution - even public. Absolutely or divinely, an active person will never bring matters to the point of public retribution, because he always surpasses violence with his good deed. Nevertheless, it is equally unfair to see in the Gospel commandment the norm of a new social order, to see in it not only a prohibition to religiously sanction a social convention, but also the abolition of a social convention. The Gospel determines the relationship of the individual to society, but does not determine the social system and does not abolish social justice. The Gospel commandment only says that it will not be Christian to deal with the offender according to the law, with justice. To each his own - this is fair, but not divine, not sacred. Lending is natural, but it is not yet Christian. Helping those truly in need and refusing parasites is very useful in social terms, but it is not Christian.
Christian charity is unconditional: they do good in a Christian way when they give to everyone who asks, they never turn away from someone who wants to borrow, and they do not demand what is taken back. And such charity can only be a personal matter; it cannot be entrusted to some cash register that mechanically opens to anyone who pushes it. Christianity does not mean social benefit, but a religiously free individual. The Christian personality must be whole, consistent and bright; she must shine for the world, represent the Heavenly Father before him, glorify Him 801. Christianity is about the whole person, not about private affairs. And such a person can reveal himself only in relation to the legal system, becoming above it. Animals cannot be loved with Christian love, because they do not perceive or appreciate Christian absoluteness. Feeling sorry for animals is good, naturally, useful, but not Christian-holy.
And people are like pigs to whom pearls cannot be thrown, and like dogs to whom shrines must not be given: they must first be raised to the level of the legal system, to the consciousness of social truth, and only then can the pearls of Christian shrines be scattered before them. Relying in the center on the freedom of the creative individual, Christian absoluteness in the periphery rests on free social convention.
In connection with the commandment of non-resistance to evil, Christ’s teaching about non-judgment of one’s neighbor is usually considered: do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven" 803. And the same controversy is going on about this commandment as about others. Some people think that Christ rejects public courts, i.e. understand the commandment of Christ in the sense of social law. Others argue that the Gospel commandment relates to private condemnation, to slander, and its meaning is that we provide judgment and condemnation to the legal authority, the judges. Proponents of the first opinion are wrong when they point out that the verbs judge (κρίνω) and condemn (καταδικάζω) are used only in relation to a legal court. Often in the New Testament these verbs are used to denote personal condemnation 804. And in general, in the evangelical “legislation” we are not talking about a new social order, but about a religious person. But on the other hand, it would be a strange stubbornness to attribute the words of Christ only to slander and over-judgment and not to bring judicial condemnation under their sentence.
The Sermon on the Mount talks about public court, when it is commanded to make peace with an opponent (ἀντίδικος - opponent in court) on the way to the judge 805 and to give up outer clothing to the one who wants to pull off the shirt in court 806. In these places we are talking about the attitude of the disciples of the Gospel to the court as litigants, or defendants. Naturally, the question arises about their relationship to the court as plaintiffs or judges. This question is answered in the words: “do not judge.” They do not abolish public courts, they talk about the Christian’s attitude towards the courts. Christ forbids all condemnation of one’s neighbor, and not only judicial condemnation, but also judicial condemnation is obvious in His words. The commandment of Christ, as relating not to the social order, but to the individual, must be understood absolutely, but not nomistically.
“You have heard that it was said: Love your neighbor and hate your enemy” 807. The first half of this quotation is taken literally from the Old Testament law, but the last words are not in the Old Testament, and they probably represent a Jewish interpretation of the ancient law. This interpretation, however, is completely consistent with the spirit of the Old Testament. Religious love in the Old Testament completely coincided with the natural feeling of patriotism. The Gospel takes it out of these narrow boundaries and demands boundless love, making it the absolute content of the creative personality 808. This property of evangelical love reveals with perfect clarity that it is a principle of personal life, and not a law of the social order. Therefore, those who reduce the New Testament commandment of love exclusively to the international principle of cosmopolitanism are wrong.
The Gospel indicates all the indisputable signs of personal love, because the Gospel love for enemies is blessing those who curse, doing good to those who hate, prayer for those who offend and persecute, actual good deeds without hope of gratitude and without expectation of return. Gospel love is not a state principle of international relations abstract for the individual; it is a living personal feeling. But those who claim that the Gospel commandment refers only to our personal enemies are also wrong, that Gospel love is limited to subjective limits, that this commandment has no relation to feelings of patriotism, that patriotism in Christianity is religiously sanctioned. If the personal nature of the Gospel love is beyond doubt, then the antithetical attitude of the Gospel commandment to the national limitations of the Old Testament, its negative attitude to the religious sanctification of natural patriotic feeling, is just as beyond doubt.
The gospel is not against patriotism; it does not say that there should be no wars and division of humanity into nations and states. It only says that the religious sanctification of patriotism contains an internal contradiction; religious war is an absurdity from a Christian point of view. Religious brotherhood transcends national boundaries, a Christian cannot participate in war, there cannot be a Christian army.
We have outlined the gospel “legislation” in relation to the Old Testament law. We see that the New Testament commandments differ essentially, and not only in form and not in degree, from the commandments of the Old Testament. The Old Testament commandments are conditional norms of the social order; The gospel law is the unconditional principle of a religiously free individual. The Old Testament commandments, as conditional norms of the social system, are not only strengthened quantitatively or mentally complicated in the Gospel, but here they completely lose their bindingness, i.e. are canceled, just as the light of a lamp placed in a room ceases to shine on someone who has gone out into the sunny expanse, or legal rights to a piece of land lose their meaning for someone who “inherited the whole earth.” A return to the Old Testament method of conditionally social application of religion would be a denial of the Gospel commandment in its essence; the distance between the Old Testament law and the New Testament law is infinite, because everything is conditional there, but here it is unconditional.
Meanwhile, the New Testament “legislation” is preceded in the Gospel of Matthew with words that have as their direct object the understanding of Christ’s attitude to the Old Testament law. Christ came not to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill (πληρῶσαι) - Matt. V,17. For until heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle will pass from the law until all is fulfilled (γένηται) - v. 18. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches people so will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; whoever does and teaches will be called great in the kingdom of heaven - v. 19. For unless a person's righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven - v. 20. The meaning of these words, if taken in continuous connection, seems completely incomprehensible.
