NOTES for Luk 18:26-27

Christ's words that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven deeply struck His listeners. Many, by no means only the Pharisees, were deeply wounded by these words, because we all consider prosperity the main sign of God's favor toward a person. If Jesus calls wealth an obstacle to entering the Kingdom, then who can be saved? To this the Lord says that no one can be saved. This is the terrible truth the Pharisees hear and reject in Christ's words. A person's whole hope that he can do something to attain salvation is undermined by these words.

These are frightening words, but there is nothing new in them. A good half millennium before Christ, the prophets of Israel spoke about this. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil," the prophet Jeremiah said at the end of the seventh century before Christ (Jer. 13:23). Much more important is what Jesus reveals in the second half of the same sentence: "but all things are possible with God." Salvation, entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lord says, is within God's power and, even more importantly, God desires this salvation of people. He repeatedly says that the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, and that the Father sent Him not to destroy souls but to save them. It is not the Father's will that one of these little ones should perish, Jesus says, but the Father's will is that whoever believes in the Son should not perish but have eternal life. This will of the Father for our salvation overcomes our sinful helplessness, and this is the chief good news - the Gospel.

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.

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.