It is certainly not about the duration of our sleep. The apostle Paul speaks about sleep and drunkenness as images of being in darkness and opposes them to being in the light - watch and sober.

We really like to relax - by sleeping or with idle talks after a small glass of Vodka (or big glass!). And we can also without any drink – just separated intrinsically from any problems, ours and those of others. We know to perceive even Christian life as a refuge, the niche, where we can hide from the difficulties of this world. We try to use the Good News, as a dose of drug facilitating life for us.

But there is also another reason, sometimes even unconsciously, for our desire to hide in the shade: the wish to send to sleep the conscience or to do violence to it. "All cats are grey in the night" -our own blackness is not so visible in a dark background. But the light reveals it to us, and to others.

That’s apparently why Paul calls us, Christians, to watch and be sober, to resist this enervation, this desire to hide from the world and from God, to be constantly aimed to prayer and the deeds of charity.

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.

Poor rich man. He had everything necessary to be a normal, good person. But to become perfect, he had to "jump higher than his own head," to do something that even a poor person would hardly dare to do, much less a rich one. So the disciples' horror is quite understandable: if entering the Kingdom of God requires doing something so hard that it is easier for "a camel to go through the eye of a needle," then who can be saved? In other words, for whom is Christ's preaching intended, and why are they going around with Him? And even if they themselves have left home and family for His sake, is that enough for salvation?

Jesus' answer is paradoxical: salvation is impossible for man, but possible for God. That means His Message is meant for those who can understand this and put it into practice, even if every camel has to squeeze through the eyes of needles...