It’s as if the idea is being instilled that Christ came to fulfill the Old Testament law to the jot and tittle, while in essence we see in the Gospel the abolition of the Old Testament law, at least in the sense of the absorption of the finite into the infinite, the conditional into the unconditional: Christ is the end of the law. In addition, the connection of verse 20 with the previous one through the union turns out to be unclear, which apparently gives grounds to admit that the righteousness of Christ’s disciples must surpass Old Testament righteousness on the path of literal fulfillment of the smallest commandments. The attempt of some theologians to understand in the words of Christ not the Old Testament law, but the eternal moral law, is unsuccessful. The starting points of the Gospel teaching are Old Testament ideas and, although the Gospel puts new content into Old Testament forms, although it gives a new teaching about righteousness, the kingdom of God, eternal life, the immediate and initial meaning of these terms is rooted in the Old Testament religion.
Thus, in particular, the Gospel gives a new teaching about the law, but the word law in the Gospel is used in the Old Testament sense 809. This was the only way the Jews could understand him. Then, an iota, a dash, the smallest commandments - all these signs are not applicable to the eternal law, these are signs of the Jewish written law. How should we understand these verses? Let's see what it means to fulfill the law in Art. 17. To do this, we turn to one place from the Epistle to the Romans (XIII, 8 - 10), where love is called the fulfillment of the law. This passage must be read from the Greek text, which is not fully conveyed in the Russian translation 810. The words are especially inaccurate: “they are contained in this word: love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to one’s neighbor” – ἐν τῷ λ ό γ ῳ τούτ ῳ ἀνακεφαλαιοῦται ἐν &nnbsp; τῷ ἀγαπ ή σεις τὸν πλησ ί ον σου ὡ ςσεαυτ ό ν ἡ ἀγάπη τῷ πλησ ί ον κακὸν οὐκ ἐργάζεται .
Our translation does not convey the expression ἐντῷ, which turns out to be a meaningless repetition; then the sentences: “love your neighbor as yourself” and: “love does no harm to your neighbor” are not connected with us, whereas in the Greek text their connection is the closest. The meaning of the apostolic words is that, firstly, the commandment of love (“love your neighbor as yourself”) has two meanings - negative (“love does not harm your neighbor”) and positive, since love is not limited to not doing evil, it does good beyond all measure; secondly, the Old Testament law, consisting of commandments: “thou shalt not commit adultery” etc. , equals one, namely the negative part of the commandment about love, is realized by one negative side of love, so that love not only includes the law as its one side, but also fulfills it and complements it with its other side. The Old Testament law is one-sided; The gospel commandment about love gives it another side, brings it to fullness.
The words of the apostle should be conveyed this way: “he who loves another has fulfilled the law (νόμον πεπλήρωκεν). For the commandments: do not commit adultery, etc. and all others consist in the following (negative) meaning (ἐν τῷ λ ό γ ῳ τούτ ῳ) of the commandment of love (ἐντῷ ἀγαπ ή σεις τὸν πλησ ί ον σου ὡ ς σεαυτ ό ν): love does not harm one’s neighbor. So, love (in its absoluteness, in its positive side) is the fulfillment (replenishment) of the law (πλήρωμα νόμου ἡ ἀγάπη)" 811. This passage of the letter to the Romans serves as the best commentary on the words of the Sermon on the Mount πλήρωμα τὸν νόμον The gospel does not violate the law in the same way that thefts and murders violate it; it makes all the commandments a manifestation of one absolute love, it elevates the law to positive absoluteness, it fulfills the law. Christ contrasts the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, and v. 17 is directly connected with v. 20: Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it (in the absoluteness of love), for through the righteousness of the Pharisees one cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
Intervening verses 18 and 19 are probably an interpolation that disrupts the natural connection of thoughts. The Sermon on the Mount as presented by Matthew was formed through the combination of sayings pronounced at different times. That verse 18 represents an excerpt from another speech is clear from the fact that a different fulfillment of the law appears here: until everything is fulfilled. This is fulfillment in the sense of selling; it is actually the fulfillment of prophecy. It is applied not only to the prophets, but also to the law because “all the prophets and the law prophesied” 812 - not only the prophets, but also the law prophesied. Verse 19 again talks about something else, namely that it is not enough to teach the fulfillment of the law, but it is necessary to fulfill it and teach it to be fulfilled. This is directed against those who “say and do not do” 813. Due to the apparent similarity of the subject, all this is combined in Matthew’s account, but within the meaning of v. 17. should connect directly to 20 tbsp.
By fulfilling the law in the Gospel commandment, there is no need to understand the fulfillment of the jot and dash, the smallest commandments, but we must understand the fulfillment of the law in the absoluteness of gospel love, the opposite of the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, who fulfilled the letter of the law.
We have seen the relation of gospel righteousness to the essential content of the Old Testament law. In this content, the ancient law served as the embodiment of prophetic preaching and stood with it in such an inextricable connection that created the inseparable concept of “law and prophets”; the considered relationship of the Gospel to the essence of the Old Testament righteousness was its indivisible relationship to the law and the prophets. But the Old Testament law, in addition to the ethical content that it borrowed from prophetic preaching, was clothed, during the period of its dominance, in the specific clothing of liturgical rites and customs, which established the dividing line between the periods of prophecy and zamism. The prophets, demanding from the sons of the covenant purity of monotheistic worship and sincerity of ethical work, fought against hypocritical ritualism; on the contrary, the inescapable feature of nomism was the scribe-Pharisee dressing of the law in a complex veil of the traditions of the elders.
In this scribe-Pharisee garb, the historical temporality that was hidden in the essence of the Old Testament was revealed in the most vivid and extreme features: in the nomistic system of religious rites and pious customs, the cowardly fear of sin inherent in the Old Testament came out, always ready to degenerate into the contentment of self-righteousness, and the slavish constraint that suppressed all creativity. The Gospel not only “fulfills” the Old Testament law in its prophetic essence, but also removes from it the veil of the tradition of the elders - it not only raises the prophetic basis of the law to religious absoluteness, but also frees the Old Testament religion from that human weakness that was expressed in the scribe-Pharisee regime. And since the shortcomings of the latter are not an arbitrary addition to the “law and the prophets,” but essentially follow from it, and the struggle of the Gospel with the regime of the tradition of the elders reveals that creative originality that essentially characterizes the religious personality in the sphere of the new testament.
From this particular side, it is interesting for us to delve into the negative attitude of the Gospel to the scribe-Pharisee shell of the ancient prophetic law.
However, at first glance it seems that the Gospel, in its negative attitude to the tradition of the elders, stands at the level of prophetic preaching. And of course, one must take into account the prophetic polemic against ritual hypocrisy, to which Christ Himself often refers listeners, in order to more clearly imagine the historical position of the Gospel. It is this comparison of the Gospel with its prophetic heights that shows the new things that the Gospel gives.
