Spiritual Hiccups - A Not Quite Good Messiah?

I've long been struck by a line from today's gospel.  As Jesus draws near to Jerusalem a rich man approaches him.  (The "rich young ruler" does not exist in the Bible.  He is a conflation of the accounts from Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)  He addresses Jesus with great respect, calling him "Good Teacher."  But Jesus responds to this address with, "Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone."

I've never quite known what to do with this line.  If read literally, Jesus would seem here to deny all sorts of deeply held Christian beliefs.  He must not be God in the flesh, and he must not be one person of the Trinity if he cannot be called "good" in the same way God can.

This might be a good place to reiterate that these "hiccups" are not pronouncements or well thought out biblical exegesis.  They are a part of my personal reflections, prayers, and meditations, and as such they are not meant to withstand great theological scrutiny.  Still, as a ponder this line, I find myself wondering about the nature of Jesus' incarnation, about what it means to be Son of God and yet reject the label good.

I'm sure there are many reasons why Jesus might say what he does, but I find myself wondering about what it means for Jesus to fully embrace our humanity.  I grew up thinking of God in Western terms of static perfection, with humans, by contrast, neither static or perfect.  We are forever changing.  We may be getting better or getting worse but we cannot simply stay the same.  But if Jesus is fully human, and considering that he rejects the label good, does that mean that Jesus is something quite different from that static perfection that defined divinity for me?

On the one hand such thoughts might seem to diminish Jesus in some way.  But from another point of view they might enhance a view of human capacity to bear in itself the divine.  I have heard from my earliest Sunday School days that humans were created in God's image.  I won't get into the possible meanings of this "image," but both this image and the presence of God in Jesus speaks to the possibility of a humanity not quite so other and separate from God. It raises the possibility of human life that truly reflects the image of God.

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