NOTES for Luk 18:19-20

Jesus' words "no one is good except God alone" sometimes cause bewilderment: do they mean that He Himself bears witness to the absence in Him of any divinity, that He separates Himself from God to the same degree as every human being is separated from Him, and moreover a sinful human being? At first glance, that is how it is, and many historians of religion have based themselves on these words of His when they asserted that the divinity of the Savior is a late idea, and that originally, in the properly Jewish environment, it did not exist. Meanwhile Jesus' answer to the man who ran up to Him was quite understandable in the context of the question itself. The man who addressed Him, of course, did not suspect any divinity in the One to whom he was speaking. He was seeking precisely a teacher, the kind of teacher who would allow him to partake of God's goodness because he himself had partaken of 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 knew then, although not everyone 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, made people suppose at least the possibility of sharing in that very goodness of God with which the world was full before the fall, when, according to the word of 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" person. Such a teacher can bring his students into that "goodness" as well - and the man who came up to Jesus was sure he had found the one who could help him in this.

It remained only to learn from him what had to be done in order to achieve the result. Jesus, meanwhile, offers no special paths except the commandments, the same inner Torah. It is as if He says: go by the path you know. The answer came immediately: I am going; "all these I have kept from my youth," but there is no result. What else can be done to reach what is desired? That is when the words sound that recall spiritual poverty. Precisely spiritual poverty - otherwise the disciples, who had left everything, would not have asked in confusion, "Then who can be saved?"

The goal of the path is not achieved through some special ascetic or prayer techniques; it is attainable only through the complete surrender of oneself to God's will - and this is the hardest thing for a fallen human being. Hard, but absolutely necessary - and sooner or later Jesus places each of His disciples before this necessity, and then each one chooses his own: the path into the Kingdom or remaining in his own wealth.