"If you find an ox of your enemy, or his donkey that is lost, bring him to him. If you see the donkey of your enemy fallen under its burden, do not leave it; unpack with him." —Exodus 23:4-5.

This means that the call to return a lost animal to the enemy or to help unpack it is the seed from which new relationships between people grow. When friendship or enmity fades into the background, something much more important is revealed—the need to respect the other person, to help him—what may be called the theology of an outstretched hand, a hand given not only to a friend but also to an enemy.

This theme, one of the main ones in the Gospel, finds its culmination in the second appearance of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Jesus here reminds us of what he said in the Sermon on the Mount. Appearing in the book of Exodus, this theme undergoes a series of transformations in the books of Wisdom and in the prophets, until it finally results in the Sermon on the Mount into a formula about love for enemies.

Of course, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to love the enemy. But Jesus does not offer the morality of prohibitions and permissions, as it was before Him and as it is now: this is forbidden, and this is permitted. Jesus gives us the morality of direction, the morality of the ideal, which is important to strive for, the road to which we must go, but which, like the peaks of the Himalayas, remains inaccessible to the majority. And, nevertheless, a landmark outside of which Christianity is impossible.

This morality is largely related to the word shalom. Jesus says: "As the Father has sent me, so I also send you" (John 20:21). But this has already been mentioned in the 17th chapter, in the farewell discourse. The peace that Jesus leaves to His disciples, the uniqueness of the relationship between Him and the Father are the main topics of the farewell conversation. The high priestly prayer of Jesus contains the theme of messengership.

This is also what is spoken of in the Gospel of Matthew. The fact is that in the Gospel the messenger – in Greek apostolos – is equal to the one who sent him, in the figure of the messenger there is the fullness of the sender, so the messenger must be treated as the one who sent him. Jesus leaves the disciples as His deputies, messengers. And since each of the disciples is His deputy, then the relationship between them (and consequently between people in general) begins to develop in a completely different way than it did before. We must remember that every person is left by Jesus as His substitute, whoever he may be. This is probably very difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept, but this is the meaning of what Christ tells us.

The Resurrected One gives the disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit. "Receive ye the Holy Spirit," He says (John 20:22). In the Acts of the Apostles, we will talk about a similar event. The disciples are gathered in a room, and tongues of flame descend on them — the gift of the Holy Spirit is given to them (ch. 1). Do the Acts of the Holy Apostles and the Gospel of John speak of different events or of the same thing? Acts says nothing about Jesus appearing to the disciples at this point, and the Gospel of John says nothing about tongues of fire. Nevertheless, the situation is the same: the disciples are gathered together, and the gift of the Holy Spirit is given to them. The reason for the differences in the stories is most likely that the narrator is touching on something almost inexpressible, so although the setting is the same—the room where the disciples are gathered—the touch of God is conveyed in different ways.

Here we are confronted with a very important, but not well described in literature phenomenon of God's action. It is often such that words cannot tell about it, words turn out to be powerless. The Apostle Paul testifies that he heard verbs which, as it is said in the Russian translation, "cannot be told to a man", in the original – "it is impossible to retell" (2 Corinthians 12:4). When we read in Acts how Jesus appeared to the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, it is said in one place that the disciples "stood in a daze, hearing the voice, but seeing no one" (9:7), and in another that they saw the apparition, but did not hear the voice (22:9): "They saw the light and were afraid, but they did not hear the voice of Him who spoke." Of course, the question arises: in what case was the mistake made?

However, there is no mistake in either case, but the phenomenon experienced by Paul and those around him is such that it is impossible to convey it in words. Liturgical tradition and Tradition resolve this question definitely: we are talking about one event, told in different ways. With this seeming contradiction, the Gospel tells us that the main thing of man's experience with God cannot be expressed in words.

Finally, here Jesus pronounces the words: "To whom you forgive sins, they will be forgiven; on whom you leave, they will remain" (John 20:23). These words repeat the idea expressed twice in the Gospel of Matthew, in chapters 13 and 18. Of all that is in the Gospel, these words are perhaps the most confusing to the orthodox Jew, to whom it is clear that only God can forgive sins, or the one against whom the sin has been committed, but not someone else. Of course, when we forgive a person, we do not absolve him of responsibility for what he has done. We remove from his heart the heaviness that arises after he feels guilty, a sinner who needs repentance. And he is given the strength to overcome the consequences of this sin. Experience shows that sin can crush a person. It is from such crushing that Jesus frees the paralytic.

Repentance frees a person from being crushed by sin, but not from responsibility for what he has done. We often perceive absolution as an act of absolution from responsibility. That is why sometimes those critics of Christianity who say that a Christian can sin as much as he wants, and then repent and everything will be forgiven him. Of course, the essence of repentance lies elsewhere. It frees a person from the weight that can crush him. In the sacrament of repentance, a person is given, as it were, the opportunity to plow the very earth that he once burned, to plow in order to return it to its former beauty. Unfortunately, this does not always work out, especially if sins against the dead are recognized. In this case, debts to the dead must be repaid to the living. For those who did not have time to help their grandmother, there are other people's grandmothers. This is the salvific nature of the sacrament of repentance—in its orientation not toward the past, but toward the future.

The third meeting of Jesus with the disciples takes place a week later. Suddenly appearing before them, Jesus turns to Thomas, the apostle who had been absent the previous time and who refused to believe that the Master had risen until he himself had seen the wounds on His body. This is another indication of the distrust for which Jesus rebukes the disciples in Mark's Gospel; here it is depicted as Thomas' distrust. Jesus turns to Thomas and shows him His wounds on His hands, legs and ribs, that is, He shows Himself Crucified to His disciple. And Thomas recognizes the Risen One in the Crucified One, he recognizes the reality of His sufferings, the endless pain that He endured on the Cross.

In this sense, the experience of Thomas is comparable to the experience of the myrrh-bearing women. The women saw the Resurrected One because they were going to the Dead One. They did not renounce Him, who was ridiculed and executed, and therefore they were the first to meet the Risen One. Thomas, touching Jesus' wounds, realizes that Jesus has risen. It is impossible to talk about the Risen One while forgetting the Cross, although we sometimes try to do so. The empty tomb is inseparable from the Cross on which He was crucified; One without the other loses its meaning.

For the fourth time, Jesus appears to the disciples on the Sea of Tiberias, and again they do not immediately recognize Him. But when they find out, although they do not dare to believe it, Jesus takes the bread (in the Greek text the same verb lambano is used, "I take," as in the story of the Last Supper and in the story of the multiplication of the loaves) and says to them: "Come and eat," that is, he performs the sacrament of the Eucharist (John 21:12-13). In the description of this fourth apparition, the Eucharist is spoken of as the center of the spiritual life of Christians.