Knowing Jesus and Entering Through Him the Narrow Gate, 30th Wednesday (II), October 26, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 26, 2022
Eph 6:1-9, Ps 145, Lk 13:22-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

•  “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. The response that a typical Jew at the time would have expected is “Yes!” because most Jews believed that only Jews — and Jews who faithfully kept God’s covenant — would make it. The interrogator likely thought he was among the few. But Jesus didn’t reply attempting to satisfy the person’s curiosity, because he hadn’t come from heaven to earth to answer the questions of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved.
•  “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” he said. The word translated as “strive” is from the Greek word to “agonize” and it’s used in a tense that means “keep on agonizing.” It’s the same word we heard St. Paul use on Sunday when he called us to “fight the good fight” or literally “agonize the beautiful agony.” To get to Heaven, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to go into agony, to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut, harder than gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival. To be a faithful Christian means to “agonize” to follow Christ always. There is no point that we can stop fighting to follow him and “live off the interest” of previous years of good discipleship. We are called to struggle, to keep fighting the good fight of faith, until the day we die. As Archbishop Sheen used to say, “If we’re not going uphill, we’re sliding downhill.” If we’re not swimming against the current of the world toward Jesus, we’ll be floating down stream over the falls. “Unless you pick up your cross each day and follow me,” he tells us, “you cannot be my disciple” (Lk 9:27,14:27). The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the Cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through. We need to agonize that way to fit through the narrow gate as if our whole life depended on it — because, in fact, Jesus says it does. In the midst of a culture that is consistently trying to water down our commitment to God, Christians who want to be faithful need to strive even harder to pick up the Cross God gives them each day and unite themselves to Christ on the Cross. Christ, himself, is the “gate to the sheepfold” (Jn 10:7,9). The reason why the gate is narrow is because it is the width of the crucified Christ.
• With words meant to shock us out of complacency, Jesus declares in St. Matthew’s version, “For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Few people, he implies, make the effort required to enter into life. Few agonize to enter through the narrow gate. Over the last few decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is exactly the opposite of what Jesus describes today, that salvation is cheap and the Christian life smooth and easy. Most have been led to believe that they can “float” effortlessly downstream to heaven because everyone ends up there — except perhaps those who don’t like us, serial killers, public smokers and those who do not use one’s preferred pronouns in progressive circles. We might all need minor “course corrections” in life, but no major changes. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. This lie from the father of lies is the opposite of what Jesus the incarnate Truth taught us. It’s also a very dangerous heresy —universalism or apocatastasis — that carries with it potentially the most serious of eschatological consequences. The One who is the Gate to the sheepfold tells us that we need continuously to agonize to enter into him. Jesus said these words as he was on the road to Jerusalem, and we know what happened when he got to Jerusalem. He entered into his agony, the agony that led to our salvation and opened up the narrow door. But we need to be willing to follow him along that path of sacrificial love — and to admit that it’s not a much-traveled path. We can ask ourselves: Which is more popular today, the path of spiritual poverty announced by Jesus or the one of materialist wealth? The path of purity or pornography? The path of peace-making or score-settling?  The path of mourning or partying? The path of turning the other cheek or slapping back? The path of keeping the commandments or breaking them? Jesus’ path is not an easy one and he never pretended that it was. Loving according to his standards can be crucifying. But he’s telling us today that it’s eternally worth it. But, we can ask, what if we don’t love the Lord that much? What if we really don’t make an heroic effort? We might not get an A-plus on our discipleship and priestly life and ministry, but we’ll still make the cut, won’t we? There has to be some type of loophole, right? Jesus implies today that there’s no short-cut out of the effort he is calling us to. In today’s Gospel, there were many who thought they had an “in,” only to be profoundly mistaken. They remained on the outside, knocking, trying to get in to no avail. “We ate and drank with you!,” they cried. It wasn’t enough. “We heard you teaching in our streets.” That wasn’t sufficient either. To both, Jesus said, “I do not know where you come from.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives even more stunning examples. “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?” (Mt 7:22). Jesus says even to these he will declare, “I never knew you” (Mt 7:23). Jesus was saying to these people that a mere external relationship with him is not enough. It’s not enough to have heard Him speak. It’s not sufficient to have eaten and drunk with Him, even the Holy Eucharist as do each day. It’s not adequate to proclaim the Gospel in His name, to do exorcisms and house blessings or even work miracles like we do every day at the altar, or in the confessional or at bedsides. After all, Judas Iscariot did all of these things, but he never really knew Who Jesus was. He followed Jesus on the outside but, as much as Jesus wanted it, he never became his intimate friend, a real member of his family, valuing Jesus ultimately less than 30 pieces of silver. His fall teaches us that not everyone living around Christ is really a Christian, not everyone coming to Church is a disciple, and not everyone in a Roman collar is really an alter Christus. We have to do more than listen to Jesus — we have to put his words into action, even difficult words like we find in today’s Gospel. We have to do more than eat and drink with him — we need to become whom we eat. We need to do more than announce his name and do some good deeds — we need to live by his name (Christian) and allow Him to work through us. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him. And we need to agonize to let go of everything in our life that’s not ordered to God, that’s not compatible with the life of faith, to squeeze into deeper conformity of heart, mind, soul and strength with Jesus and live in that full-time loving union with him.
• Today in the first reading St. Paul continues his moral instructions to the Christians in Ephesus. Yesterday, you remember, he focused on how Christian spouses are called to love each other as Christ and the Church love each other, to reverence and obey each other out of reverence for Christ, to seek to lay down their lives for each other to make the other holy and unblemished before God. Today St. Paul continues those instructions in the family, calling children to strive to honor and obey their parents in the Lord and for parents not to anger their children through authoritarianism but to “bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord,” how to love each other like with the sometimes agonizing, self-giving, merciful love with which he has loved us first. St. Paul says that even situations of obvious injustice like slavery can be lived in a way that can make us holy. He called those who were slaves to become slaves of Christ, doing God’s will from the heart, serving others willingly as if they were serving the Lord, knowing that the Lord will repay. He summons slave owners to “act in the same way towards them,” to serve the Lord in the way they serve their slaves, to stop bullying and bossing, knowing that they have a Master in heaven who plays no favorites. He was calling slave owners not to take the broad highway leading to perdition but the narrow agonizing gate to life, by treating their slaves the way St. Paul elsewhere challenged Philemon to care for Onesimus.
• As we know, in front of the call to agonize to enter through the narrow gate, Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own, with all our weaknesses, staring at the uphill narrow road, wondering if we will be one of those who are able to make it. He gives himself to us to strengthen us on the inside. He gives us the whole work of the Church. He empowers us by his word, he bolsters by the intimate friendship of prayer, and fortifies us by the awesome gift of Holy Communion so that united with him we might follow him step by step, entering into him who is the narrow gate. If we do this, then at the end of our earthly life, when we appear at the station before the gates of the eternal Jerusalem and, together with others we have invited and helped to join us on the journey, ask, “Lord, open to us,” we will see him smile, open the gates, call us by name and say, “I do know you! Come on in! Enter into the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of time!” (cf. Mt 25:34).

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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