NOTES for Mat 19:24

The conversation between Christ and the rich young man is one of the most known places of the New Testament. This conversation is the cause of emotional stress in most people - because we are instantaneously boggled that such summon can be also addressed to us and that its execution could be difficult as it is the case with this young man. At this moment, no logic works out. It would be useless to explain that this summon is not addressed to everybody (because there will be then nobody to buy all the sold assets); it would be as well useless to remind that the Lord Himself says that the one who walks along this road inherit infinitely better than he loses. The fear of parting from possessions invades us up to fingertips. We stubbornly see properties only as a source of our being and dignity.

It is effectively what suffered the people of Israel after their exit from Egypt. The "minimum living wage" was guaranteed by slavery, that's why slavery turned out to be more desired than a freedom acquired with difficulty. It was a specter of reliability, when we could struggle along slowly in a tiny mink and give no effort to trust God.

That is why this summon is so important for us; even if this summon does not call us personally to sell our properties, it is addressed to us. The slave distinguishes himself from the free man by the fact that he cannot part from his enslaver. This means that if we cannot part from the spectre of ease, of the ownership of the properties, then we are their slaves and nothing else. So we have in front of us a particular case of this summon which rings in the entire Gospel calling up to the freedom in the Christ.

In the book of Judges we read the story of Gideon's calling. The Angel of the Lord comes to him when he was about to hide from the enemies, and Gideon asks how it happened that the Lord had abandoned His people. "The Lord looked at him and said, Go in this strength of yours and save Israel from the hand of the Midianites; I am sending you. [Gideon] said to Him, Lord, how shall I save Israel? Look, my clan is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father's house. And the Lord said to him, I will be with you, and you will strike the Midianites as one man."

And now let us read the Gospel passage. After Jesus overturns the disciples' ideas about the role of wealth in a person's salvation, they cry out bitterly, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus, looking at them, utters one of the most important phrases in the whole Gospel: "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." And then, as in Gideon's case, He encourages the disciples who are aware of their weakness and smallness: "But many who are first will be last, and the last first." Notice this word "looking" in both cases. Did the Lord not look at His conversation partners before this? He did, but before saying something very important, He establishes a special contact, "eye to eye," so that the listener will not miss what is about to be said.

We often expect God to say something to us; we are afraid of missing it, and rightly so. Still, we can hope that if He wants to say something truly essential to us, He will "look" at us, and we at Him.

It can be said that the young man himself "asked for" the proposal to give up his possessions, since at first he was simply told to keep the commandments prescribed for everyone. But then he declared that he had kept all this, that is, the commandments, from his youth.

Of course, one can ask another question: is the young man claiming too much for himself, since it is very hard never to break a single commandment even once? But let us suppose that the young man managed to live blamelessly. Even so, in that case he still feels that something is lacking for him; his spiritual hunger is not satisfied. What should he do next? And only after this does Jesus propose that he make a difficult decision.

But the proposal corresponds to the request: the commandments given for everyone are not enough for you; you wanted to surpass the general level, so do what surpasses what is offered to the rest. And so the young man leaves, unable to do what he himself had asked about.

The words Jesus speaks to the disciples after the young man leaves are full of sorrow. If we listen closely, He is grieving that earthly wealth blocks people from heaven. We are used to applying these words to those who are especially rich, but if we think carefully, even people of modest means, or even the poor, may have some very small treasure that blocks heaven no less, or even more, than millions of dollars or vast estates. It is hard for even a very thin and unloaded camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

But Christ again and again invites us not to cling to earthly wealth. After all, He gives us not only everything necessary for earthly life, but much more as well, that which surpasses any earthly wealth.

So what, after all, does Jesus advise the young man who came to Him to do for salvation? In essence, nothing new: the same old path of righteousness, perfectly well known to everyone. If you want to enter the Kingdom, into "eternal life," keep the commandments. Not some new, unusual commandments invented by some learned rabbi or teacher of the Torah, but the old, well-known ones given by God to Moses long ago.

And the inquisitive young man, who of course had known about the path of righteousness and the commandments since childhood, still wants to find out: besides this path, already obvious to everyone, is there something else? Some secret knowledge, or a special spiritual practice, or something else of that sort?

In those days, teachers of the Torah or learned rabbi-mentors often proposed one or another special path of righteous life, bringing to the foreground either a special practice of prayer (that very period saw the height of the discussion over whether a believing Jew was obligated to recite the Shema, the main Jewish prayer, without interruption or not; as we can see, many rabbis and teachers of the Torah were convinced that this was absolutely necessary), or frequent fasts, or a special way of observing the Sabbath and certain other religious regulations. But these were always "commandments plus," and the content of the plus depended only on the interpretation of the particular teacher.

Jesus advises the young man who came to Him to do nothing of the kind. He adds nothing to the commandments once given by His Father to His people. Except one thing: renounce everything you have in this life and in this world. Become poor, He tells the young man. This is the only thing you lack, and the only thing you can do to draw near to the Kingdom, to "eternal life." And the young man goes away, realizing that such a path is beyond his strength.

But most interesting of all is the reaction of the disciples: they too are in doubt, even in fear. Then who can be saved? And this despite the fact that they really did leave everything and follow Jesus. As we can see, the apostles understood that the issue is not property as such, but something else, something more serious and important.

Perhaps it is that attitude both toward one's own property and toward life itself which determines whether a person can truly be considered poor, whether he is ready to part not with property and not even with social status, but with the order of things that defines the life of the untransformed world. After all, only such readiness, not the presence or absence of property or high social position, makes a person fit for life in the Kingdom. And Jesus' closest disciples may have thought about this seriously for the first time. And having thought about it, they understood: no one is ready. And the Kingdom can be obtained only by the mercy of God.

The young man asks the question that matters most to us: the question of eternal life. At the same time he asks, "what must I do to have eternal life?" This is the approach of the Law, and Jesus naturally draws the young man's attention to how he fulfills the Law. Hearing that he does fulfill it, Jesus invites him to go beyond the legalistic approach: "If you want to BE perfect..."

To be, not to have! Eternal life is not something one has, but something one enters in order to be. And one enters eternal life not by means of what one possesses, whether spiritual or material riches, one's own righteousness, or "great possessions." It is extremely difficult for a person to give up any wealth, and the greater the wealth, the harder it is. Everything we have we received from God: our abilities and talents, and material goods as well. But if we begin to regard everything we received as a gift as our own, as our property, we become those rich people for whom it is impossible to enter the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is given, not appropriated.

There is one path of salvation: "give everything away and follow Me"; be freed from possession and from yourself for God's sake, and entrust yourself to Him, for salvation is impossible for human beings, but "all things are possible for God."

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).