Striving to Enter through the Narrow Gate with Loving Trust, Total Surrender and Cheerfulness, 21st Sunday (C), August 21, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
August 21, 2022
Is 66:18-21, Ps 117, Heb 12:5-7.11-13, 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: 

• In today’s first reading, God through the Prophet Isaiah — much like God would similarly say through Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel — announced that salvation was not merely for the Jews but for everyone. “Thus says the Lord,” Isaiah enunciates: “I come to gather nations of every language; they shall come and see my glory.” He says he will send missionaries, “fugitives,” to “Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan,” in other words to Spain, North Africa, Southern Turkey and Greece, “to the distant coastlands that have never heard of my fame or seen my glory and they shall proclaim my glory among all the nations.” He continues, “all your brothers and sisters from all the nations” will become an “offering to the Lord.” It’s a powerful message of hope and God’s will, as St. Paul would write to St. Timothy, that “all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). God wills all to be saved. God wants all the nations to praise him, all peoples to glorify him, like we prayed in the Psalm. As we heard in the Gospel, he wants those “from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” to recline at table in the Kingdom alongside Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the prophets. As we live this Octave between the Solemnity of the Assumption body and soul on Monday and the Coronation of our Lady tomorrow as Queen of heaven and earth, we can’t help but focus on heaven and how God wants to gather all nations of every language, all our brothers and sisters, body and soul, together with Mary, the patriarch, prophets and saints, to come and see his glory forever and offer themselves to him with unceasing love.
• In response to this universal saving plan of God, each of us is called to say, “Thy will be done!,” to order our life and our choices to this mind-blowing summons, to receive the gift and respond with faith. In the Gospel today, Jesus speaks about the response. In other parts of the Gospel, including in passages we’ve heard this week at daily Mass, Jesus sends out his “fugitives” to invite people to his eternal banquet, but many make excuses about other things, seemingly more urgent and important, they have to do, whether taking care of their businesses or animals or prioritizing human relationships. In Jesus’ words today, he helps us to become more mature and intentional in how we respond to the incredible offer he gives.
• Jesus is heading up to Jerusalem teaching the multitudes along the way. A person from the crowd asks him how many actually make it to heaven. “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” the person inquires. It seemed to be a question flowing from curiosity. How many from Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan? How many from the Bronx, from Washington, Chicago and LA? How many from India, China, Russia, Italy, Argentina, Yemen and Papua New Guinea? Jesus did not come down from heaven, however, to satisfy our curiosity. He came actually to save us and so he responded not by stating how many will be saved, but how that interlocutor and all or any will be saved: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” A similar thing happened at another time when the disciples asked the Lord about the timing of the end of the world. “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Mt 24:3). Jesus replied not by supplying information they could put into their calendars, but by telling them how to be ready no matter when it occurred. In both cases, Jesus was not being evasive; rather he was going beyond trivia to what is most important: making us aware of what we need to know and to do in order to experience the salvation he won for us.
• We can say, almost as an aside, that many in our world would do well to pay attention to what Jesus does not answer in the Gospel. Jesus’ failure to answer the question about the number of those to be saved shows the absurdity of groups, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who want to claim that they know the exact amount of people who are saved (144,000, taking literally a symbolic number used in Rev 14:1). It also shows the absurdity of many of those Pentecostal groups who found storefront churches and claim that they know for certain when the end of the world will be. Not only does Jesus not give us or them that information, but Jesus says in the Gospel that not even heknows when that will occur — only His Father knows (cf. Matt. 24:36 ).
• Even more than paying attention to what Jesus, in his answer, does not say, we must pay attention to what he does: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” This word, “strive,” in Greek is the same word we have for “agonize” and it’s used in a tense that means “keep on agonizing.” It points to the type of struggle and suffering Jesus says it will take to enter into his kingdom. To be saved, to enter the Kingdom, 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 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. 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. It in fact requires self-death, which is why when we say the person is in agony, we often mean the final agony of the deathbed.
