The Narrow Gate

Today’s gospel passage (Lk 13:22-30) occurs soon after Jesus proclaims the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast in which Jesus implies that the kingdom will grow to enormous proportions from its very small beginnings.  This must have sounded odd to the disciple who asks Jesus if only a few people will be saved.   Presumably, he thought of the kingdom more narrowly, possibly restricted just to the Chosen People or, even more limited, just to those who ate and drank with Jesus himself.  To the questioner's anticipated delight, he was already a member of this very exclusive group!

In a way, this jibes with our own experience and expectations.  We lock the doors at night once we are safely inside.  We close the membership to our clubs once we are safely admitted.  We build gated communities to assure that only those who belong can enter.  It wouldn’t make sense to do otherwise.  Similarly, in our spiritual lives, we often create boundaries or limits on God's mercy, but only when we are certain that we fall within those limits.  What sense would it be to exclude ourselves from God’s mercy?  On the other hand, those others, those evil-doers…

It is just this logic – this sense that we are right to belong, that we are insiders, protected and isolated from the undeserving – that keeps us outside the very door we feel we have entered.  Jesus states that the true way into the kingdom is a hard one, though it is open to anyone.  The Greek word we translate as "strive" in "Strive to enter through the narrow gate" is the root word of our English word "agony."  Jesus implies that entering the kingdom is an agonizing struggle. 

In ancient walled cities, the narrow gate was only one person wide, so that only one person could pass at a time.  This makes it a very apt analogy for our entry to paradise, for our narrow gate is exactly one person wide – Jesus. But where is the struggle, the striving?  Being with Jesus can actually be pleasant.  I look forward to being with Jesus at the Eucharist.  I enjoy the singing, the praying, and being with others of like mind.  And we even get graces and the real presence of Jesus!  I enjoy the peace of quiet of my weekly hour of adoration before the sacrament.  There’s not struggle here. 

But Jesus wants more.  Luke reminds us at the very beginning of today’s reading that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to the cross.  And if we are to struggle to enter paradise through Jesus, we must not only eat and drink and be in his presence, we must also carry the cross with him.

The particular cross each of us carries may vary, but a consistent feature of all of our crosses is constant and universal love: love of family, love of friends, love of neighbors, and most importantly, love of enemies.  For without loving our enemies, our love becomes simply what the pagans do.  Christian love is much more.  The cross we bear is that this Christian love is not always – in fact, is not usually – requited love.  It may even provoke division and animosity.  This should not matter, since, as fellow cross bearers with Christ, we are measured by how we love, not by how we are loved.

How can we show this love every day and to everyone?  That is where we struggle and strive.  Many times, it seems unfair to love others unconditionally.   Take our nation’s struggle with immigration reform and with undocumented immigrants.  How do we balance our right to private property with Jesus’ command to share with those who have less?  How do we balance Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger with our need to provide for ourselves?  How do we know when enough is enough?

For Jesus, of course, there is no balance.  Enough is never enough.  There is just more love – eternal, unconditional love, the same love that God shows us in the giving his only Son. 

So we keep struggling, we keep praying, we keep proclaiming God's love as best we can.  For if we stop struggling, if we stop loving, one of two things must be true.  Either we have ignored Jesus completely or we are certain of that which we cannot be certain – that we have done enough.  In either case, Jesus tells us, we will have placed ourselves outside the door, outside the kingdom, despite God's constant invitation for us to enter.

Struggle and strive, give thanks for our occasional successes, ask forgiveness for our more frequent failures, and pray for the strength to love others as God loves us.  Only by doing so can we hope to be counted among those from the east and the west and those from the north and the south, that take their place at the feast in the kingdom of God.