NOTES for Luk 18:18-43

The Savior's answer to the question about eternal life is both simple and difficult. It is simple because He offers nothing new. It is the same old, well-known path of the Torah, outer and inner, the path of keeping the commandments. It is what the questioner has known from childhood. But then comes an unexpected demand: give everything away and follow Him, his Teacher. And here the questioner stops. He is not ready for such a step. Jesus then speaks about the rich, for whom it is hard to enter the Kingdom. What kind of wealth is meant here? The questioner was materially rich. But the apostles were not rich, and yet they too feel uneasy. Who, then, can be saved?

They seem to have understood the Teacher correctly. Leaving everything is not only about material things. The concept of poverty in Yahwism, as in Judaism of the Second Temple era, was very multifaceted. Already Isaiah of Jerusalem spoke of poverty more as a spiritual state than as a material situation. And he considered himself a poor man, though he was a courtier and an aristocrat of the highest circle. Poverty means leaving everything. Jesus' question to the one interested in eternal life is this: can you leave everything? And Peter's question is: look, we have left everything; what comes next? The matter is no longer property.

The point here is to renounce one's own life. Not physical life; to renounce it means renouncing only a specific form of one's own existence. What one has to renounce is oneself, not one's life. That very self which, as most religious people believe, will not disappear even if earthly life is taken away. This is the self one has to renounce. A separate life, a separate existence. And everything connected with it, everything that defines it. Everything that can be described by the word "mine." And what remains, the true, pure "I," which one does not manage to notice right away, this pure "I" receives another, new life.

It enters another stream, infinitely more powerful and pure than the former one. There is nothing of one's own there in the narrow, earthly sense of the word, but there each "I," each one of us, begins to possess all the fullness of the life of God's great world, the life of the Kingdom. But for this, one must unclench the will by which we hold onto our present likeness of life. For it is precisely this will, clenched convulsively, that binds us to the life of this world. And unclenching it is far harder than unclenching the hand that holds a rope when you are hanging over an abyss. But otherwise nothing will work. Otherwise there is an eternal attachment to a likeness of life that will endlessly exhaust our soul and our body. And no freedom. Therefore no Kingdom either.

What does it take to be a good person? The answer is more or less clear even to those who have not read Scripture: do not deceive, do not kill, respect others... The healthiest human communities are founded upon these principles. And what more could one wish for people, since without violence and lies the world would be immeasurably better... Yet there are people for whom this is not enough. They leave everything behind and accomplish the impossible. Mother Maria Skobtsova went into the gas chamber in place of another woman; Mother Teresa of Calcutta cared with her own hands for beggars and lepers in India; many martyrs, ancient and modern, valued their lives less than their faith; and, finally, the apostles themselves devoted their lives to preaching the word of Christ to the whole world. What tears these people away from familiar and safe places and drives them onto the path of holiness? How does this spiritual insight come about? What are we to do, who have heard the Gospel call many times and remained indifferent to it? How can we make sure that Jesus does not pass us by, passing by our darkness? Perhaps, like that blind man, we should cry out into the darkness: “Son of David, have mercy on us!”

The man whom Christ advised to sell and give away all his possessions had, in a sense, brought this advice upon himself. After hearing from Christ the commandments familiar to him from his youth, he himself wanted something more. But he proved incapable of that “more.” Usually, when reflecting on this parable, we consider the possibility of salvation for someone attached to wealth or at least oriented toward earthly prosperity. This is an important aspect of the parable. Yet very often, as soon as we set out on the path of spiritual life, we already regard ourselves as having mastered the “basics” and seek something beyond what is “already clear” to us. When we obtain it, we realize that we lack the strength to carry the new ministry worthily and we retreat.

One should not condemn someone who has overestimated his strength, but one should remember that human strength will never be sufficient for service to the Lord; He Himself gives the strength. Yet for the man in question, his refusal to follow the advice he had himself requested led him away from Christ.

When we encounter Christ, we face the need to choose and to give up something that has occupied His place in our lives. At that moment each person may have different idols, but the need to renounce them is the same for everyone. To someone clinging with all his strength to a lucrative position, the Lord says, “Follow Me,” and he has to leave his tax office, as Matthew the Evangelist did. Someone who wants to free himself from social ties encounters the unsettling words, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” The ruler about whom we read today in Luke’s Gospel, placing his hope in his wealth, hears, “Sell all that you own... and follow Me.” With sorrow and compassion, Christ Himself tells the disciples that making this choice is difficult. Yet at every moment in life a person must stand against the idol that is trying to crush one’s whole life beneath it—otherwise one will have to go away “sorrowful.”