• But what if someone doesn’t love the Lord that much? What if a person doesn’t really make an heroic effort? What if a man or woman, boy or girl, priest, religious or lay person does not get an A-plus on life: they’ll still make the cut, right? Listen to what Jesus says in St. Matthew’s Gospel about the relative numbers heading toward life and toward perdition. “The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. But the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Mt 7:13-14). Jesus does not tell us whether those on the wide, easy, congested “highway to hell” actually end up in Gehenna or whether those on the narrow, uphill road to life actually end up in heaven — Jesus’ whole mission and that of the Church he founded, after all, is to try to rescue people from the former to the latter — but Jesus does tell us pretty clearly about the direction in which the vast majority of people is trending. Over the last few decades, many have gotten the notion that the Christian life is exactly the opposite of what Jesus describes, that salvation is cheap and that everyone gets to Heaven — except perhaps genocidal serial killers, public smokers and people we don’t like. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. It’s a lie from the father of lies and also a very dangerous heresy — universalism or apocatastasis— that carries with it potentially the most serious of eschatological consequences. He who is the Gate of the sheepfold tells us that we need 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: Which is more popular today, the path of spiritual poverty announced by Jesus or the one of materialist wealth? The path of peace-making or score-settling?   The path of turning the other cheek or slapping back? The path of purity or pornography? 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 in this Sunday’s Gospel that it’s eternally worth it. He who said that we must “love the Lord … with all [our] strength” meant it. All our strength. All our mind, heart, and soul, too (cf. Lk 10:27)!
• Some today might object, “I’ve never heard things expressed like this before. There must be some type of loophole. As long as I consider myself a good person, as long as I come to Mass and keep the commandments, as long as I pray, pay, and obey, I don’t have anything to worry about, right?” 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,” people said, “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 indicating that a mere external relationship with him is not enough. It’s not enough just to come to hear Jesus’ words. It’s not enough to eat and drink with Jesus in the Last Supper in which we participate in the Mass. It’s not enough to mention his name to a few others or even to do a few good deeds in his name. In each of these things, Jesus says that we can still remain a stranger to him, someone unknown. After all, Judas ate and drank with Jesus, he heard his discourses, he was sent out by him to announce his kingdom and in his name he cast out demons and worked miracles (cf. Mt 10:8ff). Yet he never really knew who the Lord was. He followed Jesus on the outside, not on the inside. Even though Jesus wanted it so badly, Judas never became his intimate friend, he never became a member of his family on the inside. And we know that Judas ultimately valued Jesus less than 30 pieces of silver. We have to do more than listen to Jesus; we have to put his words into action, even difficult words like we find in this Sunday’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.
• To help people come to know God’s saving will and get on the narrow road to life is the reason why God founded the Missionaries of Charity, a group of “fugitives” sent out to the modern equivalents of Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan, to try to satiate Jesus’ infinite thirst that his saving love be known even by those whom the world doesn’t love. St. Teresa of Calcutta’s image was to help people get aboard the train that would disembark in the eternal station. One must get on the train, and not just any train, but the train that leads to the heavenly Jerusalem. She and you have suffered from acting on the Church’s faith about the last things, criticized for asking people who were dying whether they wanted a “ticket to heaven,” explaining to them the importance of baptism (or confession for those who were already baptized), and getting them ready as best way possible under the given circumstances. The world, which responds with indifference to those in the real or existential gutters, has on occasion objected, because many want to believe that any road or train — or even no path or movement at all — will do. But the Mission of the Church is to help everyone, particularly those in agony, to choose the narrow road that leads to life and love, to happiness, holiness and heaven. And part of our agony is to suffer for that effort.
• During this Triduum, Sisters, in anticipation of your renewal, tomorrow, on August 22, it is helpful to remember that God is calling you to strive to enter through the narrow gate with loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness, in imitation and with the help of Jesus and Mary, and to recommit, as fugitives from the Garden of Eden, to try to help others to do the same. Renew your loving trust in Jesus, in his word, in his call. Offer yourselves anew with all your mind, heart, soul and strength. And do so with radiant joy, recognizing, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us in today’s second reading, that “at the time, 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,” grasping how awesome the privilege it is to be united with Christ and his thirst on the Cross, entering into him who is the gate of the Sheepfold, whose narrow girth is the width of the cross.
• As we know, before the call to agonize to enter through the narrow gate with loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness, Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own, with all our weaknesses, staring at the uphill narrow road. He gives himself to us to strengthen us on the inside so that he might “strengthen [our] drooping hands and weak knees” and we might “make straight paths for [our] feet,” as we fight the good fight, finish the race and keep the faith. We can indeed do all things in him who strengthens us. 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 this Sunday were: 

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