By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
There is a perfection which kills. It is the perfection of the statue, flawless, cold and dead, and with this exact perfection appears the young man of the gospel passage of the 12th Sunday of Matthew, before the living God. A masterpiece within the architecture of the Law, a man whose soul has petrified from his own virtue.
His question, “Teacher, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” (Matt. 19,16), sounds like a request for the final varnish on the idol of himself, the last subtle brushstroke that would confirm the immortality of his work. It is the deep, underground anxiety of the self-sufficient, the terror that, somewhere on the flawless surface, there might be a hairline, invisible crack that will tear down everything. The final validation.
Christ, with a movement that looks more like a seismic tremor of reality than an answer, refuses to play the role of the validator: “Why do you call me good?” (Matt. 19,17). He does not judge him. He removes the foundation from under his feet. He enumerates the commandments to him as if reciting the ingredients of a void, of a recipe which, while kept to the letter, did not produce life, but only its flawless imitation.
The answer of the young man, “All these things have I kept from my youth up” (Matt. 19,20), is a litany of the void, a lifeless procession, the confession of a man who spent his life polishing the bars of his cell. His next phrase is the hidden agony which escapes from the depths of this cell: “What do I still lack?” (Matt. 19,20).
And then, after he himself confessed the wound, comes the healing which looks like amputation, the invitation that sounds like a death sentence to his former self, that relentless, surgical command which does not aim at the symptoms but at the very tumour which consumes his soul: “If you want to be perfect, go sell what you have… and come follow me” (Matt. 19,21), a proposal that is not moral advice but an invitation to an act of metaphysical suicide, to the voluntary demolition of the world which he built around his Ego, because perfection is not the accumulation of virtues but the total emptying from the self, the cutting off from everything that defines you outside of God, a violent transformation where the gold of the possessions must be burned in the alchemical furnace of love to be converted into the imperishable treasure of absolute freedom, of existence as pure relation and not as a fortified possession. He was of course rich. For Christ, this is not a social situation but a disease.
The possessions had become an extension of his flesh. And so, “he went away grieving” (Matt. 19,22), returning to the warm, suffocating tomb of his treasures. This grief is not just an emotion, but it flares up into a tangible, heavy presence of a God who was rejected, the phosphorescent shadow of a salvation that he refused to accept.
Christ does not mourn. Not at all. He simply makes the diagnosis. The parable of the camel (Matt. 19,24), in the continuation of the passage, is not an exaggeration, it is a law of spiritual physics. Wealth exceeds the notion of possession and of the object and becomes power, an active gravity which deforms the space of the soul, curves it around the Ego and renders impossible the straight course towards the narrow gate. The rich man, as observes Saint Eustathius of Thessaloniki, forgets that he is simply “a steward”, a manager, and slides into the hubris of the owner.
And this hubris is a form of cancer which gives birth to its own living, necrotic reality: the gold and the silver, stacked in the storehouses of the soul, cease to be inert metals and become a living, metabolising fungus which, as warns the Apostle James with an image of unspeakable horror, begins to feed on its possessor – “Their rust… will eat your flesh like fire” (Jam. 5,3), a slow we would say, internal, silent process of auto-cannibalism, where the man is consumed by his own possessions, at the time that the world, blinded by the shine, applauds his self-destruction, falls silent when he speaks, and elevates his word “unto the clouds”, even if this word is nothing but the sound of decomposition.[1]
He becomes the casing of his things. A living sarcophagus. The reality has been completely reversed. Man serves matter. The soul becomes a slave of gold. And God is limited to the role of a decorative amulet. A luxury for those who have.
The reaction of the disciples is the dizziness of one who has just realised that the map he was using leads to the cliff: “they were exceedingly amazed” (Matt. 19,25). This reversal is so radical that it causes them cognitive collapse, a terror that is expressed with the most fundamental question of human existence: “Who then can be saved?” (Matt. 19,25). It is the cry of absolute bankruptcy. If this perfect one failed, what remains? His answer is not a simple solution but an invasion.
“With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19,26). Here we no longer speak of human effort, but of divine intervention. Salvation, rather, is not the top of the ladder which we build, but the hand which tears down our prison. And the young man, with his sad back, remains in history as an eternal monument of human tragedy: the moment when man looked God in the eyes, saw the emergency exit, and chose to burn alive inside his palace…
[1] Eustathius of Thessalonica, Tou Sophōtatou kai Logiōtatou Eustathiou Mētropolitou Thessalonikēs Apanta Hosa Ekklēsiastikēs Estin Hypotheseōs [The Complete Ecclesiastical Works of the Most Wise and Most Learned Eustathius, Metropolitan of Thessalonica], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 136 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1865), 885.
