In today’s Gospel, we hear the story of the rich 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 a question about recognizing first, who Christ is, and second, for us, who we are and who we’re truly called to be.
Who you believe Jesus Christ is will make all the difference in your life regarding your identity and your 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’s revealed Himself to be as 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 the rich 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 they owe Him no response, no obedience, no accountability, and can make of Him whatever suites them and their lifestyle.
If we dumb Jesus down and make of Him primarily a “friend,” or ‘moral’ figure, as some groups 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 He’s entrusted to His Body, the Church, and we’ll thwart our rescue from our fallen human nature; we’ll prevent ourselves from becoming all that God wills us to be as godly men and women desiring salvation and eternal life with God. 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. If we fail to recognize His divinity, then how can we recognize our calling to deification/theosis 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 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 on our behalf, making us fellow victors through new birth in Him, and giving us the tools to continue our journey further up and in His Kingdom.
This question of Christ’s identity hits us head on in today’s Gospel. A young man comes to Jesus relegating Him, addressing Him, as simply 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?”
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 suggesting He’s 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 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 theologian, Fr. Justin Popovic of blessed memory, 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 tells Jesus that he’s done all this “from his youth,” and then, he ventures to ask the Master, “what do I still lack”? Wow, what 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 sees 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 only 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.” The Lord isn’t saying that having wealth is a sin; there’s no hidden Marxist ideology here. Rather, Jesus is reminding us of this other truth: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The New Testament teaching is not that we’re to give a tithe to the Lord, as was the case in the Old Testament, but rather, that everything we have is to be offered up to God, hence Christ’s invitation, “Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven…” Tithing is just a start to help us begin to understand this truth, to cultivate a thankful heart towards God, to find freedom from the idol of false security.
No, 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. For this reason, the Church admonishes us, rich and poor, if we don’t want to give away all that we have, then freely tithe from our income, give a “first fruit” to help build up the Kingdom of God and support the work of the Church in changing hearts, converting and healing souls, helping others to journey into the Kingdom of God, and providing us all with the tools of salvation we need as we journey into the Kingdom of Heaven.
God doesn’t demand of all of us that we sell everything 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 tempts us to put our trust in materialism or could cause us to make of Jesus something else than the God-man, the Logos (Word) of God, Who 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. We affirm that Christ is our Lord and God, the only Savior of mankind, as all generations before us in the Church also affirm.
Christ God sees into the heart of the young man in today’s Gospel. He sees what he’s still lacking. Christ God sees in our hearts too with a desire to heal and save us. Today, Christ gives us an opportunity to relinquish our vain attempts to follow Christ 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 to Him who is Eternal Life, the God-Man who became incarnate to save us. Christ offers us a new way in which we can continue to become the men and women of God He’s called us to be in His great love and mercy.
Epistle: I Cor. 15:1-11
Gospel: Matt. 19: 16-26