We will consider the Gospel judgments: 1) about holidays (Sabbath), sacrifices and the liturgical cult in general, 2) about Levitical uncleanness, 3) about almsgiving, prayer and fasting, 4) about the attitude towards tax collectors and sinners.
About holidays (Saturday), sacrifices and liturgical worship in general. The disciples of Christ, walking with Him through the sown fields, out of hunger, plucked the ears of grain, rubbed them with their hands and ate. The Pharisees saw this as a violation of the Sabbath rest laws. To justify His disciples, Christ gives the argument that for the sake of need one can violate ritual laws. So in Scripture it is conveyed that David, when he had need and was hungry, he and those who were with him, ate the showbread, which according to the law could only be eaten by priests. What is important here is that Scripture itself, reporting about what happened to David, allows for the possibility of violating ritual laws for the sake of human needs. The Gospel elevates this incident with David into a general rule: “man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is for man; therefore the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.” So in Mark and (in short) in Luke 814. In the Gospel of Matthew the idea is expressed more strongly. Apart from the case of David, reference is made here to priests who, while performing their duties at the church on the Sabbath, violate the Sabbath and remain innocent.
The law itself, by giving regulations requiring the violation of the Sabbath rest, allows for an exception to the Sabbath law 815. True, the priests violate the Sabbath when performing their duties in the church, and David, as well as the disciples of Christ, violated the Sabbath for personal needs. But, according to the teaching of the Gospel, human need is higher than responsibilities towards the church. “But I tell you that here is more than a church” - λέγωδὲὑμῖν ὅ τι τοῦἱεροῦ μεῖζ ό νἐστιν ὧ δε 816. In the Russian translation, this saying is given a dogmatic tone: “here is He who is greater than the church,” with which, apparently, the following below agrees: “for the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” But we have already seen from the Gospel of Mark that the last thesis does not have a dogmatic basis, but an anthropocentric one: “the Sabbath is for man.” In addition, in general, the dogmatic meaning would be completely out of place in this context, and, finally, it does not at all correspond directly to the following: “if you knew what it means: I want mercy, not sacrifice 817, you would not have condemned the innocent.”
More than the church (τοΰ ἱεροῦ μεῖζον) is hunger, human need. If it is possible to break the Sabbath for duties in the church, then even more so it can be done for the sake of human need. That need is higher than the church is evident from the fact that mercy is shown in relation to need, and sacrifice is made in the church, but God wants mercy, not sacrifice. And the Pharisees, instead of condemning the disciples, should have shown more mercy to their need than zeal for the law. Let us note that after these discussions about human need, the final thesis is given in the Gospel of Matthew that “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath,” which, it is easy to see, has the same meaning in Matthew as in Mark.
For the sake of human need, ritual laws can be violated. If love is added to need, then in this case the violation of the ritual law turns out to be not only permission, but also a duty. This is how Christ looked at His healings on Saturday 818. In His conversations with the Jews, the question of the relationship of the ritual law to the moral law was clearly raised. Should one do good on the Sabbath? Every Jew answers this question in the affirmative, pulling his sheep out of the pit and leading his donkey and ox to watering. How much better is a man than a sheep? If the Sabbath can be broken for the sake of one’s own interests, for the sake of one’s sheep and one’s eagle, then, of course, it must be broken out of love for another person, for the sake of a good deed.
The moral law is higher than the sacrificial cult: for the sake of reconciliation with one’s brother one must postpone making a sacrifice 819, Love is greater than all burnt offerings and sacrifices 820. The most important thing in religion is not the tithe of mint, anise and caraway, but love, faith and truth 821. True worshipers of the Heavenly Father must serve Him in spirit and truth, i.e. in spiritually absolute and real love 822. The Gospel expresses with perfect clarity the idea that serving God does not constitute a specific area isolated from moral and spiritual reality. Separated from moral and spiritual activity, the highest and brightest feats of religious service lose all value, like trees that do not bear fruit. Not only the hypocritical invocation of God, but also prophecy in His name, casting out demons and working miracles by His power does not bring one closer to Him without fulfilling His will, without deeds of love 823. Only one way is open to man to serve Him - the path of serving the lesser brothers of Christ: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners 824.
The disciple of Christ, the apostle of love, confirms that love for God, not accompanied by love for one’s neighbor, is false, imaginary love 825. The Apostle Paul conveys the Gospel thought no less powerfully and with inspiration, calling the phenomena of ecstasy, the highest religious knowledge and extreme ascetic deeds that are not warmed by the warmth of love 826 as a meaningless sound of brass and an insignificant, useless deed.
About Levitical uncleanness. Leviticus 827 lays out the laws regarding Levitical uncleanness, which makes a person religiously unclean. These laws were extremely diversified and multiplied in the tradition of the elders of later Judaism. The Jews contemporary to Christ, adhering to the tradition of the elders, did not eat without thoroughly washing their hands; they washed themselves when they came from the market; observed the washing of bowls, mugs, cauldrons, and benches. In the society of Christ’s disciples, this tradition of the elders was not observed, it was “transgressed,” for which He was reproached by the Pharisees and scribes. In response to them, Christ outlined His teaching on the issue of ritual impurity 828. He understood, first of all, the harmful consequences that inevitably entail following the tradition of the elders, observing religious laws on external purity. It directs a person’s attention to the external and distracts him from the internal; it calms the conscience with appearances and drowns out moral energy; The legends of the elders are for an evil person a means of covering up and justifying an evil heart.
In short, the religious assessment of external purity gives rise to hypocrisy. The Jews were such hypocrites. Under the pretext of direct sacrifice to God, they refused to show love to people; they covered up the violation of the basic requirements of morality with external religious deeds. Having revealed the inconsistency of the scribe-Pharisees' practice, Christ then positively expounded His teaching on uncleanness. Nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile him, because it does not enter his heart, but into his belly and comes out, by which all food is purified; but what comes out of his heart defiles a person; all sorts of evil thoughts defile him. Washing your hands, distinguishing between types of food is useful, natural, but not holy: holiness is a property of the heart. Good is born from a good heart, and from an evil heart comes evil 829. The Pharisees wanted to create religious holiness by external purity; but they, while purifying their appearance and outwardly appearing to people as righteous, were inside filled with theft and untruth, hypocrisy and lawlessness. They were like painted coffins 830 .
You need to do the opposite, go not from external to internal, but from internal to external. A good deed, e.g. alms make a person religiously pure in all respects 831. The Apostle Paul calls this Christian principle freedom from the weak and poor elements 832. The Kingdom of God is not in food and drink, but in holy spirituality, in truth, peace and joy. In this way one must serve God 833. In Christianity, no external religious deed matters, but faith operating through love 834. The apostle recognizes this freedom as the great gift of Christianity. He calls the observation of days, months, times and years a return to elemental slavery 835.
