21st Sunday in OT 2019 - Strive to enter through the narrow gate

In the course of his public ministry, Jesus is asked a lot of questions. After all, he is a teacher; he has disciples who call him “rabbi”. Sometimes people ask questions about his motives, he is asked, “why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?”; sometimes he is asked about his identity, “who are you? Are you the one who the scriptures foretold? Are you the messiah?”, other times Our Lord is asked to give commentary on the moral law, or the law of moses, “is it lawful to divorce and remarry?”

And quite typically, one of the hallmarks of Jesus’ teaching is that he often does not answer questions directly. He often redirects the question to consider matters of greater importance.

When asked in today’s Gospel, "Lord, will only a few people be saved?", the Lord doesn’t answer with a yes or no, as the question would dictate. Rather, he seems to indicate that the question “how many people will be saved” isn’t nearly as important as the question “HOW will we be saved?” The number of the saved isn’t nearly as important as the manner by which we are saved. The Lord leads the questioner to consider what is of greater importance.

In a similar incident, when asked when the world was going to end, he didn’t answer the question directly, there either; rather he urged the questioners to “prepare themselves.” For knowing the day or the hour isn’t as important as the need to prepare your soul through repentance.

Again, the Lord reorients the questioner to consider what is of greater importance. That shifting, that reorienting is at the essence of the Christian life, isn’t it? Christianity reorients us, from focusing on what is of lesser importance to what is of greater importance. What is of greater importance, the earthly or the heavenly? What is of greater importance, the size of your house, the neighborhood in which you live, or if you make your home a Christian home where the love of God is practiced? What is of greater importance, seeking wealth, fame, and power, or holiness, humility, and service?

Now the worldly soul might say, well does it matter? What does it matter if my life is focused on the worldly? What does it matter if my life is focused on non-essentials? Why do we need to be reoriented?

Part of it has to do with joy. In the end the earthly does not give us true joy. And the Lord say, “I have come that you might have joy, and your joy might be complete.” You might think that the biggest house on the block will bring you joy, but what actually gives joy is that the house is filled with people who you love and who love God, that your home is filled with the peace that the world cannot give. You might think that wealth, fame, and power bring your joy, but we know that pursuing these things alone leads to exhaustion. You might think that the million-and-one non-essentials will bring you joy, but our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

And the deeper reason we need conversion, the heart of the matter, isn’t just that these million-and-one non-essentials leave us exhausted and joyless in this life, but rather, that there are eternal consequences at stake. What we do in this life echoes into eternity. And in the end there are only two possibilities for our eternal souls, which the Lord describes in today’s Gospel, one way that leads to the “wailing and grinding of teeth” and the other “to reclining at table” at the eternal banquet in the kingdom of God. As the ancient Christians put it: there is one way that leads to life, and another that leads to death, and there is a great chasm between the two.

So, how can we be saved? What is the way that leads to everlasting life, “how can we come to that place at God’s eternal table?

““Strive to enter through the narrow gate”. Heaven cannot be taken for granted. We must strive for it, we must make every effort to reach it. The Greek word, translated as strive, in the Gospel today, is the word “agonizomai” from which we derive the word Agony. Agonize, make the supreme effort. The greeks used this word to describe the effort of the Athlete who seeks to win the Olympic games and to survive hand-to-hand combat with your mortal enemy. Do you want to be saved? Are you doing everything you can to be saved?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jesus’ passion begins with the “agony” in the garden, where he agonizes over abandoning his will to the will of the father. He sweats blood over it?
Notice Jesus doesn’t say today, stand at the gate and complain about how narrow it looks.  Some Christians look at the commandments of God and teachings of the Church and reject them, claiming that they are too narrow, too rigid, outdated.  They seek to refashion the gate, and make it wider.  But that’s not what Jesus commands here.

Rather, Entering the narrow gate requires us to change.  It requires that we conform ourselves to its narrowness, to deflate our egos if our egos are too big, to let go of the attitudes which are not of christ, to drop the selfish clinging to worldly pleasures, grudges, and fears if they are keeping us from following Jesus in the way of love and self-sacrifice.

This all seems very hard, very difficult, and perhaps unpleasant. But, that’s where our Second Reading reassures us, that to those who allow themselves to be disciplined by God, for those who strengthen their drooping hands and weak knees, for those who allow themselves to be corrected and converted, they will know peace, they will know the peaceful fruits of righteousness, they will know themselves as children of a good God who seeks what is best for them, who desires that we become our best selves, who we seeks our salvation from all those self-destructive vices and attitudes.

It is a tough gospel, a tough lesson. But in the end it’s the message of the cross, it’s the essence of Christianity: let those who wish to follow me, deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me,” says the Lord. And we know that the cross, and the cross alone is the royal road to heaven, it’s the secret to true joy, and eternal life for the glory of God and salvation of souls.