21st. Sunday, Year (C)
(Isaiah
66:18-21; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30)
‘Lord, will only a few people be
saved?’ He answered them, ‘Strive to
enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but
will not be strong enough (not be able).’
The first lesson to be learnt from those words of
Jesus is that we should take great care lest we allow ourselves to be swept
along with the majority. There are, sadly, many nominal Catholics and pseudo-religious
people who imagine that because they are only doing what others -- most others,
they would say -- are doing these days, they can consider themselves to be safe
and secure from serious fault ... for who could fairly blame the majority, how
could the understanding and expectations of so many so-called Christians and
even Catholics be wrong? And so, despite
some possibly niggling vestiges of conscience, they approach the Lord with false
confidence and soft words of entrapment, ‘Lord,
will only a few people be saved?’
What does ‘be saved’ mean there? It is a passive expression and it does not
appear to be a question about being saved by
someone, so much as being saved from
someone, from something. ‘Being saved’,
it implies, is what happens to some people without their involvement, and one
can already anticipate -- hidden in such passivity -- the future complaints and ready excuses of
the majority not thus saved, ‘We couldn’t do anything about it; it wasn’t our
fault, we only did what lots of others were doing’.
Jesus rejects such passivity and any suggestion
of such helpless innocence, immediately; He insists on an active appreciation and
open expression of the question involved, and therefore He answers, Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
which means, ‘You strive to enter through the narrow gate, for it
depends ultimately on you; without doubt you cannot do it of yourself but
neither, most certainly, will it be done without you, in spite of you, or
against you.’
At the root of this attitude to God is the bogy
of sin. Why should God label some of our
actions as sinful, why should He get angry when we do such things? They don’t touch Him; they just satisfy us,
give us some pleasure in life.
Here we need to try to face up to a basic, and unfortunately
wide-spread mis-appreciation, and wrong-headed understanding, of Catholic teaching:
God, Jesus, and His Church, do not simply ‘label’ actions as sinful because
they anger, or are thought to anger, God. God declares something to be sinful for us because
it would hurt us, and could become like a stone of offence against us at the
deepest level of our being. When Mother
Church in the name of Jesus, likewise says, ‘such an action would be sinful for
you’, she means, such an action would hurt us, and could, perhaps, even ultimately
destroy us. God is motivated by love when
He warns us against sin; He is not pushed by anger in such matters but allows
Himself to be moved by compassion and concern for us, even though it gets Him
‘bad coverage in the popular press’, so to speak.
People of God, our heavenly Father, our Lord and
Saviour, the most Holy Spirit our Helper, is omnipotent of Himself and for us,
but He is neither foolish nor arbitrary; He wills to re-form us in Jesus by the
Spirit as His children, His children in Spirit and in Truth. He will not have our merely passive subjection
but desires our total love and active understanding, our sincere obedience and
self-commitment, so that, ultimately, we may be fit and able -- in Jesus -- to
share in His eternal beatitude; and to that end He is constantly at work in us
and with us, for us and our eternal well-being, through His Spirit.
Many will refuse or ignore God’s inspirations,
because they choose to sample the attractions of earthly life rather than work
with Him; they want to experience some of the earthly pleasures they can
afford, or to which – in accordance with what others were apparently doing around
them – they feel they have a right, and so can ‘legitimately’ allow themselves. These are the ones who would not say ‘no’ to
their own desires, rejecting, even mocking, the very idea of discipline, and regarding
sacrifice as being for fanatics only. Because
of such spiritual indifference and indulged sensuality many, attempting later to
enter by the narrow gate, will find themselves ‘not strong enough’ to do so, according
to our translation’s active understanding of the Gospel words ... as distinct
from the normal and more passive expression, ‘not be able’ to do so. Their original, ‘bi-focal’, so to speak,
question, ‘Lord, will only a few people
be saved,’ spoke indeed of salvation but secretly hinted at and mocked the
‘bogy God’ Who, they frequently say, is always calling things that annoy Him,
sins; labelling something as wrong and sinful merely because it is against His subjective
preferences or despotic wishes.
All such people want a broad path and a large
gate, slightly perhaps, but permanently, ajar; they want what a famous Lutheran
pastor, one persecuted by the Nazis, called ‘cheap grace’. Let me quote him:
‘Cheap grace
is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without
church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship,
grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.’
Such grace is much sought after: people will go
from church to church to find it, and on finding what they want they will call
such an accommodating church a truly
Christian church, a loving, caring, compassionate community from which no one
is to be excluded and where none are judged; where sin is recognized as being
mainly in the eyes of the beholder, and where, for the pure all actions and all
people are pure; where the only thing that matters is a good intention, and the
supremely good intention is not really wanting to harm anyone else.
In our Gospel reading we heard Jesus say:
There will be wailing and grinding of
teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom
of God, and you yourselves cast out.
The times of Jesus and His Church are offered us
to enable us to avoid those eternal punishments. Jesus
is merciful, loving, and understanding, but all with a view to our repentance
and conversion; He cannot, would not want to, remove what His Father has
established ... eternal punishment awaits those who deliberately and wilfully
ignore Jesus for whatever reason. Jesus
comes to offer us what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor I quoted
earlier, calls ‘costly’ -- not cheap – grace; grace that leads to eternal joy,
fulfilment, and peace. He writes:
‘Costly
grace is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must
be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.’
My dear People of God, we are very highly
privileged because the Lord has revealed to us the truth of the Gospel in the
Church which He established and which His Spirit guides and protects. The Gift of His Spirit is always there for us
among His people and we know where to seek and ask for It in the Eucharist and
the other sacraments of the Church. Let us take care and watch, let us pray and let
us work, because at times the way can indeed seem to be narrow, stretching on
and on before us with no end in sight; we might even, at times, fear that the
door is closed to us ... but such things are but fears, not fact, imaginings
not reality; for Jesus has assured us:
Do not be afraid little flock, for
your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12:32)
