Readings:
Isaiah 66:18-21
Psalm 117:1, 2
Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13
Luke 13:22-30
We have in our Gospel today a rather straightforward question. A man comes up to Jesus and asks him, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” What a good question. Isn’t it a question we’ve maybe at least at some point in our lives wanted to ask God, how many will really be saved? And here in the Gospel they were wondering the same thing. How man will be saved? A few? A thousand? A million? 144,000? Notice how our Lord when he responds to this man does not report a number, rather he shifts the focus of the question from being about everybody else to being about the individual asking the question: “You strive to enter through the narrow gate …” What a great answer … If we ask Jesus How many will be saved? Or even just will I be saved? We can see his answer already … “You strive to enter through the narrow gate.” So lets look at this narrow gate, what is it made up of? How do we strive to enter through it? I want to propose a triple-path to help us get to and enter through the narrow gate: 1) the path of grace 2) the path of virtue 3) the path of enduring suffering well.
Anyone who wants to enter through the narrow gate must first receive grace. To pass through the narrow gate is impossible for man alone and so he needs the grace of God. Grace enables us to enter through the narrow gate. If one were to look among all the other religions of the world you would discover that the doctrine of grace is unique to Christianity. Grace means that God acts first, that he has come to us to help us attain eternal life. A good definition of grace then is Calvary, that is, the mount upon which the Cross of our Lord was planted. Grace = Calvary. For when you look upon the limp body of our Lord Jesus breathing his last for our sins you see a reservoir of grace that is filled to the brim and flowing over. It’s there in the heart of Jesus where all the grace we need to enter the narrow gate, to gain eternal life, is kept. How does it get to us? Remember that after our Lord breathed his last his side was pierced with a lance and what poured out was blood and water. In our Catholic faith the water is a sign of Baptism and the Blood is a sign of the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of our Lord. So what gets the grace from that heart to this heart? From that heart to your heart? The sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist. Imagine a long pipe connected to that wounded side of our Lord, that pipe reaches across centuries and millennium to bring the grace that flows from his wounded heart, wounded out of love for us, to us here in the year 2010. That is exactly what the sacraments do. They connect the event of Calvary to your very own life today. Without this grace we would not even know where to begin in trying to enter through the narrow gate.
The second path to and through the Narrow Gate is virtue. Once we have received grace we have to maintain it and we do that with a life of virtue. Our virtuous lives enable us to keep God’s grace actively working in our lives. Grace is sustained by growing in virtue. What is virtue? Virtue is a good habit bearing on our activity and we form good habits by discipline. Virtue exists, by the way, both for the natural life and the supernatural life. To be good at anything, like basketball, baseball, football, golf, dancing, gymnastics, swimming, chess, one needs to discipline themselves with good habits so that they can perform. Since football season is coming up lets take that as our example. Everyone knows that preseason is a time to get in shape; to pump, pump, pump it up. But if in the off season you haven’t been keeping good habits like exercising daily, eating well, and taking care of your body it is going to be harder to get into top shape come time for regular season. You have to discipline yourself, form good habits, so that you can achieve your goals. Just as there are disciplines in training for football, like exercising, weight lifting, drills that enable a player to throw the ball, catch the ball, juke, block, or tackle better. So too there are disciplines in the spiritual life, like prayer, coming to Mass, going to confession, devotions, spiritual reading, studying the teachings of the Church, these are all disciplines that enable a Christian to grow in virtue, virtues like living a more pure and chaste life, exercising patience with those who frustrate us, being more truthful with those we love, having more faith in God when times are difficult, and loving even those who hate us. Yes, grace might give you a free gym pass, so to speak, but if you don’t take the time to go to the spiritual gym of your life and use the weights and techniques of the spiritual life, you won’t have a chance at walking through that narrow gate come game time. The grace that pours into our lives from the cross must be maintained, sustained, and activated by a virtuous life.
Finally, striving to enter through the narrow gate includes the ability to suffer well. A life of grace and of virtue will bring with it certain suffering. We would not be able to walk through the narrow gate without enduring at least just a little bit of suffering. Why does suffering have to be part of God’s plan we might wonder? Let’s be clear when Jesus came to earth he didn’t come and say, “Hey everyone, I have good news, suffer!” No … rather, he found us in suffering, in our strife and our struggle, and he chose to enter into that all of it, to the greatest degree possible, so that something good might come of it, namely so that salvation might come of it. Our Lord’s suffering on the cross has turned the worst evil of our life, our own suffering, strife, and struggles, to be the source of the greatest good of our life, our salvation. Thus, here we see that the narrow gate of heaven that we want to walk through is closely connected with suffering well.
Our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews can comfort us about this whole reality of the narrow gate involving difficulties, the author writes, (quote) “all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” Here that athletic vocabulary echoing a bit. Discipline. Training. The struggle that comes from disciplining ourselves, the strife of leaving behind our old lives, the suffering because others think we’re weird for loving Jesus, and the sadness of turning away from the things of the world or the things in our own life that we have tried previously to fill ourselves up with, turning from all that, to God and asking him to fill us up with his grace seems a cause not for joy but for pain. But in truth this is all leading us the to peaceful fruit of righteousness so that we may, with the grace of God and virtuous life, “make straight paths for (our) feet” through the narrow gate of heaven.
Why not make the gate wider? Why does it have to be narrow? In the Gospel of John chapter 10 verse 9, not our reading from today, our Lord says this; (quote) “I am the gate and whoever enters through me will be saved.” Connect that statement with our Gospel today in your mind. Think about it … the gate is narrow precisely because the gate is Jesus, and so to enter through the narrow gate ultimately means conformity to the very person of Jesus Christ, to live a life of grace with Jesus, to follow in the wake of the many virtues he exhibited in his earthly life, and to participate with him in the suffering he endured on Calvary. By the way, that’s why he will be able to recognize us when we come and knock on the door, because we have been conformed to him, we have been likened to his own person. If we do this we will have no need to worry that we might have to hear those most horrifying words that were spoken in the parable today to the one who knocked on the door, “I do not know you.”
So how many will be saved? 10, do I hear 20, 50, one million, 25%, no come on, turn away from this pointless question, rather you strive to enter through the narrow gate by living a life with Jesus himself.
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