but ye do not do my words;

I will reject you. [3]

This means: it is impossible to read the Gospel without doing what it says. And who of us does? That is why it is the most unreadable of books, the most unknown.

V

The world as it is and this Book cannot be together. He or she: the world needs not to be what it is, or this Book needs to disappear from the world.

The world has swallowed it as a healthy man swallows poison, or a sick man swallows medicine, and struggles with it in order to take it into itself, or to vomit it out forever. He has been fighting for twenty centuries, and for the last three centuries he has been struggling in such a way that even the blind can see that they will not be together; or this Book, or this world is finished.

VI

People blindly read the Gospel, because they are accustomed. At best, I think: "The Galilean idyll, the second failed paradise, the divinely beautiful dream of the earth about heaven; but if you fulfill it, then everything will go to hell." Is it scary to think so? No, it's habitual.

For two thousand years, people have been sleeping on the edge of a knife, hiding it under the pillow – a habit. But "the Lord called Himself Truth, and not habit." [4]

The "dark water" in our eye when we read the Gospel is a non-surprise – a habit. "People do not move away from the Gospel to the proper distance, do not allow it to affect themselves as if they were reading it for the first time; they are looking for new answers to old questions; they strain out the mosquito and swallow the camel." [5] To read it for the thousandth time, as for the first time, to throw the "dark water" of habit out of one's eye, to suddenly see and be amazed – this is what is needed to read the Gospel properly.

VII

"They were greatly amazed at His teaching," this is at the very beginning of Jesus' preaching, and the same, at the very end: "all the people were amazed at His teaching" (Mark 1:22, 11, 18).

"Christianity is strange," says Pascal. [6] "Strange", extraordinary, surprising. The first step to it is surprise, and the further into it, the more amazing it gets.

"The first step to the highest knowledge (gnosis) is considered by Ev. Matthew is amazed... as Plato also teaches: "The beginning of all knowledge is wonder," recalls Clement of Alexandria, it seems to be one of the "unwritten words of the Lord", an agrapha, perhaps, in the Aramaic original of Matthew, which has been lost to us: