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:

He who seeks, let him not rest...

until he finds it;

and when he finds it, he will be amazed;

being amazed, he reigns;

having reigned, he will rest. [7]

VIII

The publican Zacchaeus "sought to see Jesus as He was of Himself; but he could not follow the people, because he was small in stature; and running forward, he climbed up a fig tree" (Luke 19:3-6).