NOTES for Mat 19:16-26
Let us quote from a sermon by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom): "Today the Lord warns us how hard it is for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Does this mean that the Kingdom of God is open only to the deprived, to the one in material need, to the one who has been stripped of everything on earth? No. The Kingdom of God is open to everyone who is not enslaved by what he has. In the first beatitude - Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven - we are given the key to today's parable: the poor in spirit are those who have understood that they possess nothing as their own."
Wealth and poverty, wealth of spirit and poverty of spirit - these are four different concepts we need to keep in mind in connection with today's passage. The Metropolitan contrasts wealth not with material poverty, but with poverty of spirit, and this is very important to understand. But how should we arrange the remaining two concepts in order to complete the picture?
Let us return again to the Metropolitan's text: "Poverty is not the same as deprivation; poverty means freedom from enslavement to the illusion that we are self-sufficient, that we are the creators of what we are and what we possess. And this means being free from enslavement to what has been given to us, so that we may become God's coworkers, only stewards, as it were, over the property God has entrusted to us."
This means that poverty precisely as deprivation is not opposed to wealth, as it often seems to us, but in a certain sense stands on the same pole with it. And on the other pole are wealth of spirit and poverty of spirit.
The Apostle Paul describes very well this closeness and this flowing of wealth and poverty of spirit into one another: "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Cor 8:9).