We’re reminded today of this truth: Who you believe Jesus is will make all the difference in your life, regarding who we are and our 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 obediently following the One true God as He has revealed Himself to be.
Often, we hear people today making of Jesus something that He simply cannot be—friend, teacher, prophet, best human who ever lived. Many choose to reduce Jesus to something less than God because if He’s just another man—however great—then we owe Him no answer, no obedience, no accountability.
But if we dumb Jesus down and make of Him primarily a “friend,” a “buddy,” as some groups do today, if we make Him according to our likeness, our desires, then we’ll struggle to submit ourselves to Him and the authority He’s entrusted to His Church, which will be an impediment to our rescue from fallen human nature, from becoming all that God wills you and I to be as adopted sons and daughters. If we fail to recognize His holiness, then we’re likely to struggle to take seriously His calling to become holy, fit to be in communion with Him for eternity.
While it’s true that Christ is our ‘companion,’ (our ‘friend’), He’s always more than this. True, He’s an example to follow, but He’s more than this: He alone is the Savior, the All-Powerful (Pantokrator), Creator of the universe, who is yet humble, becoming incarnate for our sake, to renew human nature and offer us reconciliation, a returning to communion with Almighty God.
If you believe Christ is a prophet, but not truly God, as the Muslims do and as Arias believed, then there’s no salvation for man, no elevation, no enlightenment, no escape from the most animalistic of vices and enslavement to the evil one, as we can see so plainly exercised in the world today where God is reduced to a monad rather the triune God He’s revealed Himself to be.
All such revisionism and remaking of Christ into our likeness fails to account for the reality of Christ’s own revelation as the very Logos (Word) of God. He alone is capable of giving us new life as the Giver of all life. Who else is capable of giving us a new identity other than the One who called all life into being through His Word?
C.S. Lewis said we have three choices when it comes to the question of who Jesus is: “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 option is to see Christ as He’s revealed to be through the mystery of the Incarnation: the God-man, who enters into human nature as man and redeems it as God, restoring us to life, defeating sin and death, making us fellow victors through new birth in Him, and the continued striving to repent and live out that new life in head and heart.
This question of Christ’s identity hits us head on in today’s Gospel. A rich young man comes to Jesus relegating Him, classifying Him, as a “good teacher.” Ironically, while at the same time addressing Jesus as a mere man, 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?”
This explains Jesus’ pointed response to the young man, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.” Jesus is not, as some revisionists and humanists today say, suggesting He is not fully God; instead, 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 Lord and God, then I can’t tell you what your soul lacks. 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 Fr. Iustin Popovic says of this passage, “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 proceeds to give the man instruction, referring him to what every faithful Jew would know: to keep the commandments. But in his youthful pride, the young man was able to tell Jesus that he had done all this “from his youth,” and ventures to ask the Master, “what do I still lack”? He still doesn’t realize Whom he is addressing.
Here Jesus reveals further to the man that He is the Messiah, that He is the God-Man: He sees into the man’s soul as to where his true loyalties lie: his great wealth. The young man is looking for legitimacy, looking to be told that he’s arrived, looking for Jesus to affirm him on his terms, to be the Jesus made in the image of the rich, young man. But Jesus reveals this to him; He shows the man who his true god is, his great riches, 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 the young man went away from Jesus 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.” The Lord isn’t saying that having wealth is a sin; there’s no hidden Marxist ideology here, as some today also mistakenly see. Rather, Jesus is reminding us of this other truth: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
There are few greater temptations for us than our reliance for security on our finances, financial well-being. It can easily take the place of God for us; 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, our present, our future, to God. For this reason, the Church admonishes us, rich and poor, to freely tithe from our income, giving a “first fruit” to help build up the Kingdom of God and support the work of the Church in changing hearts, in converting and healing souls, in helping others to journey into the Kingdom of God.
God doesn’t demand of all of us that we sell all we have and give it to the Church, but He teaches us here that it’s incumbent on each one of us to deny ourselves, to give up those false idols, whatever could be causing us to make of Jesus something else than the God-man, the Logos of God become incarnate, Who He’s proven Himself 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. We affirm that Christ is our Lord, God, and Savior—the God-Man, who is the only Lover of mankind.
Christ God sees into the heart of the rich, young ruler. He sees what he’s still lacking, and He sees in our hearts too. Today, Christ gives us an opportunity to relinquish our vain attempts to follow Christ in word alone, to make Him in our hearts into little more than “friend” or “good teacher.” So, we submit ourselves today, our vain efforts to control, to the One who alone can save us, who sees what we’re still lacking and who offers us a new way, trusting in Him, who alone can save our souls and make us into the men and women of God He’s called us to be.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Mission
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Epistle: I Cor. 15:1-11
Gospel: Matt. 19: 16-26
