NOTES for Luk 18:19-20

Jesus' words, "no one is good except God alone," sometimes cause perplexity: do they mean that He Himself testifies to the absence in Him of any divinity whatsoever, that He separates Himself from God to the same degree as any human person is separated from Him, and a sinful human person at that? At first glance it is so, and many historians of religion have based themselves on these words when they asserted that the Savior's divinity is a late idea and that originally, in the properly Jewish environment, it was not present. Meanwhile, Jesus' answer to the man who ran up to Him was completely understandable in the context of the question itself. The one addressing Him, of course, did not suspect any divinity in the One to whom he spoke. He was looking precisely for a teacher, such a teacher as would allow him to share in God's goodness, because he himself had shared in 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 then knew, though not everyone of course 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, compelled people to suppose at least the possibility of sharing in that very divine goodness with which the world was filled before the fall, when, according to 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" one. Such a teacher can make his disciples participants in "goodness" too; the man who approached Jesus was sure he had found someone who could help him in this.

It remained only to find out from him what needed to be done to achieve the result. Meanwhile, Jesus offers no special paths besides the commandments, the same inner Torah. He says, as it were: go by the path you know. The answer followed immediately: I am going, "all this I have kept from my youth," but there is no result. What else can be done to achieve what is desired? It is then that the words sound, reminding him of spiritual poverty.

Precisely spiritual poverty; otherwise the disciples, who had left everything, would not have asked in dismay, "who then can be saved?" The goal of the path is not reached through some special ascetic or prayer techniques; it is reachable only through complete surrender of oneself to God's will. And this is the hardest thing for a fallen person. Hard, but absolutely necessary, and sooner or later Jesus places each of His disciples before this necessity. Then each chooses his own way: the path into the Kingdom or remaining in his own riches.