Jesus' words "no one is good except God alone" sometimes cause bewilderment: do they mean that He Himself bears witness to the absence in Him of any divinity, that He separates Himself from God to the same degree as every human being is separated from Him, and moreover a sinful human being? At first glance, that is how it is, and many historians of religion have based themselves on these words of His when they asserted that the divinity of the Savior is a late idea, and that originally, in the properly Jewish environment, it did not exist. Meanwhile Jesus' answer to the man who ran up to Him was quite understandable in the context of the question itself. The man who addressed Him, of course, did not suspect any divinity in the One to whom he was speaking. He was seeking precisely a teacher, the kind of teacher who would allow him to partake of God's goodness because he himself had partaken of it.

Such a view of teachers and spiritual guides was not rare in the Judaism of the Second Temple period: the path of the inner Torah, about which everyone knew then, although not everyone walked this path, as well as the ideal of the "living Torah," which the one walking the path of the inner Torah was to become at the end of his path, made people suppose at least the possibility of sharing in that very goodness of God with which the world was full before the fall, when, according to the word of the biblical Poem of Creation, it was "very good." The one who reached the end, the transformation into the "living Torah," was to become such a "very good" person. Such a teacher can bring his students into that "goodness" as well - and the man who came up to Jesus was sure he had found the one who could help him in this.

It remained only to learn from him what had to be done in order to achieve the result. Jesus, meanwhile, offers no special paths except the commandments, the same inner Torah. It is as if He says: go by the path you know. The answer came immediately: I am going; "all these I have kept from my youth," but there is no result. What else can be done to reach what is desired? That is when the words sound that recall spiritual poverty. Precisely spiritual poverty - otherwise the disciples, who had left everything, would not have asked in confusion, "Then who can be saved?"

The goal of the path is not achieved through some special ascetic or prayer techniques; it is attainable only through the complete surrender of oneself to God's will - and this is the hardest thing for a fallen human being. Hard, but absolutely necessary - and sooner or later Jesus places each of His disciples before this necessity, and then each one chooses his own: the path into the Kingdom or remaining in his own wealth.

Everyone is usually very concerned whether the camel will eventually pass through the eye of the needle or not. And if it does, whether this means that God has done the impossible. But let us try to turn to the general spirit of the scene. And let us recall the words, full of fiery self-confidence, of the man who came to Jesus, that "all these I have kept from my youth." Who can say such a thing about himself, who can say about himself that he is righteous?! The whole sharpness of the maximalism of Jesus' words, it seems to us, is directed not against the rich, but toward cooling this ardor, simply to emphasize that no one is righteous. And yet it was precisely for this ardor that the young man became so dear to Him, as we learn from the parallel passage in Mark (Mark 10:21).

Christ's words that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven deeply struck His listeners. Many, by no means only the Pharisees, were deeply wounded by these words, because we all consider prosperity the main sign of God's favor toward a person. If Jesus calls wealth an obstacle to entering the Kingdom, then who can be saved? To this the Lord says that no one can be saved. This is the terrible truth the Pharisees hear and reject in Christ's words. A person's whole hope that he can do something to attain salvation is undermined by these words.

These are frightening words, but there is nothing new in them. A good half millennium before Christ, the prophets of Israel spoke about this. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil," the prophet Jeremiah said at the end of the seventh century before Christ (Jer. 13:23). Much more important is what Jesus reveals in the second half of the same sentence: "but all things are possible with God." Salvation, entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lord says, is within God's power and, even more importantly, God desires this salvation of people. He repeatedly says that the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, and that the Father sent Him not to destroy souls but to save them. It is not the Father's will that one of these little ones should perish, Jesus says, but the Father's will is that whoever believes in the Son should not perish but have eternal life. This will of the Father for our salvation overcomes our sinful helplessness, and this is the chief good news - the Gospel.

Everything Jesus says to people listening to Him, leads inevitably to this question: "who can be saved?" All the maximalism of the sermon on the mountain, all His parables overturning the usual representations of righteousness and godliness, - all this can dip us into the glooms of despair, if we perceive them seriously, and not "with benignity ": I can't like that, this is beyond my strengths! I am a sinner, and I have no salvation. All this because we always think about self-salvation, and not just salvation, we try internally to deserve salvation, to win, and we come up all the time against our inconsistency. But Jesus said two thousand years ago that our salvation doesn't depend on our work and/or our heroism, salvation is rather a gift of God's grace. Only God alone is able to save us, we can't do anything by ourselves! Our duty is to place confidence in Him for our salvation, and not persist in our own understanding of the ways of righteousness; to allow God to intervene in our life at the stage of decision-making, and not at the stage of disentangling the aftereffects of our acts. Literally, it is this faith that is confidence in God, which turns out salvific for us.

Everything Jesus says to people listening to Him, leads inevitably to this question: "who can be saved?" All the maximalism of the sermon on the mountain, all His parables overturning the usual representations of righteousness and godliness, - all this can dip us into the glooms of despair, if we perceive them seriously, and not "with benignity ": I can't like that, this is beyond my strengths! I am a sinner, and I have no salvation. All this because we always think about self-salvation, and not just salvation, we try internally to deserve salvation, to win, and we come up all the time against our inconsistency. But Jesus said two thousand years ago that our salvation doesn't depend on our work and/or our heroism, salvation is rather a gift of God's grace. Only God alone is able to save us, we can't do anything by ourselves! Our duty is to place confidence in Him for our salvation, and not persist in our own understanding of the ways of righteousness; to allow God to intervene in our life at the stage of decision-making, and not at the stage of disentangling the aftereffects of our acts. Literally, it is this faith that is confidence in God, which turns out salvific for us.

