| The Synoptic Gospels (Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke) share among them a certain commonality. They contain similar, sometimes almost identical stories from the life of Jesus. Their tone is, in part, biographical. St. John, on the other hand, in the last Gospel, gives us teaching that is more poetic, more mystical, and reflects the burgeoning development of theology in the primitive Church.
All four Gospels contain within them the power of the Holy Spirit and a clear picture of just who Jesus is. For example, one passage, common to the Synoptics, concerns Jesus dialogue with a rich man. (Luke 18; Mark 10; Matthew 19) (This rich man is not to be confused with the rich young man who walked away sad from Jesus.) As the Lord was leaving the town where He had been teaching and jousting with the critical self-satisfied Jewish leaders, a man came running after Him, knelt before him, and said “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds in a curious way: “Why do you call me good? There is none good but He who is God.” (Mark 10:17-18) It’s a complex reply. Jesus is right of course. Only God the Father is good because He is the source of all goodness. That’s the point — all goodness is from God. But Jesus shares in His goodness, does he not? He does so because He is the Son of God. So Jesus is also good by His essence. St. Athanasius the Great tells us: “For God in Christ is good – or rather, of all goodness He is the Fountainhead.” We who were created by God share in this goodness too, because we were made in His image. So we too are good by the act of creation. God is the source of all goodness, and everything that is created shared in His goodness. It’s all called good by him in Genesis on the sixth day of creation when He created men and women, He called it very good! So Jesus must have something else in mind when he said this. The goodness spoken of here is not simply moral goodness, or ethical rectitude. This goodness is actually the inner presence, the indwelling of God Himself in us. God the Father is the source of all goodness, but the rich man unfortunately thought he might be the source of goodness. St. John tells us he was a righteous man, you know, righteous people can easily develop into prideful people, swollen with ego. Not only is he rich but he’s prideful: he said he has kept all the commandments. So he thinks in himself that he also is good. Jesus wants him to know that that’s not the way it works. One can hear the man’s ego barking! God is good and if we are good it is because He is. Goodness is characterized by certain things, one of them is humility which the rich man evidently does not have. God has it in spades. God is the humblest of all. Jesus is the humblest of all. If we don’t look deeper into the scripture, into the Lord’s words, we will miss that point. Jesus Himself identified His own humility: “Learn of Me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.’ (Matt 11:,29) But why does the provocative dialogue with Jesus begin this way? It is to wake this man up, to make him rethink his presuppositions and by extension to wake us up too, to make us re-think our presuppositions, to take us all deeper into the mystery. Elder Cleopa of Romania (1912- +1998) instructs us: “It is the ultimate purpose of God for his Son to be born in us and everything that Jesus does and everything that happens in life by the grace and goodness of God , happens in order to bring the Son of God to birth in us.” Remember we were created GOOD. We were not made defective. What happened as a result of the ancestral sin never took away the indwelling goodness of God in Christ! That is why we are alive! It is why we breath. It is the thing that makes us get up when we fall – the goodness of God within us. Jesus is the door and he’s opening the door for the rich man. He is the light, and he’s shining light on the darkness. He is the truth, and he’s telling him the truth and He wants to be born in the man’s life. He wants to wake him up. The Lord’s teaching through parables and metaphors is how he does it. It is how he awakens the true self in us, in our soul and heart. He is the bringer of grace and truth. As Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Blessed Memory, wrote: “God invites us to share in his compassion. He invites us to explore our deepest selves. He invites us to become new. He inspires, He enlightens, He awakens. He asks us to turn our gaze from what is outside of us to what is inside of us. He does not force the issue. There is no coercion in God.” How do we know this? At the end of the passage, Jesus lets the man go. Love lets come, and lets go. That is perfect love. “The beginning of love,” the Monk Thomas (Merton) writes, “is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image, otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves that we find in them.” Jesus does not try to change or manipulate the rich man. He challenges. He invites him to change his mind. Absolute freedom characterizes all truly loving encounters. It is the essence of true love and the true lover. These are the characteristics of ego-free love: openness, humility, vulnerability, emptiness, and courage, and the Lord Jesus is all these things. So the rich man is free to walk in, and to walk out. But the Lord continues to contribute to our enlightenment with the use of another metaphor. Riches was the first metaphor. Riches is anything we attach ourselves to and believe gives us security in life. The other metaphor is further down in the passage –this one: the eye of the needle. (Mark 10:25) The eye of the needle is detachment. How could the rich man enter the Kingdom of Heaven by detaching from his attachment to himself and to his riches? Where your heart is, Jesus says, there is your treasure. His heart was in his wealth and his prideful ego.. They were his idol, the things to which he felt inextricably attached. What do you feel inextricably attached to? That’s your idol. That’s what you and I have to let go of to go through the eye of the needle. That’s what you and I have to detach from to enter the kingdom of heaven. The metaphor of the eye of the needle represents the door to the kingdom within our very selves. How great the temptation to choose another way! How easy it is to make so many people, events, and things, the treasure that God alone should be! Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana (Albania) writes: “It is foolish to think we will ever enter heaven without first entering into ourselves because the rich man is wholly consumed and focus on things outside himself, he could not enter heaven. He could not have passed through the eye of a needle, if he could even have found it, because he was blinded. Blind to his attachments. Blind to his need for God. Only the humble, the vulnerable, and the brokenhearted can see the eye of the needle and pass through it.” Unfortunately, like the rich man in the Gospel passage, we are so often so well defended by our attachments that we don’t see the chink in our own armor. Jesus was inviting the rich man to empty himself of himself (ego). That is what we must do if we are to progress towards the kingdom within. It is not an easy task. It is painful most of the time but absolutely necessary, and God, be sure, will contribute everything he can to help us do this difficult thing. We are not so much pushing through the needle’s eye as allowing the Crucified and Risen One to gently pull us through it! The source of life, my brothers and sisters, is not in our attachments or in our self definitions. Life, just like goodness, comes only from God. Our identity, like goodness, comes only from God. The door is not outside of us; it is inside of us. The very place where the treasure – the real treasure – is hidden, we have been taught not to look. We too must pass through the eye of the needle to find it. So the rich man walks away, and most of the time, we do too when we’re invited by the Lord to detach from all our worldly cares. The eye of the needle is a risky path. It takes extreme courage because what we leave behind when we enter it must be left behind as we exit it. It cannot be dragged through with us or behind us. To enter the eye of the needle is to become something new, something different, something true. It is to be reborn, and rewired. It is to become selfless and therefore truly human. It is freedom from attachments. It is emptiness. It is to be like God. So, first we must admit we’re not who we think we are. We are certainly not who we have made ourselves appear to be. We are something far greater, far deeper, far closer to Divine Love than we can imagine. To be attached to anything else, to tenaciously grasp at our voracious ego, is to thwart our progress through the needle’s eye! May the Risen Lord of love remind you of your own beauty and depth today, and all the days of your lives! Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen! Faithfully in the Resurrected Lord, |