About almsgiving, prayer and fasting 836. The hypocrisy of Jewish asceticism, fasting, alms and prayer was not accidental, not an appendage, but essential and necessary: it was a consequence of the fact that alms, prayer and fasting were considered godly deeds, assessed from a religious and legal point of view, and inextricably linked with the expectation of reward from God. The outward expression of this religious-legal calculation was the love of performing prayer, almsgiving and fasting for display in front of people, in public, in public. The Gospel completely rejects this legal-utilitarian point of view; it reduces the religious value of charity, prayer and fasting to an internal good that cannot be assessed externally. Whoever believes the meaning of charity in what is visible to people, what is accessible to external assessment, already receives his reward in human glory, he should not expect anything more from the Heavenly Father, the true benefit of charity is alien to him.
Alms must be done with complete self-denial, with complete self-forgetfulness, without any calculation, in a divine way - and then you will feel the religious value of charity, the religious benefit of mercy: “Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you,” - there is no need to add “openly”, this is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you in the divine mystery of your goodness, in the divinity of your alms. Do charity in God's way, and you will receive a reward from the Heavenly Father, not that external reward that people can give, but a reward that only the Heavenly Father can give you, which lies in the very reality of divine charity. This reward is available only to those for whom it is truly more blessed to give than to receive. Christian almsgiving is the fruit of selfless love, a matter of free religious creativity.
In the same way, prayer is not a godly deed, for which a clear reward will follow, but it is an internal state, a mystery that takes place between God and man, a shrine into which no prying eyes should penetrate, an intimate and personal relationship of a son to his Heavenly Father. Everyone prays to their Heavenly Father. Prayer that allows external imitations and visible monotony, c. invisible essence is the internal-personal relationship of man to God, elevating each person to God, reflecting the whole of God in the moment of his ecstasy. Only in this inner mystery, inaccessible to external gaze, does prayer give a person a reward from the Heavenly Father, a divine reward. Finally, fasting also cannot be considered as a merit before God, as a good deed for which a reward awaits: religious fasting in itself has a reward from the Heavenly Father. Prayer and fasting give a person freedom of spiritual life, strong alertness, strength in the fight against temptations, power over nature and the world 837.
This freedom, vigor, and inner strength have their own value, independent of consequences, provide internal good and are not subject to external evaluation: this is the opposite of the gospel fast and the Pharisaic fast. The Pharisees in external acts of almsgiving, prayer and fasting found the basis for religious complacency, which closed their hearts before God; on the contrary, religious wakefulness puts a person before God, opens his soul to heaven. This is how the self-satisfied Pharisee, who fasted twice a week and donated a tenth of his income, and the humble publican prayed. As a feat for reward, the Pharisaic fast was strictly regulated; neither Christ nor His disciples observed such a fast, but “ate and drank.” In this respect, they differed both from the Pharisees’ disciples and from the disciples of John, who “fasted often and said prayers” 838 .
In comparison with the strictly ascetic life of John the Baptist, who “ate neither bread nor drank wine,” Christ seemed to the Pharisees as a man who “loved to eat and drink wine, and was a friend to publicans and sinners” 839. In response to the reproaches of the Pharisees and disciples of John, Christ explained that in modern times fasting is only a natural and free expression of the inner mood, heartfelt contrition, that the ancient path from external to internal, the path of strict regulation of ascetic deeds, does not correspond to the new, filial-free attitude of people towards God, just as harsh patches do not correspond to old clothes and new wine to old wineskins. The new spirit cannot be combined with outdated forms, and someone who has experienced a new mood will not want old forms, just as someone who has tasted good wine will not immediately want bad wine 840.
Attitude towards tax collectors and sinners. The Old Testament law, as a principle of moral life, made a sharp distinction between the righteous and sinners. All pagans, as living outside the law, were considered sinners by nature. And in Jewish society itself, there was a distinction between the righteous, as strict adherents of the law, and the sinners, as transgressors of the law. The Jewish regime required a careful study of the law, but the common people did not have time for this, and therefore they were “a people ignorant of the law, cursed” 841. Fulfilling the law with His 613 commandments, which constrained every step and every minute in the life of those under the law, required intense attention, free time and material resources; it turned out to be unattainable for the poor who worked for a piece of bread. They, of necessity, violated the laws of purity and could not fulfill all the requirements of the law in relation to the church and sacrifices. On their shoulders the law lay as a heavy and unbearable burden 842 - they were the toiling and burdened 843 .
Among them, an indisputable place was occupied by publicans, tax collectors in favor of the hated Roman power, who were inevitably defiled by their very occupation and constant relations with the pagans. All sinners were cursed and despicable for the Jew; on the contrary, the righteous, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the zealots of the law were considered the chosen ones, they were proud and self-satisfied. For poor sinners, there was only one means of salvation left - to obey the righteous as their teachers and take advantage of their benefits; this attitude further enslaved the humiliation of sinners, their oppression, and puffed up the righteous. The gospel has broken down this barrier that separated the righteous from the sinners. Christ acted as a friend of publicans and sinners, was in their company with love, looked for everything that was humiliated, lost and lost 844. According to ancient prophecy, He healed the brokenhearted, preached liberation to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and set the tormented free 845.
His new teaching liberated oppressed sinners from the unbearable burden of an unfulfilled and unenforceable law, removed the curse of the law from them, dispelled the darkness of its ignorance, introduced them into the kingdom of God as they were nomistically - blind, ignorant, damned. Christ called all the oppressed and burdened to Himself, promising them peace of mind, a good yoke and a light burden 846. He discovered mountains in places that were considered valleys, and lowlands where there were mountains. Not only the publican of the parable, who did not dare to raise his eyes to heaven, went to his house more justified than the Pharisee, who smugly thanked God for being better than others; but the tax collectors and sinners who listened to Christ’s parable, according to His word, felt justified before God, reconciled with Him. They really saw the light and were freed, since what was weighing them down turned out to be a ghost, the work of human hands. The secrets of the kingdom of God were hidden from the wise and prudent and were revealed to infants.
