Putting on the mind of Christ.

A few Sundays ago the Gospel reading in the Orthodox church was Matthew's story of the encounter of the rich young man with Jesus. Jesus tells him that to be saved he must keep the Commandments, including the most difficult one of all, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." When the young man says that he has kept the Commandments, even that hardest one, we have no reason to think he was not telling the absolute truth. Jesus then tells him, "If you would be perfect, sell what you possess, give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." This is followed by the statement that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, though with God all things are possible.

This passage has often been used to make a distinction between the life of the ordinary Christian and the life of the committed ascetic. After all, the young man can be saved simply by keeping the Commandments; but he has to go farther to become perfect. I think this misses the point, which is a somewhat frightening one.

Saint Athanasius said that God became human so that human beings might become God. This doctrine of deification is central to Orthodoxy, and to the mysticism of the West (for example, in The Cloud of Unknowing, the Letter of Private Direction, and the writings of

Saint John of the Cross). Asceticism is certainly involved here, but it is not seen as a special vocation, and deification is seen as the state to which all are called, a complete restoration of the communion with God which is broken by sin. Jesus revealed what we are to be; though he is divine by nature, we become divine by adoption.

To be divine, in Christian terms, means that (in Saint Paul's words) we must "have this mind among ourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself...." (Philippians 2: 5-7)

Richness in the form of possessions is in this context a metaphor, and more than a metaphor. To be rich is not only to have more than you need, it is to hold on to that which makes you secure. What happens if you sell everything you have? You have nothing between you and hunger, between you and illness, between you and death. It is entirely natural to fear all of this, and it seems foolhardy to think of abandoning it all, in the hope that God will take care of you.

This idea--that we are called to become divine--means in the context of Christianity that we are to empty ourselves, as Christ did. What is increasingly clear to me is that whether we choose to give it all up or not, it will all be taken from us anyway. When Jesus says "take up your cross" the implication is that the cross will be there whether we take it up or not. We will be crucified in any event. How will we deal with it? When you see people at the edge of death you understand that there is little you can do for them. You can bring them what the church has to bring--the sacraments, Scripture, words of consolation that often seem, in context, pretty hollow--because the dying person knows that you have not been where she is, which is to say the place where you lose everything you have ever known and leave everyone you have loved.

Of course, it is our faith that Jesus, death has overcome death itself, that we do not leave those we have loved, that death does not cancel us. But having that faith, feeling it when confronted with death is, to put it mildly, no easy thing. Jesus, prayer in Gethsemane, said when he was "greatly distressed and troubled," should make it clear that we cannot expect to meet this moment without difficulty.

Riches represent the attempt we make never to come to this moment. In this sense they are both metaphorical and more than metaphorical. They are metaphorical in that they need not be possessions. The person who holds on to any self-image, any sense of personal importance, or is pleased to be a CEO, a bishop, or a well-regarded poet, is holding on to a kind of wealth. And we do in fact use physical possessions i n the same way. All of these things distract us from something absolutely unavoidable. I had always thought of the passage about the rich young man as having something to do with Christian ethics, the relationship between rich and poor, and of course this is also present in the passage. But finally it is about a kind of law that obtains in the fallen world. Like "the sins of the fathers are visited on the children," it is not about God's sense of justice; it is simply a fact. In fact the rich try to hold on to something that cannot really be held on to, and if we need to empty ourselves in order to be like the one who assumed our nature so that we could assume his, that grasping will keep us from being able to join him.

The subversive thing about Christianity is that there is no point at which we could really know that we have given it all up. We are left as the disciples were when they asked, "Who then can be saved?" It isn't possible for men, Jesus says, but with God all things are possible. That's the only note of hope here, or for that matter anywhere.