21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (go to readings)
We know from rabbinic sources from around the time of Jesus that one of the big questions they were wrestling with was, “who will be saved?” You hear it a number of times in the New Testament, including in our Gospel reading today. Rabbis leaning toward the conservative side were saying that not all of Israel would be saved. The generation of Noah, the people of Sodom, the rebellious generation that left Egypt in the Exodus, the ten lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom. They were excluded. Other rabbis, leaning toward a more liberal interpretation, were saying that God would restore the lost tribes, and perhaps show mercy to all who had sinned, and perhaps all of Israel might be saved. But on both sides, the scope of who would be saved was still limited to Israel, God’s chosen people. Even the more liberal suggestion was that being an Israelite, a Jew, was a guarantee of salvation. And so, with this question circulating around Israel, someone finally asks the Messiah, the one who perhaps would know for sure, this burning question. And Jesus, being typical Jesus, doesn’t answer the question. In fact, he answers a whole different question, which wasn’t asked. In response to this one person’s question, he said to the crowd, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.” So a few things in that important sentence: First, the narrow gate seems to favor the narrow interpretation of the question that was asked. Second, we might picture a crowd trying to get through a pass that narrows down to one person at a time. Like an amusement park gate or sports venue gate. The entrance seems wide, but as you get close, you see it’s rather narrow and guarded. And if there were a big rush trying to pass through that narrow gate, the strong would seem to have an advantage. But for this gate, it’s not the physically strong, but the spiritually strong. Those who have disciplined themselves and their appetites to be virtuous, because they have battled against their vices in prayer and surrender to God to grow in holiness. These are the ones who will be strong enough to pass through this gate. And third and most important about this, is that Jesus doesn’t answer the question of whether there will be few or many, but rather the instruction to make sure that no matter how many there are, you make sure that you are among them. Your call is not to be holier than the next person, but to be as holy as you can possibly be.
“You stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from. And you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your company, and you taught in our streets.’ Then he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!‘”
There’s a difference between “knowing about Jesus” and “knowing Jesus.” When Pope Leo XIV was elected, a lot of people got to know a lot about him. But not like his family knows him. It’s not enough to know about Jesus, to hear the bible stories, to say daily prayers, go to Mass, even receive communion, and be done with it until next time. We have to intentionally enter into spiritual communion with Jesus, give him permission to change our hearts, our lives, and then prayerfully respond to his invitation to these changes he’s leading us through, becoming closer to him, conforming our heart to his sacred heart, hearing his voice and obeying in love.
God makes each of us with great care. He is our heavenly father. But we can make ourselves into something else, we can distort ourselves, distort our humanity, our goodness, by sin, by rejection of God’s discipline, and then fearfully hear God say, “I do not know you. I do not know where you are from” as the gates of heaven are locked against us, and we are outside wailing in eternal sorrow, or even eternal anger, railing against God for having the audacity to exclude us.
It can apply to us in the church as much as it applied to the Jews hearing Jesus say, “when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves cast out. And people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.” Jesus doubles down on that personal message: not just saying directly, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” but “you yourselves cast out.” The Greek word for strive there is “agonizomai,” where we get the word “agony” and “agonize,” which also appears in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, when he is talking about athletes exercising discipline, “agonizomai”, struggling, striving, with all their might, their mind, their heart, for their little reward, and how much more should we strive for salvation, which we could lose by vice, sin, and distraction?
We’re going to end with the last part of that quote: “And people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.” In this, Jesus is confirming Old Testament passages like our first reading in which Israel will be restored not for its own sake, but for the sake of the whole world. The Jews were angry with Jesus for being a Messiah that claimed to be not just Israel’s own private savior from the oppression of the Romans, but the universal savior of humanity from the oppression of sin. I love irony, but sometimes irony can be dark. Just as Eve in the Garden of Eden fell to the serpent’s lie that eating the fruit would make her like God, when she was already more like God than she would be after eating the fruit, the Jews were unhappy with Jesus, as we just said, but it was in being the Messiah, the Savior of the World, by which he would restore Israel to its special privileged place of being God’s holy city. And because of their angry rejection of Jesus, they crucified him just outside of Jerusalem, and fulfilled what Jesus had promised, the Messianic Age, but now in a way in which the Jews’ relationship to this fulfillment is difficult, and the city of the glory of the New Covenant people, the Church, is no longer Jerusalem, which was destroyed, as Jesus said would happen if they killed him. “If you destroy this temple, I will rebuild it in three days.”
But we’re going to sum all this up to two points Jesus gives us. First, we should focus more on our personal commitment to striving for our personal holiness without the distraction of asking if it will be many or few, or comparing ourselves to other people. There are places in the scriptures where it seems like a few, such as our gospel reading, and there are places where it seems like many, such as the numberless multitude in the book of Revelation.
Our faith teaches us that God has given humanity through the Catholic Church all the necessary means of salvation, which is to say the Sacred Scriptures, sacred Tradition, sacred Liturgy, and sacred sacraments, particularly the grace which protects the integrity of the Church and its Faith. The downside for us of course is not only are we more under attack by the enemy who wants to destroy the Church and its members, but that we are held to a higher standard. “To whom much is given, of them much is expected.” As Israel should have been the beacon of holiness to the ancient world, guided by the gift of the divine law, the Church ought to be even more so to the modern world, guided by the grace and truth of the New Covenant.
The Catholic Church teaches that although God instructs us about what is necessary for salvation, and we must take that with absolute seriousness, God himself is not limited to what he has given us. He is God, and he can freely choose to save whom he wills, how he wills, but he willed to reveal to us the way he intended to save us, and so we would be wise to obey, and foolish to be presumptuous.
Those who were raised outside the faith or with an immature faith will be judged less harshly, as we heard a few weekends ago. To the extent that they do good and avoid evil as they perceive it in their fallen and limited human nature, the good that they do outside the state of grace will not be salvific, but will help conform them and open them up more to goodness, and help them to more easily hear the call of God in them toward Jesus and his Church. However, even though whatever evil they choose is in greater ignorance, while their sinfulness is not as grave, they still must suffer the consequences of the evil of their actions. While those outside the Church have a hope of salvation by the mystery of God’s mercy beyond what he has instructed for the Church, it is still a great act of love to evangelize lost souls, because not only does it help them avoid sin and the consequences of evil choices, but more importantly it invites them to the joy of the life of grace, the beauty of the Church temporally and spiritually, the spiritual blessings of the sacraments, and the fuller blossoming of their particular gifts. While many consider the Catholic Church to be their enemy, the Church does not consider them to be her enemy. They are her lost children, her mission field, and those yet to be reborn to her in the womb of baptism and brought into full communion in her spousal relationship with the Lord.
Jesus was and is the Messiah, sent to restore Israel, including the expectation of reuniting the ten lost tribes who had been dispersed among the nations of the world. And so, if the Messianic covenant is going to include the descendants in all the world, then all the world, those who are outside the covenant, must be invited. And so, after Pentecost until the end of the age, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus sends out his Apostles to north, south, east, and west, inviting all to enter into the New Covenant: responding to grace by living the life of love, faith, and obedience, striving for holiness as God has revealed it to us, including sharing the fullness of truth we have received. Although God loves all and calls all to accept the invitation, not all will humbly submit themselves to his discipline and formation, to be able to answer the call to the banquet. His love is unconditional, and our response is up to us. We can be those warned about being shut out. Or we can be the beneficiaries of our readings today: the ones invited from all the nations, north, south, east, and west. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.
The Snarky Vicar 