So, in relation to everything that obliged Old Testament man to external actions, that constrained him by external rule, the Gospel declared the principle of internal freedom: sons are free 847. In this principle, which penetrates all sides in the relation of the Gospel to the area of the tradition of the elders, to the nomistic regime of the scribes and Pharisees, the essential difference between the Gospel and prophetic polemics with ritual hypocrisy, with a visible coincidence in the letter. Both the ancient prophecy and the Gospel in this respect remain true to their basic principles. The prophets set social good as the highest goal of moral activity: and they fought with sacrificial ritual hypocrisy in the name of social good. In this case, it is important not only that a social good cannot have an absolute character, it must remain from beginning to end within the limits of convention, but it is also important that a conditional social good from a religious point of view can only be the subject of a religious command, an external commandment.
Therefore, the essential question of prophetic preaching was the question of what reveals the divine will more, whether the commandment of burnt offerings or the commandment of love for one's neighbor. Resolving this issue in favor of the social good, resolutely preferring the social good to ritual practice, the prophets found the ultimate basis for themselves in the will of God, in His commandment 848. The Gospel, raising the essential content of the Old Testament law to the height of absoluteness, putting in place of the law the principle of absolute life activity, accordingly determines the Christian’s attitude towards everything external in the spirit of God’s filial freedom.
While prophetic ethics was a temporary equilibrium of two conventions, social and religious, at the height of a historical pass; whereas the legalistic regime of later Judaism consolidated the slavery that was hidden in the very grain of the Old Testament and was not overcome in the prophetic upsurge, the evangelical attitude of the individual to everything “entering into a person from the outside” crowns the absolute content of personal life with freedom and expands internal religious creativity in domination. “The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” - this is the height of religious creativity that the ancient prophets did not dream of, this is something new that the prophets wanted to see, and did not see, hear, and did not hear, these are the new wineskins of the God-son personality. New Testament ethics remains anthropocentric to the extreme. If everything that happens outside is not for a person, everything that comes to him from the outside, everything that happens to him, then from him, from his heart, everything good and evil, pure and unclean.
There is absolutely no need to cope with the laws in order to distinguish the pure from the unclean, the permitted from the unlawful: the person himself must make everything clean. From his own heart comes light, making everything on which it falls bright; if this light dims, then nothing external can cleanse a person. There must be salt in his own soul, healing everything with which he comes into contact 849. This principle of Christian freedom is especially clearly and inspiredly revealed in the letters of the Apostle Paul. There is nothing unclean in itself; only to one who considers something unclean, it is unclean 850, but for the pure everything is clean 851. Those who consider anything unclean have a weak conscience 852; these are the powerless, the weak 853. Christians are called to be strong, courageous and free 854. They were given the knowledge that there is no defilement outside of man, that all days with God are equal, that every creation of God is good, that food and everything external can neither bring a person closer to God nor remove him from Him, that the fear of touching, tasting, touching is instilled only by human teachings 855.
The Apostle knows only two boundaries for Christian freedom: firstly, so that the freedom of the spirit does not pass into carnal licentiousness 856 and so that, secondly, the freedom of the strong does not serve to seduce the weak 857. Christian freedom is defined by love 858.
If this is the relationship of the Gospel to prophetic ethics, then it is clear that Christ turned to prophetic quotations only because they were authoritative for His listeners, and not because the Gospel repeats their teaching. He found in the books of the Old Testament those sayings that corresponded to the spirit of the Gospel, made a choice from various Old Testament passages 859: He freely treated the entire volume of the Old Testament, He always expressed in Old Testament words more than they contained, He always reached through the Old Testament commandment to the original laws of human life, to the ultimate freedom of religious creativity. When He condemned, by the criterion of the Old Testament commandment about respect for parents, the evil tradition of the elders and called only this commandment of God, He did this not because it is on the pages of the Old Testament, on which the laws about Levitical uncleanness are found, but because in the Mosaic commandment He read the natural law of human nature, which stands above all human teachings.
He also placed duties in relation to human needs above duties in relation to the church and the commandment of the indissolubility of marriage above the laws on divorce. Likewise, He accepts the teaching of the Old Testament prophets about the primacy of morality over religious rites and customs in the light of the new principle of personal freedom.
It should be noted, however, that the principle of divinely filial freedom in the Gospel is revealed with some secrecy and gradualism. Despite the general undeniable negative attitude towards the ritual-ascetic norms of eldership, both in His teaching and in life, Christ, however, took them into account in certain cases and did not formulate His negative attitude towards them in the form of a definite abolition of them. So He ordered the healed leper to show himself to the priest and offer the sacrifice for cleansing established by Moses 860. Speaking about the superiority of ethical requirements over cult requirements, the Gospel does not abolish the latter, but only puts them in second place: the sacrifice must be made, having first been reconciled with the brother 861. Comparing the most important things in the law, judgment, mercy and faith, with the tithe sacrifice, the Gospel even instructs: “it was necessary to do this, and not to abandon that” 862. Christ paid the church tax, although he did this in order not to give rise to temptation 863. He and His disciples celebrate the Jewish Passover, although after it he establishes a “new” covenant 864.
Shows zeal for the Jerusalem temple and approves of the woman’s sacrifice, although he taught about the spiritual worship of the Heavenly Father 865. This evangelical secrecy is not explained by the rationalistic assumption that the gospel principle of divine freedom and spiritual worship for the New Testament Teacher Himself was understood only gradually. Two facts must be taken into account that are not in harmony with this explanation. Firstly, the absence of a formal abolition of the tradition of the elders, not only in the first stages of gospel history, but also in the final outcome of the gospel teaching. Secondly, the lack of chronological sequence between the adaptive and pure phases of the Gospel teaching.
Thus, the saying that “it was necessary to leave tithes of mint, anise and cumin” was pronounced by Christ at a time when there could no longer be any doubt about the place, or rather about the inappropriateness of this tithe in the life of the new society of Christ’s disciples, when their negative attitude towards the tradition of the elders had already become clear, when the principle of freedom of the sons of the kingdom had already been expressed - finally, it was pronounced in a speech that marked Christ’s complete break with Judaism. The doctrine of spiritual worship was revealed long before the praise for the sacrifice of a mite for the church. Obviously, the secrecy of Christian freedom was a method of evangelical teaching. The Jews, to whom it was commanded, were not to leave tithes, and the teaching of the Gospel is that, even without leaving tithes, one must fulfill the most important things in the law. Comparing sacrifice and reconciliation, the Gospel does not resolve the question of whether sacrifices need to be made, but only talks about what the one offering the sacrifices needs to do.
