In today’s Gospel, we hear the story of the young man who comes to Christ asking Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Christ responds initially not with an answer to his question, but with a test of the young man’s faith, saying, ““Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.” And so, the young man’s encounter with Christ becomes, first, a question about who Christ is, and second, who we are and who we’re truly called to be.
First, who is Christ? Who you believe Jesus Christ is will make all the difference in your life regarding your own identity, purpose in life, and ability to find a way out from all the common dead-end patterns of brokenness that result from sin and a life lived without knowing and following the One true God as He’s revealed Himself—the Savior of the world.
We often hear people today making Jesus into something that He simply cannot be—friend, prophet, best human who ever lived, or, in the case of this young man, “good teacher.” Many choose to reduce Jesus to something less than God because if He’s just another man—however ‘great’ or ‘good’—then, no response, no obedience, no accountability is owed Him or His life-saving revelation, His call for new birth, relationship and communion with Him. Then, we can make of Him whatever suites us and our ‘lifestyle choice’.
If we make of Jesus only a “friend,” a ‘moral’ figure, as some do today, if we make Him according to our likeness, our desires, our pre-conceived notions, then we’ll struggle to submit ourselves to Him and the authority of His Church. If so, then we thwart our rescue from our fallen human nature, the healing of our sin-sickness, and, ultimately, our redemption; we’ll prevent ourselves from becoming all that God wills us to be as godly men and women desiring salvation and eternal life with Him. If we fail to recognize Christ’s holiness, then we’re likely to struggle to take seriously His calling for us to likewise become holy or to even understand what that means. If we fail to recognize His divinity, then how can we recognize our calling to deification/theosis, that is, union, through communion with Him?
All such revisionism and remaking of Christ into our likeness, our convenience, fails to account for the reality of Christ’s own revelation as the very Logos (Word) of God. C.S. Lewis put it this way when it comes to the question of who Jesus is: He has to be one of the three: “liar, lunatic, or, Lord.” “No man could do the miracles that Christ did in plain sight before countless eye-witnesses, unless He were also God. No man has power over the elements of nature, unless He is also the Logos (the Word of God), who is the Creator of those elements. No mere man, who is only man, can raise the dead on his own command. A lunatic would talk and speak of amazing and strange things, but his witness wouldn’t be true; alone, he would work no miracles.”
The only true and honest response is to see Christ as He’s revealed Himself through the mystery of the Incarnation: the God-man, who enters into human nature as man and redeems it as God, He who calls us to enter into that renewed human nature through water and the spirit, Baptism and Chrismation, the sealing of the Holy Spirit by which He gives us all the tools we need to continue our journey further up in His Kingdom, that is, to be deified.
The young man in today’s Gospel comes to Jesus, relegating Him to the status of a “good teacher.” Ironically, while at the same time addressing Jesus as a mere man, however ‘good,’ he asks Jesus a question that only God can ultimately answer: “Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Only God can tell us what we need for eternal life.
The young man’s failure to submit himself to the reality of who Christ is, explains Jesus’ pointed response, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.” Jesus is not suggesting He’s not fully God. No, Jesus is convicting the young man of his error, as if to say something along these lines: “you can’t have it both ways: If I’m merely ‘the good teacher’ and not your Lord and God, then I can’t tell you what your soul lacks. But, if you can see Me with the eyes of faith, then know that I am the Messiah, God incarnate, who sees into your soul.’
As Romanian confessor of the faith, Fr. Iustin Popovic of blessed memory, puts it, “No one is sufficiently good to be able to give the greatest good: eternal life. Only the Perfect Good—and that is God, the God-Man—knows and has the Perfect Life, Eternal Life, and can give it…”
Having set the record straight, Jesus gives the man instruction, referring him to what every faithful Jew would know: to keep the commandments. But in his youthful pride, the young man tells Jesus he’s done all this “from his youth.” Then, he dares ask the Master, “what do I still lack”? In his youthful pride, he still doesn’t realize Whom he’s addressing.
Here Jesus reveals further His true identity to the man as the Messiah, the God-Man who is Eternal Life: He looks into the man’s soul as to where his true loyalties lie: his wealth. The young man is looking for legitimacy, looking to be told he’s ‘arrived,’ looking to be affirmed on his terms, to see Jesus made in his image, as one who’s followed the externals of the Law. But Jesus reveals this to him, showing the man who his true god is, his wealth, saying, “Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow Me.” We read that he went away dejected; for he loved his wealth more than he loved God.
For this reason, Christ gives us this warning: “I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Brothers and sisters, this is a warning to us as well. All of us are “rich” by world standards. The heart of the Lord’s message here is this: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Almost a fourth of the Gospel is dedicated to lessons concerning the dangers of divided loyalties and how easy it is for mammon, money, to become our master.
In the Old Covenant, we read that God commanded (yes, commanded) His people to give a tithe (ten percent) of our income. The New Covenant teaching is not that we’re to give a tithe to the Lord, but rather, that everything we have is to be offered up to God as a ‘first fruit’, hence Christ’s invitation here, “Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven…” One thing we can do to help us with this temptation to entrust ourselves and those whom we love to our finances instead of to the Lord our God, our rightful Master, is to at least follow this Old Covenant teaching, which has been widely practiced in the New Covenant Orthodox Church as well. We read that St. Vladimir of Russia in the 11th century, upon his conversion, gave a tithe of all that he had to the Church. Tithing helps us begin to understand this truth: everything we have is a gracious gift from God. He alone is worthy of our trust, not our possessions. The more we give this area of our lives over to God, the more we can cultivate a thankful heart towards Him and find freedom from the idol of false security.
It’s not a question as to how much we have, but how tightly we hold on to that imaginary security, that idol, rather than entrusting ourselves, our families, our well-being, present and future, to God. If we can’t entrust our finances to God, how do we trust Him to take care of our children and even, the healing of our souls, our very salvation?
God doesn’t demand of all of us that we sell everything we have and give it to the Church, but He does teach us here that it’s incumbent on each one of us to deny ourselves, to give up whatever tempts us to put our trust in materialism, whatever could cause us to make of Jesus something other than the God-man, the Logos (Word) of God, He’s revealed to be.
We don’t need a ‘watered-down Jesus’ or a Jesus conforming to our likeness. As Orthodox, we reject all such historic and modern revisionist efforts to “re-imagine” Jesus Christ or proclaim a different Gospel. As Orthodox Christians, we affirm that Christ is our Lord and God, the only Savior of mankind, as all generations before us in the Church have also affirmed.
Christ God sees into the heart of the young man in today’s Gospel. He sees what he’s still lacking. And Christ God sees into our hearts as well with a desire to heal us and save us. Today, Christ gives us an opportunity to relinquish our vain attempts to follow Him on our terms, to make of Him what we desire. Instead, He invites us to build up treasure in heaven, grounding our identity in Him, entrusting ourselves, all that we are, all that we have, to Him who is Eternal Life, the God-Man who became incarnate to save us. He offers us the way we continue to become the men and women of God He’s called us to be in His great love for mankind.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Mission
Sunday, 19 August 2018
Epistle: I Cor. 15:1-11
Gospel: Matt. 19: 16-26
