Last Sunday, we had a very challenging Gospel, as
we heard Jesus declare that his radical Gospel message would bring about
division, not peace. Today, I was hoping for a Gospel that was a bit
easier to tackle, but our message today is also very challenging and difficult
to discern. We are given a lot of themes and images in Jesus’
message this morning: the narrow gate through which we enter eternal life, the
question of who will be saved, and the predicament of who will be first and who
will be last in God’s kingdom.
As we think about the image of a narrow gate, we
might think about the difficult passageways we have to get through in life,
both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense. When I thought about this reading, I thought not
about a narrow gate, but rather a narrow bridge. As a missionary, traveling to the different
villages in the jungle could be daunting. I remember the first village I visited with the
priest away from our mission site. We
traveled 4 hours in a canoe, then several more hours on horseback through the
rain forest before we reached the village. When we arrived there, we had to cross a bridge to
enter into the village. And by bridge,
it was nothing more large log stretched across a ravine. That’s a bridge – you’ve got to be kidding me,
I thought. The villagers were running
across the log with great agility.
However, I looked at the priest and said: Oh no.
I am not going across that log.
He told me that there was no other way to go across. I got up on
the log and eased my way across with the speed of inch worm. I got to the center of the log and looked
down; I froze, convinced that I was going fall, and in the process breaking my
neck or some other body part. I looked across the log and saw a little old
indigenous man – he was probably about 4’10” tall, very weather-beaten for his
harsh life in the jungle. He looked at me and saw the fear in my eyes. Before I knew what was going on, he had run
across the log, picked me up and had brought me across safely. In my shock, I was able to thank him.
The trouble
was, as I was going across the log, I panicked.
I didn’t have confidence I would make it. I didn’t have faith. To go through the narrow gate that Jesus is talking
about, we have to rely on our faith, and on the grace of God to get us through. Really knowing Jesus and having a relationship with
him, relying on our faith through the ups and downs of life, and growing up on
our spiritual journey – those are all things that will help us get through that
narrow gate.
Our reading from Isaiah also gives us greater
insight into the salvation that God offers to humanity and the way we can enter
through the gate Jesus is talking about. The people of Israel had seen themselves as God’s
chosen people, yet they were forced into exile and taken away from their
promised land. Isaiah helps them understand that their time in exile
spread their faith to other lands and to the farthest ends of the earth. People of different races and different nations
learned about God in this way. The
people of Israel brought them to God as an offering on his holy mountain. This message offered by Isaiah of God’s invitation
to all to his kingdom was perhaps surprising to the people of ancient
Israel. Perhaps we’re surprised at who is welcomed into God’s
kingdom as well based upon our preconceived ideas about our faith. Perhaps the ones we thought would be last will
indeed be the first to come to his kingdom; maybe we need to remember that
there are different ways God calls us to live out our Catholic faith and that
our way is not the only way.
We hear a lot of people in our society today say
that anything goes – any lifestyle, any path, any belief system – that any of
these things will lead to salvation.
That is not what Jesus is saying in today’s Gospel. God is looking for a commitment; he is
looking for us to travel down the road of faith with him. And we cannot trick ourselves or trick God
that there is another way. There is a story about the first Czar of Russian,
Ivan IV, often referred to as Ivan the Terrible. Even though under his guidance Russia was
transformed from a small kingdom to a mighty empire, Ivan was well-known for
his cruelty – he even killed his own son, the heir to the throne of Russia, in
a fit of anger and rage. At the end of his life, as an old man, Ivan was
afraid to face God and to be judged for all the terrible things he did during
his life. Ivan shaved his head and dressed for burial in the
robes of a Russian monk, hoping that God would think him to be a true monk and
a religious man of God, and would thus allow him into heaven. We might think this story to be ridiculous,
but it is no different from the way some people in our world today try to
disguise who they really are, thinking that God and everyone else will think
that they are different from their true selves.
Maybe the goal of this talk about salvation and
narrow gates and who will be first in the Kingdom of Heaven is to get us to
think about how seriously we commit ourselves to our journey of faith, about how
seriously we are willing to reach out to others on this journey and to
contribute to the life of our parish. Do we see ourselves as disciples of Christ who
infuse God’s love into our world and who proclaim God’s kingdom to our brothers
& sisters? Or do we leave that work
to others? Are we willing to go through this narrow gate even
on our earthly journey, to enter the gate of faith that God has brought into
our world?
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