In the person of the poor widow, it approves not of the offering to the church, but of the absolute nature of every religious matter. Without allowing any compromise with the old forms of Judaism, the Gospel does not determine the formal abolition of these forms, because it rejects them not in the name of a new form, but in the name of spiritual freedom. Corresponding to the Gospel is such abolition of old forms, which freely stems from the assimilation of a new spirit, and not abolition in the sense of a formal prohibition. A formal prohibition is also a form, an external prescription, which, however, is not reconciled with the freedom of the Christian mood. We will find the best interpretation of this side of Christian freedom again in the Apostle Paul. He explains that the principle of Christian freedom has full meaning only for one who has actually mastered freedom, that it cannot be imposed on a person as a formal prescription, that it can flow only from a free heart. If for someone everything is pure, then this first of all means that he has truly internalized Christian freedom. “Blessed is he who does not condemn himself in what he chooses.”
His bliss is in this freedom, and without freedom there is no bliss. If someone acts according to the rule of freedom, but with doubt in his heart, he “is condemned, because he does not act according to faith, and everything that is not according to faith is sin.” Hence the apostolic advice - to do everything without grumbling and doubt, for everyone to be guided by his own mind 866. The fullness of Christian freedom lies in the fact that it is assimilated freely and expanded without coercion. It is decorated with tolerance and conditioned by mutual non-judgment 867.
This is the relationship of New Testament righteousness to Old Testament righteousness. Essentially, in the new covenant, a legalistic, religious-juridical regime has no place. While John the Baptist came by the way of righteousness, Christ came by another way, in which tax collectors and harlots walked ahead of the sons of the law 868 . The evangelical principle of life is the free manifestation of a creative personality, and therefore the evangelical mood is radically at odds with the legalistic system. Despite this, for the sake of the evangelical mood, the name righteousness 869 is withheld. Of course, this is no longer legalistic righteousness, and the very name of righteousness as applied to New Testament life is an inevitable heritage of the Jewish language. However, it does not turn out to be completely meaningless even on evangelical grounds. The gospel overthrows the legalistic regime not in the name of the moral indifference of primitive savagery; it calls us from legalistic truth not back, but forward, to a state that is higher than legalism - it calls us to truth as a free manifestation of love.
Moral indifference, ethical laxity are below the legalistic regime; but the evangelical mood presupposes the intensification of ethical energy, moral effort - in this respect, the Gospel is not only not inferior to the law, but also surpasses it 870. And if the Gospel makes the first last and the last first, if it puts sinners and harlots ahead of the righteous lawyers, then it precisely reveals moral energy in those rejected by the law, and moral dullness in the lawyers.
The fullness of the legalistic order is embodied in the legal relationship of man to God. Moral work in the Old Testament was understood as work, followed by a reward from God. The Gospel, while retaining the name truth for the New Testament mood, also retained the religious-legal language. In the Gospel parables, man’s relationship to God is represented by the relationship of workers to the owner and slaves to the master. The Gospel compares the evangelistic work to field work, for which a reward awaits in the harvest, when both the sower and the reaper rejoice together 871, and every worker is worthy of a reward for his labors 872. Those persecuted for the truth, reviled and persecuted are promised a “great reward in heaven” 873. This reward is a heavenly treasure that man can gather for himself through his earthly labors; it, unlike earthly treasures, is an undecaying vagina, an unfading treasure, where a thief does not approach and where moths do not eat 874. Thus.
a person can collect wealth for himself from God 875, Who rewards secret alms, secret prayer and secret fasting 876. For God, not a single “good deed” 877 will be lost: even whoever gives a disciple of Christ a cup of water will not lose his reward 878. This reward from the Heavenly Father seems to be consistent with the mood of the workers: the merciful will be shown mercy, peacemakers will be called sons of God, those who forgive the sins of their neighbors will be given forgiveness by the Heavenly Father, those who confess Christ before people will be confessed by Christ before the Heavenly Father 879. With whatever measure someone measures, it will be measured back to him; by which court they judge, they will be judged 880. Therefore there is a reward for the prophet, a reward for the righteous 881. Deprivation for the sake of the kingdom of heaven will be rewarded with a corresponding benefit and vice versa: everyone who exalts himself will be humiliated, and he who humiliates himself will be exalted 882; he who saves his soul will lose it, and he who loses his soul for Christ’s sake will save it 883.
The meek will inherit the earth, the poor will receive the kingdom of God, those who hunger now will be satisfied, those who mourn now will laugh, those who are persecuted will rejoice; on the contrary, grief awaits those who have received the consolation of wealth; those who are satiated will now hunger; those who laugh will now weep and lament 884. The wealthy man who received his goods in earthly life suffers beyond the grave, and the poor Lazarus is comforted after death in the bosom of Abraham 885.
However, religious and legal concepts in the essence of the matter are decisively alien to the Gospel. In order to correctly judge the relationship of the Gospel to religious jurisprudence, one must take into account that in the Gospel teaching, while there is an undoubted qualitative correspondence between the religious mood and its fruits, there is no quantitative proportionality between good deeds and reward, while proportionality is the main feature of jurisprudence. From a subjective or individual point of view, the reward of the gospel always exceeds the labor, the effort of man. A servant who is faithful in a little is placed in charge of much and even of all possessions, so that to everyone who has it is given and increased, and vice versa - from the one who does not have, what he considers his own is taken away 886.
He who leaves for the kingdom of God a house, brothers, sisters, lands, father, mother, wife, children, receives now, in this time, amidst persecutions, much more - a hundred times more houses, and brothers, and sisters, and lands, and fathers, and mothers, and children, and in the century to come, eternal life. The extreme disproportion, the excess of the reward in the parable is expressed under the extraordinary way of serving the master to the slaves 887, so that under The Gospel image of the master and master hides the face of the Heavenly Father, His condescending love. From an objective or comparative point of view, the Gospel rewards do not differ in degree of merit, but turn out to be equal for all worthy ones - and it is this reward, equal for all, that is the highest degree of reward, and the less worthy are equalized with the more worthy. Thus, workers hired in the evening received the same benefits as those who worked in the morning and endured the hardship of a hot day - this is because the owner was more kind than just: his goodness overturned the calculations of legal truth 888.
By the same goodness of the Heavenly Master, he who receives a prophet or a righteous man and even gives a cup of water to a disciple of Christ receives the entire reward of a prophet, a righteous man, a disciple 889. From the subjective and objective side, the gospel reward is not reward according to merit, but the mercy of the Heavenly Father 890. Along with this, the sons of the New Testament kingdom are encouraged to completely abandon legal accounts with heaven, to look at their deeds as merits, and at the Heavenly Father as a master or master, because the master is in no hurry to seat the slave who has returned from the field at the table, but forces him to serve himself at dinner, and does not thank him for fulfilling the order. We are commanded, even after fulfilling everything commanded to us, to recognize ourselves as powerless, worthless, having done only what we were supposed to do 891, and to count only on the mercy of the Heavenly Father. This was directed decisively against Judaistic jurisprudence, which hoped to oblige heavenly justice to retribution through the precise execution of the law and the precise measurement of one’s merits.
