The Church has been proclaiming the Great Joy – the Gospel (Good News, Message) – for two thousand years: The Kingdom of God has arrived, it is already among you and within you! ‘I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people,’ ‘Rejoice!’, ‘That your joy may be full’, ‘No one will take your joy from you’, ‘Rejoice always!’… With these and similar words, the Church testifies that it lives in the fullness of Being, of Happiness. The Gospel, as articulated by the Church, is theology as a revelation of reality, which the Church has lived for two millennia. What does the Church live by and what joy does it proclaim? Here is the joy: The Kingdom of God (Happiness) has arrived – it is already among us and in us! Thus, from now on (this ‘now’ began two thousand years ago and this ‘present’ – the Unending Day – will have no end), every person can, if they wish (thus the Church calls everyone to Repentance: accept the Gift of Happiness), live the fullness of Being, for Happiness has arrived! What is the Gospel about? It’s about us being saved: we were orphans – we have become children of God in Christ (adopted by the Heavenly Father); we were mortally ill, crippled, paralyzed, leprous, deaf, mute, blind – God has healed us, we are healthy (though not everyone knows this, only those who have heard the Gospel of Salvation (Healing) and, trusting, have tried to use their healthy (healed, cured) bodies: ‘believe – rise and walk!’); we were poor – we received an inseparable (indelible) treasure, became heirs, ‘owners’ of all Reality; we were slaves (of sin, decay, death, space, time) – we have become free in the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the grace of the Resurrection… And all this, note, is in the past tense (completed and finished action): healed, liberated, deified, resurrected (not: will be healed, liberated, resurrected someday… ‘Someday’ – these words do not evoke full joy; of course, better someday than never… – how much sadness is in these words?! But as soon as we say ‘someday’, not ‘now’, ‘today’ (‘and now is already’), we speak from the position of a religion of expectation – the Old Testament and pagan religions, which promise happiness in the future: the Messiah will come… after the tomb you will receive a reward for…).
Why do we (who consider ourselves Christians, even Orthodox, who say they know the Gospel and at least partially live it) not rejoice?! Because we do not understand the Gospel – the joyful news, what it is about, although formally baptized into the Mysteries of the Kingdom of God, we should have the experience of Happiness, but we are worse than unbaptized pagans and ‘do not even know if the Holy Spirit exists’ (a great crime – to baptize into the Church without previously proclaiming the baptized or their parents!). We do not want to hear the Gospel, do not try to understand what it is about, and most tragically – do not know ourselves. We, knowing neither ourselves nor reality, rhetorically (self-assuredly) ask, without waiting for an answer: ‘Do I need that gospel or what these Christians proclaim?’ A hungry person does not skeptically ask: do I need food? But asks: where, where can I find something to eat, because I am dying of hunger?! A person suffering from unspeakable pain does not say: do I need a doctor, but rather: tell me, where can I find a doctor, medicine?! A homeless person, freezing at minus thirty degrees Celsius in a passage, surely dreams: who would offer him hot tea and shelter, at least for the night… These earthly realities are a weak shadow compared to the spiritual ones, from which the Lord God saves us (and saves – helps to accept the Gift of Salvation), but we are not troubled by this at all! Why? Therefore, the first category of people who do not hear the Gospel and do not need it, who reject it as something superfluous, unnecessary, and even something that causes anger and irritation! To imagine and feel the pitiful spiritual state of these people, let’s take an analogy from biological existence: a person who is freezing in the cold initially feels the cold, wants to warm up, struggles somehow for their life, but then comes a moment when it feels ‘warm’ to the person, that is, objectively they are freezing, dying, but subjectively it becomes ‘good’, ‘warm’, and they fall asleep… Therefore, when the irreversible process (freezing and inability to help oneself) begins, then the person no longer needs either warmth or help – they feel good, thus any help, action to save them is perceived as unnecessary, and then, when they are already forcibly started to be rubbed, warmed up, in other words brought out of this ‘bliss’, – they start to hate the saviors as such, who took away their happiness and caused them pain and suffering… Or another example: sometimes a person starves so long that they no longer want to eat – (in fact) they are dying, and they do not feel hungry… Thus, a person enters a state where they themselves begin to defend their dying (calling it life, bliss) and perceive any objective good as evil to themselves. Such people not only do not need the Gospel, but also despise it. About such people the Lord said: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ This category also includes the lukewarm, spiritually relaxed, for whom neither Paradise attracts nor hell and its torments frighten – complete atrophy of all living (walking dead). The reasons for such states are sins (see Chapter I), and primarily those that a person freely chooses (i.e., those that they could still not commit, but having thought about it, chose sin, not the voice of conscience, i.e., went against themselves, against their own conscience, unforced by anyone (implying a deep-rooted passion, which they can no longer cope with (‘help themselves’)), inflicting mortal wounds on the soul).