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.

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.

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.