With such illumination, the qualitative correspondence of the gospel reward with the moral deed receives a different and definite meaning. Losing the characteristic features of a reward and turning out to be the mercy of the Heavenly Father due to quantitative disproportion with merit, the gospel reward, in its qualitative correspondence with the religious mood, appears to be the actual fruit of moral effort. The difference between reward and fruit is that reward, being always commensurate with merit, is not connected with it essentially, organically, in this regard it is accidental, and therefore its quantitative proportionality hardly acts as a conditional proportionality, which has only comparative significance. On the contrary, the fruit essentially follows from the work and, although quantitatively incommensurable with it, is free from chance and convention. The harvest is a fruit, not a reward, and can only be called a reward figuratively. The reward of the gospel must also be recognized as fruit.
This explains its qualitative correspondence with moral energy, with a religious mood: the merciful are merciful, the forgiving are forgiven. Of course, this is first of all a spiritual fruit, the internal benefit of religious effort. The righteous man of the Gospel carries within himself a reward, while the reward itself, legal from the formal side, is necessarily external, material, noticeable to other people. The Gospel decisively rejects the religious-legal view of external goods - wealth, honor, longevity, as a reward for virtue, irrevocably rejects the very possibility of judging internal dignity by external state, just as it rejects the possibility of judging internal religiosity by external righteousness. It proclaims grief to the rich, the jaded, the venerable. It is also contrary to the Gospel to think that humiliation and suffering for the sake of the kingdom of God in this life, “now,” will be rewarded with external benefits “then,” in the future life.
The disciples of Christ, who left everything for His sake, will receive a reward “now in this time, in the midst of persecution.” Gospel bliss is inner bliss, which is given in visible humiliation and in bodily suffering. When we read in the Gospel about reward from the Heavenly Father, about reward in heaven, about treasure in heaven, in all these expressions we must understand the spiritual fruit of Christian life. “The Father will reward” - this ultimately means that a Christian should not expect anything for himself in terms of reward. He takes from Christ “His cup” and accepts “His baptism” - the cup of suffering and the baptism of blood, but places in the kingdom of heaven are distributed by the Heavenly Father, and these are the places that can only be prepared by the Heavenly Father, i.e. places of spiritual bliss, and not external benefits and honors 892. In reality, the Son of Man commands His disciples to serve and self-sacrifice, but their sitting on the thrones of judges is a distant image of spiritual good 893.
However, the gospel reward is not limited to the ethical-psychic benefits of good behavior. The Gospel, without having the slightest bias towards social utilitarianism, is not limited to ethical eudaimonism. It is religious, mystical. His benefits are spiritually objective. To embrace the depth and boldness of the Gospel teaching, one should turn to the idea of religious and creative anthropocentrism. We have seen the application of this idea to issues of ritual purity and cultic practice. Evangelical anthropocentrism, not coinciding at any point with the old cosmological anthropocentrism, also goes beyond the limits of the subjective world and creates a mystical-objective atmosphere. According to the Gospel, the spiritual attitude of people and God towards man is determined by a person’s own attitude towards his neighbors and God. Already the Old Testament forbade a person to do to others what he did not want for himself, and this indicated a subjective measure for the legal restriction of the individual in the name of society.
The New Testament positively commands that a person determine by his attitude towards others the attitude of others towards himself 894. The Gospel recognizes believing love as a power that can and must conquer the world and inherit the whole earth 895. That this will be a spiritual victory, an invisible reign, this character of the divine-filial predominance does not in the least diminish its reality. Expecting external benefits for self-denial means usury, but spiritually one must recognize self-denial by force: the one who serves everyone will spiritually possess the world - the first will be the one who puts himself last. To expect an external reward from God means to go against the Gospel, but to limit the good of the Gospel to the subjective realm means to act not according to the Gospel. It requires from us nothing less than to believe in complete victory over the world and strive for such a victory - to believe that God is stronger than the world and the principle of good is stronger than the principle of evil. Evangelical anthropocentrism even transcends the boundaries of the world: and God’s attitude towards man, according to the Gospel teaching, is determined by man himself.
God is the Father for those who love in a divine way, who have God's faith. And, in particular, God’s judgment is predetermined by man’s own judgment, since he is justified by his own words and condemned by his own words 896. He will be judged according to his own principles, according to what he recognizes as good and proper and what is evil and improper. If he does something that his own conscience condemns him for, then he creates condemnation for himself from God. He will be judged according to his ideas about God and according to his expectations from God. If he considers God to be the Father, then he will be judged mercifully as a son; if he sees in Him a cruel master and master, then he will be judged as a wicked slave 897. By applying any principle to judgment about others, a person pronounces a sentence on himself, which will inevitably be fulfilled. When the scribes and Pharisees condemned their fathers for beating the prophets, and they themselves did the same, they testified against themselves and were condemned by Christ according to their strict sentence 898.
At the same time, a person must remember that in general the principle of legal justification and the idea of a heavenly master put him in an extremely unfavorable position, since absolute perfection through the law and commandments cannot be achieved: on this path a person will always be condemned. If anyone thinks of pleasing God with a sacrifice of two kopecks, he will inevitably be condemned for not giving away his entire estate. If anyone thinks to earn God's mercy by fasting and chastity, then he will necessarily be condemned for every bite he swallows and for every involuntary movement of lust. Therefore, when applied to other people, it is better for a person to avoid legal standards. Since he himself will be judged by the same court as he judges others 899, then for him it is a direct interest not to judge others at all, to forgive everyone endlessly, because in this case he himself will not be judged and will receive complete forgiveness 900. Be that as it may, in the gospel image of the Son of Man, the power to forgive sins for the first time descended from heaven to earth, and the disciples of Christ received into their hands the keys to heavenly justice 901.
For them there is no mystery of the coming heavenly judgment before which they could tremble. Christian love knows no fear to the last, and there are no external limits to divine freedom.
Prov. III, 30; XII, 16; XIV, 17; XV, 18; XXX, 33; Eccl. VII, 9; I. With. S. I, 22 – 23.
Bow. XII, 51 – 53; Matt. X, 34 – 36.
MP. X, 29.30; Matthew XIX, 29; Luke XVIII, 29. 30.
I.s. P. IX, 8 – 11; XLI, 26; XLII, 12. 13.
Matt. V, 31. 32; XIX, 3 – 9.
