NOTES for Luk 18:35-43

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.

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.

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...