Christ and the intelligentsia: yesterday and today(?) Who is most guilty for the death of Christ?

Christ and the Intelligentsia: Yesterday and Today (?)

I published this text on “Interfax-Religion”. I will be glad to receive comments.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin

Who is most guilty for the death of Christ? The authorities, the priests, or the intelligentsia of that time, the “conscience of the nation”? With whom should the Church be today? With this very “conscience”, with the “enlightened class”, or with “tsapki, embezzlers, sell-out show-centaurs”? Let’s try to understand this by turning to the New Testament.

Yes, the Lord Jesus was executed by the Roman authority, and before that He was condemned by priests and elders. But they did not do it at once. To build the accusation, many provocations were needed: tricky questions, tests of loyalty to religious and secular law. And these provocations were provided mainly by the Pharisees — people who were not at all contemptible, but, on the contrary, were esteemed by the people as moral and spiritual authorities. Independent of spiritual and secular authorities. Carefully, without driving matters to rebellion, they opposed them. They liked to adapt religious norms to “modern life.” They opposed the death penalty. For the most part they shunned politics. They called for the separation of religious power from the secular — the latter, they said, had “blood on its hands.” They were literally “separated” — from the unenlightened philistines, from the arrogant priesthood, from those who collaborated with the hated occupying power (though once, indeed, it was the Pharisees who supported its arrival to bring a reasonable republican order to a fractured Judea). They loved to pray not in synagogues but at home, anticipating the “private religiosity” fashionable in the separated circles of the 21st century.

In a word, we are speaking of the most genuine intelligentsia. They didn’t need Christ. They were convinced that they knew better than He where to lead the people and where the path of reason, peace, progress, and prosperity lay. All the more so because He joined in feasts with tax collectors — dishonest collectors of occupation taxes. In His circle were known wanton women, and while on the Cross, He promised to lead into His Kingdom a common bandit first. And before that He predicted the condemnation of the “best people of the nation” to Gehenna, and even compared them to unclean animals!

All that happened then painfully recalls the present times. For people who for a century and a half have fancied themselves the mind, honor, and conscience of several epochs, the words and deeds of Christ which are accomplished in His Body — the Church — are unbearable. These people still ask tricky questions in order later, publicly or privately, to denounce: Christians are against the Constitution, they are no friends of Caesar! Even if they are, he would only lose from this friendship… They still want to bracket us out of the life of the people — “go into the forests, pray there, don’t bother us.” They still demand to shun those whose handshakes they themselves do not wish or simply fear. And most importantly — they are still convinced of their usefulness to society, of their rightness and enlightenment, of their right to consider themselves better than other people: “robbers, evildoers, adulterers” (Lk. 18:11), swindlers and thieves, anchovies and rabble, and as for “this people”, “this people who knows not the law is accursed” (Jn. 7:49).

In all this, our humanists, truly, are for some reason afraid to tell themselves honestly: they and Christ have different paths. They claim that “God forgives everyone,” although it is enough to read the New Testament and see: it speaks of the wrath of God and the fury of God, of how the Lord Jesus curses people who do not fulfill His commandments, and speaks of the eternity of their posthumous torments. Which, by the way, are much worse than all pre-trial detention centres, camps, prisons, firing squads, and gas chambers. Precisely because they are eternal.

The only way out is repentance. That is, acknowledging one’s own wrongness and readiness to change. At the very least — never to repeat what was done wrongly. To read the evening prayers at least once and compare them with one’s worldview. The modern Pharisees, however, seek another way out: a cunning one. To forget the heritage of triumphant Christianity and be ecstatic about an accommodationist theology, born in the diaspora, under the dominance of secularism. To remember those words from the Gospel that they like, and to dispute or ignore the others. But “is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13)

No, “He is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). And the Church will always speak about God’s truth, even if it — by stick, carrot, or any other means of training — is being taught to keep silent or to be a free supplement to a culture of consumption, self-justification, comfort, health, and prosperity. The task of the Church is not to adapt to society. Its task is to change it. Or at least to manage to cry out: you are living wrongly and, if you do not turn your path by 180 degrees, you will perish. At least, the great cities will perish. “He who has an ear, let him hear” (Rev. 2:17).

Print, save, email as .pdf