NOTES for Luk 18:31-34

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.

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...

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 on these principles. And what more could one wish for people? Without violence and lies, the world would be immeasurably better...

And yet there are people for whom this is not enough. They leave everything and accomplish the impossible. Like Mother Maria (Skobtsova), who went to the gas chamber in place of another woman; like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who cared with her own hands for the poor and people with leprosy in India; like the many martyrs, ancient and modern, for whom their lives proved less precious than their faith; like, finally, the apostles themselves, who laid down their lives to preach the word of Christ throughout the world.

What tears these people away from their settled, secure places and drives them onto the path of holiness? How does this spiritual insight occur? What are we to do, who have heard the Gospel call many times and remained indifferent to it? How can we keep Jesus from passing us by, past our darkness? Perhaps, like that blind man, we should cry 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.