Striving With Others To Enter Through the Narrow Gate to Salvation, 30th Wednesday (II), October 30, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Mary, Our Lady of Grace, St. Petersburg, Florida
Quarterly Meeting of The Pontifical Mission Societies
Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 30, 2024
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. That is a question that must involve all of us individually and personally as human beings and as Christians, but it is something that must deeply motivate our work as missionaries, just as much as it did Jesus himself, St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier, St. Therese and scores of apostles and missionaries across the century. Jesus came into the world so that the world might be saved through him. Throughout the Gospel, he makes the point that some will be saved and some won’t be, some will be the sheep on his eternal right and others will be the goats on his left, some will choose to live in the light and others to remain in darkness, some will receive him and those he sends and others will reject him.
• In response to that question, a typical Jew at the time would have expected him to answer, “Yes!, only a few will be saved,” 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 verb tense that means “keep on agonizing.” To enter and remain in Christ’s kingdom, and to get to Heaven ultimately, 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 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 a young 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, harder than a missionary to plant the faith in a place that is resistant to the Gospel. 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 the former National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, 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 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 desire to be faithful need to strive ever harder to pick up the Cross God gives them each day to 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 genocidal madmen, serial killers, those who don’t like us and public smokers. 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. 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 have to be honest in assessing the situation of the world today, including among those who call themselves disciples of Jesus. 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.
• We need to ask, however: 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? Won’t we all benefit from an eternal bell curve? 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 many of us 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 priests 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, and ultimately valuing Jesus less than 30 pieces of silver. Judas’ fall teaches us that not everyone living around Christ is really a Christian, not everyone coming to Church is a disciple, and not even 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, we 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. The whole passage indicates that the Christian family is meant to be a place where the family members help each other, and even the slaves and servants, to pass through the narrow gate that leads to life, so that none will be lost and all we be numbered among those who have been saved.
• What motivates us as missionaries has to be this zeal to extend Jesus’ saving will and work to the ends of the earth, to make possible for people to proclaim the Gospel by their words and the witness of their life, so that people will learn how to follow Jesus Christ the Way along the narrow way that leads to life. Just as Jesus gave his life to ransom many, so Christian missionaries and apostles dedicate our lives to trying to get people off the broad highway that leads multitudes away from the Lord, to get them off the roadsides looking for meaning, and onto the path that leads to Jesus and his Body the Church, so that they might journey with us into deeper friendship, deeper union of life, with the Lord Jesus. What beautiful work this is, and everything begins with our personal integrity as we agonize to make every part of our life and our work united with our Savior.
• 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 saving 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 seize this opportunity, if we strive to enter through this narrow gate each day, 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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