2 There are many examples of people with hardened hearts reluctantly listening to things that are not in their hearts and deliberately closing their eyes so as not to see things that might shake their prejudices.

The Jews were waiting for the Messiah as an invincible conquering king who would conquer the whole world and reign forever. The true Messiah—Christ, the Son of God—came and began to preach His teaching. But the Pharisees, scribes, high priests, and in general the leaders of the Jewish people did not want to hear this sermon and deliberately turned a blind eye to all the deeds done by Jesus. They would neither listen nor see that which proved the falsity of their doctrine and the divinity of the coming Messiah, whose kingdom is not of this world; they did not want to because their hearts had become hardened under the influence of obsessive thoughts about the Messiah-conqueror.

The Apostle Paul preached about the risen Christ before the Areopagus in Athens; but when he came to the very event of the Resurrection, some members of the Areopagus mocked him, and others said: "Of this we will hear thee at another time" (Acts 17:32). They did not listen to the preacher because their hearts were hardened by the same obsessive thought about the impossibility of the resurrection of the dead.

So it is in our time: our intelligentsia (of course, not all of them), who know neither Jesus Christ nor His Gospel, who have left the childish faith brought there in secondary school and replaced it with fashionable atheism, as a sign of a supposedly higher intellectual development, do not even want to hear about Christ the God-Man, the Son of God. Having read Büchner, Renan, Strauss, Haeckel, our intellectuals have become so hypnotized by their false teachings that it is very, very difficult to bring them out of this hypnotic sleep. An unbelieving student, exhausted by the consciousness of the aimlessness and meaninglessness of human life, wrote to me about his passionate desire to know the meaning of life; I pointed out to him the necessity of studying the gospel and the person of Jesus Christ in order to know the meaning of life, and he told me that the doubts deeply rooted in his soul positively prevented him from even unfolding the gospel. Let me give you another example. In Nice, I often had the opportunity to meet with one of my acquaintances, a doctor, an elderly man. Apparently, he was also worried about the question: why do we live? He was looking for an answer to this question and took up the reading of the Gospel. But the spirit of denial and doubt, which had taken possession of him already at school, decisively prevented him from studying the Gospel without prejudice, and afterwards he wrote to me that he envied people who believed, but he himself could not believe what happened almost two thousand years ago and about which he could say and write anything, since there was no (?) criterion and factual evidence.

3 It is given to you to know (or rather, to understand) the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but it is not given to them.

The word given implies the one by whom it is given. In this case, we can mean God, by Whom it is given to some to understand the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, and to others it is not. But is it correct to ascribe to God such inequality in the distribution of His most important gifts, the understanding of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven? Of course not. God created people in His image and likeness, and this likeness gives all people the opportunity to understand the mysteries that Christ revealed. These mysteries, in order to comprehend them, do not require special mental development; They are very simple and are easily perceived, if not by the mind, then by the heart. One only needs to believe in Him Who has revealed these mysteries (John 6:28-29). One must either believe or be convinced that Christ was indeed the Son of God and that therefore His every word is the truth. But this opportunity to believe or be convinced of the divinity of Christ is given by the people themselves. If one undertakes to study the Gospel without prejudice, awakening from the hypnotic sleep inspired by the Büchners, Haeckels, etc., then he gives himself the opportunity to comprehend the mysteries revealed by the Lord. If, however, nothing can awaken him, if he has allowed himself to be so hypnotized that the mysteries revealed by Christ become inaccessible to him, then, of course, he himself does not give himself the opportunity to comprehend them.

In general, one should blame oneself first of all for any failure; In looking for the cause of failure, one must first of all ask oneself the question: is it not my own fault that such and such a thing does not come to me, that it falls out of my hands? And with conscientious research, it almost always turns out that the culprit of all failures is the loser himself. Thus, the Lord's expression, "It is given to you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but it is not given to them," it seems to me that it should be understood in this way: you (that is, the Apostles), who have renounced everything that bound you to the world, who have renounced property, family and friends, and have followed Me, you have thereby acquired the opportunity to understand the mysteries revealed by Me; but by your deeds it has been given to you to understand them. And they, who have hardened their hearts with coarse selfishness and befogged their minds with the false teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, — it is precisely by this selfishness and obscuration of the mind that it is not given to understand the mysteries revealed by Me. Consequently, the conditions in which we place ourselves give or do not allow us to understand these mysteries. And he who has placed himself in favorable conditions, who thus has all that is necessary for the knowledge of the truth, it will be given to him to know it, and this knowledge will increase; but whoever has placed himself in other conditions that are not conducive to the knowledge of the truth, deprives himself of any opportunity to know it, deprives himself even of the desire for God and the knowledge of Him, which is innate in all people, even that which everyone who bears the name of man has.

