NOTES for Luk 18:26-27

Everything Jesus says to people listening to Him, leads inevitably to this question: "who can be saved?" All the maximalism of the sermon on the mountain, all His parables overturning the usual representations of righteousness and godliness, - all this can dip us into the glooms of despair, if we perceive them seriously, and not "with benignity ": I can't like that, this is beyond my strengths! I am a sinner, and I have no salvation. All this because we always think about self-salvation, and not just salvation, we try internally to deserve salvation, to win, and we come up all the time against our inconsistency. But Jesus said two thousand years ago that our salvation doesn't depend on our work and/or our heroism, salvation is rather a gift of God's grace. Only God alone is able to save us, we can't do anything by ourselves! Our duty is to place confidence in Him for our salvation, and not persist in our own understanding of the ways of righteousness; to allow God to intervene in our life at the stage of decision-making, and not at the stage of disentangling the aftereffects of our acts. Literally, it is this faith that is confidence in God, which turns out salvific for us.