Deut. XXIV, 1 – 4 Wed. Jer. III, 1; Small II, 15. 16.
MP. X, 11; Onion. XVI, 18; Matt. XIX, 9.
Mf. V, 32; Onion. XVI, 18.
Matt. V, 32. – In view of the indisputability of the main meaning of the Gospel commandments, for us the question of the meaning of the words παρεκτὸς λ ό γου πορνε ί ας in Μ f. V, 32 and μὴ ἐπὶ πορνε ίᾳ in Μ f. XIX, 9. Apparently, the only possible reading of Matthew, V, 32 is this: whoever divorces his wife, in addition to the guilt of (his) debauchery, also gives her a reason to commit adultery. Probably also Matt. XIX, 9 should be read in a similar way: whoever divorces his wife, even if not for wantonness, and marries another, commits adultery. In any case, one cannot find in these words an indication of the wife’s adultery as one of the reasons for a permitted divorce, which would constitute an exception to the prohibition, which is necessarily conditional. Here, the impossibility (inconceivability) of the fact of a husband’s voluntary abandonment of his wife who has already left him is of decisive importance. The wife leaving her husband is discussed in Mp. X, 12, and in Matt. V, 32 and XIX, 9 speaks only about the husband, only about what comes from his initiative, what depends on him.
All the exegetical confusion stems from the fact that modern concepts of church marriage and divorce are introduced into the Gospel text, where, however, only natural union and actual abandonment are understood.
In order to give social force to personal-free absoluteness, it is necessary to turn it into formal legal law. And when this happened for the first time in church history, when the church-state law on the indissolubility of the marriage union was first pronounced, from that moment horror hung over the earth.
MP. X, 29.30; Matt. X, 37; XIX, 29; Onion. XIV, 26; XVIII, 29. 30.
Ref. XXII, 8, 11 (7, 10).
Lion. XIX, 12; Number XXX, 3; Deut. XXIII, 22 – 24 (21 – 23); Mf. V, 33.
Mf. V, 34 – 36; XXIII, 16–22.
Lion. XXIV, 19 – 21; Deut. XIX, 21.
Lion. XIX. 17. 18, Deut. XXXII, 35.
I.s. S. XXVIII, 2; Pl. Jer. III, 27 30 – 31; Prov. XXIV, 29 and even XXV, 22. 23: “if your enemy is hungry, feed him,” etc.
Mf. V, 39–42; Onion. VI, 29 – 30.
Rome. XII, 21. However, it remains doubtful whether the words of the apostle should not be understood in the Old Testament everyday-utilitarian sense.
Onion. VII, 37; Mf. VII, 1.
Mf. XII, 7; John VIII, 15; Rom. XIV, 3.
Matthew V, 44 ff. Onion. VI, 32 ff.
John VII, 19; VIII, 17; XV, 25; Onion. X, 26, etc.
Do not owe anyone anything except mutual love; For he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments: do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet (another), and all the others are contained in this word: love your neighbor as yourself. Love does not harm your neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
What is in this place last. St. Paul (cf. the same briefly Gal V, 14) πλήρωμανόμου does not have the meaning legi satisfacere, this is evident, firstly, from the fact that in other places he talks about keeping the Commandments, which is denoted by the term τήρησιςἐντολῶν θεοῦ (1 Cor. VII, 19), secondly, from the fact that he portrays love in Christian-absolute terms.
Mf. XI, 12, 16; Bow. XVI, 16. 17.
Matt. II, 28–28; Bow. VI, 1 – 5.
Mf. XII, 9 – 13; Matt. III, 1 – 5; Bow. VI, 6 – 10; XIII, 10 – 16; XIV, 1–6.
Mf. XXIII, 23; Bow. XI, 39.
Mf. XV, 1 – 20; MP. VII, 1 – 23.
Mf. XII, 35; Bow. VI, 45.
Mf. XXIII, 25 – 28; Bow. XI, 39.
Bow. XI, 41 Gal. IV, 8..
Bow. XXI, 34 – 36; Matt. XXVI, 41 par.
Matt. XI, 18.19; Bow. VII, 33. 34.
Mf. IX, 14 – 17; MP. II, 18 – 22; Bow. V, 33 – 39
Mf. IX, 9 – 11; XI, 19; MP. II, 14 – 15; Bow. V, 30; VII, 37–39; XV; XIX, 1 – 10.
Matt. V, 13; VI, 22 23; MP. IX, 49. 50; Bow. XI, 34 – 36.
Rome XIV, 14. 17; and Cor. VIII, 4 – 8; Col. I, 22; 1 Tim. IV. 4.
Rome XIV, 19 ff. XV, 1 ff. Wed. Matt. XVII, 26. 27.
Onion. IV, 17. Some parts of the Old Testament Bible turn out to be evidence against others for Christ.
Matt. VIII, 4 par. Wed. Onion. XVII, 14.
Matt. XXIII, 23; Onion. XI, 42.
MP. XII, 41–44; Onion. XXI, 1 – 4; John IV, 21 – 23.
Rome. XIV, 5; Phil. II, 14.
Matt. XI, 12; Onion. XVI, 16.
Matt. V, 12; Onion. VI, 23. 35.
Matt. VI, 20; XIX, 21; MP. X, 21; Onion. XII, 33; XVIII, 22.
Mf. V, 7. 9; VI, 14; X, 32.
Mf. VII, 2; Onion. VI, 38.
Mf. X, 41. 42; MP IX, 41.
Mf. XXIII, 12; Onion. XIV, 11; XVIII, 14.
Mf. V, 3 words. Onion. VI, 21 – 26.
Mf. XXIV, 47; XXV, 21. 23 29; Onion. XII, 43. 44; XIX, 16 – 19.
Onion. XII, 37 Wed. XVII, 7. 8.
Mf. X, 41. 42; MP. IX, 41.
Bow. VI, 32 33. 34 χάρις = VI, 35; Mf. V, 46 μισθός.
Matt. XX, 20 – 23; MP. X, 35 – 40.
Matt. XIX, 28; Onion. XXII. 30.
Matt. VII, 12; Onion. VI, 31.
Matt. V, 5; Onion. XII, 32.
Onion. XIX, 20 – 23; Matt. XXV, 26 ff.
Mf. XXI, 41 – 43; XXIII, 29–31.
Matt. VII, 2; Onion. VI. 38.
Mf. VI, 12. 14. 15; XVIII, 23–35; MP. XI, 26; Onion. XI, 4; XVII, 3. 4.
Mf. IX, 6 par. XVI, 19; XVIII, 18.
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