Ephesians 5.9-19

Luke 18.18-27

The LORD says that His Father gives to those who ask. But, we pray in the Divine Liturgy: Grant us our petitions that are for our salvation. The LORD does not give us what is not for our salvation. For His will is that we should not perish but be saved and have eternal life. ‘For this is the will of my Father,’ the LORD says, ‘that all who see the Son and believe in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.’ (Jn 6:40) And it is precisely for eternal life that the rich young ruler is asking.

So let us note how the LORD answers him. ‘You lack one thing. Give all you have to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me!’

Note that to receive the eternal life the Father desires to give, one must believe in Jesus Christ, and that means to follow Christ. To follow Christ means to love Him. To follow Him means to unite oneself to Him in the likeness of His death, for He is going to His Tomb in order to become one with us in our death. To unite oneself to Him in the likeness of His death means to lose our life in this world and all the riches that go with it for His sake. Worldly riches are lifeless; they have no power to raise us up from the grave to give us eternal life, which the Father wants to give us. If we want to receive the eternal life the Father wants to give us, we must unite ourselves in the fear of God, with faith and love, to His Son, Jesus Christ. He alone is the Resurrection and the Life. He is the treasure of heaven. He alone can save us in our death and raise us up to eternal life (cf. Eze 37.10-12).

So, in His answer to the rich young ruler, the LORD is calling him to spiritual struggle. For the one thing the rich young ruler must do to inherit eternal life is to let go his love for his riches and love the Treasure of Heaven, which is Jesus Christ. And to inherit eternal life is to inherit Jesus Christ, for He is the Resurrection and the Life (Jn 11.25; Jer 28.19). In other words, he must deny himself, he must take up his cross, he must put to death all that is earthly in him and lose his life for the sake of Christ in order to become one with Christ in His death; for in His death, the LORD God has become one with us so that we, by losing our life for His sake and uniting ourselves to Him in His death out of love for Him, may find ourselves united to Him in His resurrection, and so find our life in Him; for He is Himself our eternal life.

In calling the rich young ruler to let go his riches, He is directing him to lay hold of his will. For it is by our will that we give our love either to the Treasure of Heaven, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or to the riches of the world, to our idols or to our passions.

Covetousness, says St Paul, is idolatry in one place. The love of money, he says in another place, is the root of all evil. It’s not money itself that is the root of evil; it’s the love of money. The love of money is a form of self-love; and it is self-love, says St Maximos, that is the root of all evil. Where self-love is absent, he says, there no trace of evil can exist. Greed is the root of all evil, says St Ephraim the Syrian. Greed, too, is a form of self-love. Friendship with the world, says St James, or love of riches, is enmity with God.

In directing the rich young ruler to let go all his riches, then, and give to the poor, the LORD was directing him to put to death his self-love, his greed, his idolatry, and to begin learning the fear of God that grows into loving the LORD God, the Treasure of Heaven, the Source of Eternal Life, with all his heart, soul, strength and mind, and his neighbor as himself.

In another place, the LORD says that ‘from the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force.’ He says, ‘from the days of John the Baptist until now’ because the Kingdom of Heaven was not within us before the days of John the Baptist; the King of the Kingdom of Heaven had not yet been conceived in the womb of the Holy Virgin and become flesh and established Himself in ‘the midst of the earth,’ the earth of our body and soul, and in the root of our being, at that mystical point of our birth and our death in the mysteries of Christmas and Holy Pascha, to work His salvation not outside of us but from inside of us, in the midst of the earth of our body and soul.

The Kingdom of Heaven that is within us is taken by force, by struggle, because, to get to the Kingdom of Heaven that is within us, we must purify our heart. That means putting to death all that is earthly in us; our self-love, our greed, our covetousness, our love of money, our idolatry. But to do that, we have to fight ourselves, fighting not to give in to our love for the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life; fighting to master our will and turn our mind and heart willfully, by force, away from our self-love and willfully, by force, orient ourselves to the God who first loved us, who gave Himself to us on the Cross so that He could become one with us and, even though He knew no sin, He might become sin for us that we might become the Righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor 5.21); i.e., that we might inherit eternal life, because Righteousness is deathless (Wisd 1.15).

This spiritual struggle of letting go our riches, our idolatry, and giving our love freely, voluntarily, to Christ Jesus, the Sun of Righteousness who is risen from the dead with healing in His wings (Mal 4.2), this is the work of repentance. This spiritual struggle of repentance is accomplished in the Church through the Church’s ascetical disciplines: prayer and fasting, folding our daily life into the liturgical rhythm of the Church’s worship – Vespers, Compline, Matins, the hours, Holy Liturgy – and folding the rhythm of the Church’s worship into the routine of our daily life. These are the form of the Cross the Church gives us to take up. When we do, then the earthly vessel of our body begins to carry daily the Treasure of Heaven. This is the death of Christ that is working our salvation, the death of our death, in the midst of the earth of our body so that our daily life begins to manifest the power of Christ’s Holy Resurrection – the Treasure of Heaven that is working and growing in us – and we begin to live, here and now, in the Eternal Life, in the riches, of our inheritance in Christ.

Dear ones, the gifts of the Spirit the evil one can and has imitated. He can and has appeared many times as an angel of light, even as Christ; and he has deceived many, even Orthodox Christians. The evil one can fabricate mighty works, miracles, even healings, to draw self-loving souls away from the eternal life of the LORD. But in the cheap imitations of the evil one, one thing is lacking: repentance, and all that goes with it: contrition, mourning for one’s sin, humility, and the struggle to deny oneself and forcefully to let go one’s love for the riches of one’s self-love, greed, covetousness, idolatry.

This rich young ruler was obviously in self-deception, seeing himself as ‘righteous’ when in fact he was an idolater, a lover of himself, a friend of the world, and far from God. There is no resurrection to eternal life without dying to this life. There is no inheriting of the Kingdom of Heaven without the struggle of losing the riches of self-love and greed and idolatry in the godly sorrow of repentance of a broken and contrite heart.

And if God were not born as a Child of the Holy Virgin; if He had not died on the Cross and risen from the dead in the flesh, so that He has planted Himself, planted the Resurrection and the Life in the midst of the earth, in the very root of our being, in the sacred chambers where we are born and die, no one could be saved. There would be no inheriting of eternal life, no taking of the Kingdom of Heaven that is within us. But, because of Christmas and Holy Pascha, the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Christ is within us. God is with us!

We are making our way now through this blessed season of Advent with the wise men and the shepherds to the Cave of Bethlehem to offer the gifts of our love and the struggle of our repentance to the King in the hope of faith – the hope of inheriting eternal life, of receiving into the cave of our heart, the King and LORD of all. Amen!