CHAPTER 15. Answers to the scribe and the two disciples. Calming the Storm. The Healing of the Possessed in the Land of the Gadarenes. Healing of the bleeding woman. The resurrection of Jairus' daughter. The healing of two blind men and a dumb demoniac man. Resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain

Answers to the scribe and the two disciples

On the very day when the Lord was teaching the people in parables, He came in the evening again to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowds of people gathered around Him again, and He wanted to get into a boat to swim to the other side. At that time the scribe came to Him and said, "Teacher! I will follow You wherever You go.

Wishing to test whether he was really ready to become His disciple, wishing to discover His innermost thoughts, Jesus explained to him that to be a disciple and to follow Him is not so easy for people who are devoted to the comforts of life, to earthly goods: foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.

This answer apparently made a strong impression on those of Christ's companions who were already called His disciples; on the faces of many of them one could see their readiness to follow Him; but to test the power of this readiness, He said to one of them, "Follow me." This disciple had just lost his father and was about to bury him. Therefore, he hesitated and wondered what he should do? He considered it impossible to break the custom and not attend his father's funeral, and therefore, deciding to leave Jesus for a while, he asked permission to go first to bury his father, promising to return afterwards and follow Jesus. But Jesus did not give the permission that was asked: "Let the dead," He said, "bury their dead.

"The word dead, which is used twice here," says Bishop Michael, has two different meanings: in the first place, it means the spiritually dead, and in the second, the dead in the proper sense, the bodily dead. The Jews used the word dead to refer to a person who was indifferent to an object, or over whom a certain object had no influence. Thus, to be dead to the world, to the law (Rom. 7:4), to sin (Rom. 6:2) means that the world, the law, and sin have no influence on man, have no power over him, that he is free in relation to them, acts as if they did not exist. Thus there are people who are dead to religion, being deaf to its voice. Such were those of whom the Saviour speaks here. "Leave the dead, who are deaf to my word, to my work, who do not understand and do not understand it, and who are dead because of their sins" (Eph. 2, 1, 3); leave it to them to bury your dead, and you, who have heeded the word of life preached by Me, follow Me, continue to be My disciple." The Lord wanted this, apparently not entirely understandable, prohibition to pay the last debt to the deceased father, or to test the character and devotion of this disciple to Himself, since true love for Christ must leave for Him both relatives and friends (Matt. 10:37; Luke 14:26), or to warn and protect him from his relatives, who might wish to distract him from Christ. Perhaps the Lord saw that the cares of the home, the cares of life, would completely distract this disciple from the work of God, and therefore does not allow him to depart from Himself. Without a doubt, the duty of children is to obey their parents, to pay homage to them both in life and in death, and the Lord does not destroy this duty. He only teaches that for the sake of preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God one must leave everything when circumstances require it" (Bishop Michael, Explanatory Gospel, 1).

The other disciple did not wait for Jesus' call and said to Him, "I will follow You, Lord!" but first let me bid farewell to my household (Luke 9:61). And Christ did not give him the permission he asked. The first disciple had a more valid reason for a short absence - the death of his father; the other simply did not have the strength to immediately break all ties with the past: wishing to follow the Lord, he was aware of his attachment to earthly life with all its joys, and in him there was a struggle between two opposite desires; finally, the desire to follow Jesus begins to win, and he, delighted with such a victory, himself, without challenge, hastens to say: I will follow You, Lord! but... Here the struggle begins again, life beckons to itself, and the ardent disciple says bashfully and timidly: but first allow me to say goodbye to my household.