As usual, what Jesus said seems paradoxical, even shocking to those who listen to Him. Does Jesus really want us to leave all our relatives, to deny them for His Kingdom, in which He promises us the obtainment of a large number of children, of brothers and sisters, of women and parents? Besides, for what we need such a large number of parents.

No! In no way, Jesus doesn't speak about stupidities. He probably wants to make us go out of our reassuring character according to what everything is well for us, we have family, relatives that like us, children who will be our perpetuation … He wants to tell us that all this is only a shadow of all that can be, all our relationships built by ourselves are feeble and fleeting. But if we shall break with all these "our" relationships for the Kingdom of God, for His leadership among us, for these relationships He can build between us, then not only we shall not lose those our close ones, but also we shall really acquire them. So, we shall truly love each other, instead of possessing each other. And what arises between us here, "in this present time", will pass with us into eternal life, and will not be any more subject of time and death.

The evangelists unanimously draw our attention to the fact that when the Lord speaks to the disciples about the Passion, they do not understand what He is telling them. Luke even strengthens this by saying that they "understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them." Meanwhile, the Lord says each time that what was written about Him in the prophets must be fulfilled. Consequently, the issue is words that should have been sufficiently well known to all Jews and, in particular, to the twelve apostles. This, strictly speaking, is the difference between biblical prophecies and predictions of the future. What in them was a prophecy about Christ could be understood only when these prophecies were fulfilled. Thus the prophecies that all nations would come into God's Kingdom, the Kingdom of the New Covenant, were fulfilled in the Church, not in the political history of the Jewish people as a state. On the contrary, the words of the prophet Zechariah about the thirty pieces of silver, the price paid for God's mercy, and his words that people would be saved by looking on the One whom they pierced, turned out not to be a poetic device, not a metaphor, but precisely a literal foreseeing of events. The evangelists emphasize all this also so that we may not be carried away by a rational path of understanding and interpreting Christ's saving actions. It turns out to be possible to comprehend them mainly in the practice of one's own spiritual life.

All the Gospels are full of stories about healings. At times such fullness seems somewhat excessive: after all, even a few stories of people healed would have been enough to prove the fact that Jesus is able to heal. But judging by the care with which the memory of all the healings was preserved, we have to think that the point was not only to prove something to someone.

Indeed, Jesus does not treat people the way doctors have done and still do; He heals those who draw near to Him, giving them a share in the Kingdom He brought into the world. And in the Kingdom, where there is no place for either evil or sin, naturally there is no place for illness either, so those who come into contact with the Kingdom recover in a natural way, receiving that fullness of life which is accessible to them in an untransformed state. But in order to come into contact with the Kingdom, it is not enough merely to be physically near the Savior; one must also trust Him and follow Him. And this is where all the details of the healing stories become important.

Who met Jesus, and how? Some met Him like the blind man, who had nothing to lose. In a certain sense, it is always simpler for someone who has nothing to lose: without looking back, he hurries to where even the smallest hope shines for him. He does not care what those around him think either about him or about the one who gives him this hope. So it is with the blind man in the Gospel story: he had heard that this strange Teacher, or perhaps Prophet, heals everyone ready to trust Him, and he runs to Him for healing. And he receives what he desired. Together with the Kingdom, about which he perhaps had not thought very much before, but which has now become for him the most real and obvious reality.

It is so important to understand: what exactly do I want? Why does the Lord ask this of me if He already knows? Because to ask is to take responsibility upon oneself. It would seem, how can a blind man not want to receive his sight? But when the moment comes and receiving sight becomes real, you understand that everything will change. It will no longer be possible to ask others; you will have to act yourself, to answer more fully for yourself and your actions. It is the same with spiritual blindness. If a person does not see or understand that he is acting badly, less will be required of him than if he knows, sees, and still acts according to his own will and not according to God's. The desire to receive sight is also the desire to accept God's will.

For various reasons, we try to solve our problems by ourselves, without consulting anyone or asking anyone for help. We do not want to be indebted or to ask. Or it is clear that the people around us are burdened by no fewer problems of their own. It feels awkward to ask them for help, awkward to insist on what we need, even when their help is vital and we cannot manage without it. When we ask God for something, we often think our problems are too small and that we should not bother Him, distract Him, or make Him listen to us, understand us, and help us. As an example showing that such thoughts and actions are unacceptable, we are given the blind man whom nothing can stop. He needs Jesus as he needs air; he needs Him in order to live, to be healed, and to see the world. Even if people push the blind man aside and tell him not to intrude, he will not give up. May the same be true of us.