On the other hand, what humility! I have already mentioned that, according to the Gospel, John the Baptist says about himself: I am not worthy to bend down and untie the shoe strap of Him Who is coming after me – that is, Jesus Christ... Such an incomprehensible, invincible, indestructible force, and on the other hand, there is consciousness: I am only transparency, I am only a voice.

What does this voice mean? Here I want to read to you from the Gospel of Luke the first sermon of John the Baptist. In the third chapter, from verse two to verse eighteen, those of you who have the gospel can read the following:

In the time of the chief priests Annas and Caiaphas, there was a word of God to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. And he went through all the country round about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, who says: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight; let every valley be filled, and every mountain and hill be made low, the crookedness straightened, and the rough paths made smooth: and all flesh shall see the salvation of God" (Isaiah 40:3-5). John said to the people who came to be baptized by him: "Offspring of vipers! Who inspired you to flee from the wrath to come? Produce worthy fruits of repentance, and do not think to say in yourselves: "Our father is Abraham"; for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. Already the axe lies at the root of the tree: every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. And the people asked him, What shall we do? He answered and said to them, "He who has two garments, let him give to the needy; and whoever has food, do likewise. The publicans also came to be baptized, and said to him, "Teacher! What should we do? He answered them, "Do not demand anything more than what is determined for you." The soldiers also asked him: "What shall we do?" And he said to them, Do not offend anyone, do not slander anyone, and be content with your salary. And when the people were waiting, and all were thinking in their hearts about John, whether he was not the Christ, John answered everyone: "I baptize you with water, but there comes the One who is stronger than me, from whom I am not worthy to untie the strap of my shoes; He will baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire. His spade is in his hand, and he will cleanse his threshing floor, and gather the wheat into his garner, and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. He preached many other gospels to the people, teaching them

Next, I will speak about what is contained in the heart of John the Baptist's preaching: repentance.

You probably remember that Christ is called in the Old and New Testaments by two names: Emmanuel, that is, "God is with us," "God is in our midst," and Jesus, which means "God saves." And John the Baptist clearly indicates from what God saves us and by what way this salvation can be obtained. God saves us from sin, and the way to this salvation is repentance. But what is sin? Often we think of sin as a violation of good relations with people. But there is much more to sin than that, it is more dangerous, it is more terrible. Here are some ideas about what sin is; I take them from the Old Testament and, mainly, from the New Testament.

Sin is a violation of the law; but what law? — the law of life. Life in the true sense of the word is possible only through the participation of God Himself in life, since He is the only unconditioned, independent source of life, it is better to say: He is life itself. To tear oneself away from Him is to enter the realm of dimming, extinction, and finally death itself. Therefore, sin is lawlessness; But do not be deceived. To be obedient to the law does not mean to be "law-abiding" in the legal sense of the word, that is, to be the obedient of rules that remain external to us. To understand this better, we can compare what the Old and New Testaments tell us about the law.

In the New Testament, Christ also gives us commandments, but the attitude to them is different from that to the Old Testament prescriptions: Christ's commandments teach us not how to act, but what to be; Christ's commandments are the way. We cannot treat them slavishly, obeying out of fear or in the hope of reward. Through the commandments, we grow into communion, into a deep, ever more perfect unity with God, we partake of His perfection and holiness. Not from the fulfillment of God's commands, but from kinship with what the Apostle Paul calls the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16), kinship with the approach, with the understanding of God, we can save ourselves; and to be saved means to partake of the Divine life. This means that what is presented to us in the New Testament in the form of laws is in essence not rules of life, but indications of what should be in us, in our heart, in our mind, the force that moves our life. This is not an external law, but a description of the inner man (1 Peter 3:4).

In this respect, when I say that we cannot be saved if we violate the law of life, I am not talking about actions, but about this law of life becoming truly our being, and we cannot act otherwise, because we have already joined the thought, the plan of God. If we share His desire, if we love what He loves, we are one with Him.

And this is very important, because it is very easy to turn the New Testament rules that Christ gives us into the Old Testament law, to become fulfillers, as it were, remaining outside of this experience. I remember a man who received the Gospel in this way. He considered himself a pure, bright Christian. He would never let a beggar pass without calling him and giving him a bowl of soup and a copper coin; but he never let a beggar into the house. He would stop him in the doorway and say, "Don't you dare step with your dirty shoes into my clean corridor.. And when he had finished eating the soup and getting a penny, he would say, "Now go and don't come back to me, I have given you everything you need!"

This is the difference between keeping the law in the legal sense, and becoming a person for whom the commandment is the call of life: becoming a person who cannot do otherwise.

The second concept of sin, which is also very important and related to the previous one, is separation from God. We treat the will of God as an external law only because we are cut off from God in our hearts. This separation of our heart from God, our will from the will of God, our thoughts from the thoughts and ideas of the Divine is our basic sinfulness, that state of half-death, of tarnishment, of which I spoke earlier. But sin still develops further, and from this state of isolation are born its consequences; orphanhood, internal discord, discord with people, enmity with the rest of creation. And in this respect, sin spreads, acquires an infinite number of different shades: hatred, fear, greed, all kinds of self-centeredness, because we have lost God. At the beginning of the Gospel of John it is said (in Russian translation) that the Word of God was to God. The Greek text does not say that this Word is "to God," but that the Word is as if torn, stretched, and wholly directed at God and the Father. This is the real relationship of man to God, of which Christ is a model. But we are torn away from Him and wither, like a twig that is cut off, cut off, torn from the tree.

The third thing I want to say about sin is that one should not be comforted by the thought that there are major and minor sins. Of course, there is a difference; But even a small sin, if it is voluntary, consciously and cynically chosen, can kill the soul. As an example of what a petty sin can do, I will give a comparison. During the war, I was a doctor, and one night a seriously wounded officer, pierced through by a machine-gun burst, was brought to our unit from the front nearby. One would expect that he could only die. But he was lucky: none of the vital organs were affected, he was operated on, treated, he survived. And that same night I was summoned, because a young soldier had been brought. He was in a tavern, quarreled with another soldier, both were drunk, who brandished a small penknife, stabbed his comrade in the neck and cut a large vessel from him; and when they brought him to the hospital, he was near death; He was barely pumped out. Here again: a machine gun can be imagined as a major sin, a murderous phenomenon – what is a penknife compared to a heavy machine gun? And at the same time, a person could die from it...

The same happens if we are careless about our sinful desires, about how we are drawn to sin, how we begin to love and cherish this "small" sin, how we finally reach it. In comparison, a major sin is sometimes less deadly. The first person who came to me for confession was a murderer. His heart was broken by repentance, horror at what he had done. Yes, he then served time in prison, and that time in prison was a time of healing. At the same time, thousands and thousands of people accumulate many small sins, not noticing how these sins fester them, make them powerless, irresponsible. In this respect, we can say: wherever you cross a river, no matter how you cross it – fording, swimming, on a bridge, in a boat, you find yourself on the enemy side, you have betrayed your true calling, you have betrayed yourself, because you have ceased to be a whole person. These are the different approaches to sin.

I will return to this in another context. But now I want to move on to another question: the question of how to get rid of sin, what to do.