The Narrow and Beautiful Gate

Texts:  Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29
           Luke 13:22-30 

Strive to enter by the narrow gate, for many will try to enter and will not be able.

            The civil wars and insurgencies that have raged across Africa in the last fifty years have many causes, complex and different circumstances, but several sad commonalities.  Most of them have involved the use of so called “child-soldiers”; these youngsters, abducted from their homes at ages as young as six or seven, in many cases have been forced to kill their parents or siblings or friends, and through psychological and physical torture, have been turned into highly effective and remorseless killing machines.  When they are freed, and begin to recover from their experience, among the things they commonly report are two recurring dreams.  In one, the child finds himself surrounded by the people he has killed, who ask him again and again, “Why did you murder us?”  In the other, the child dreams of a family gathering, some happy assembly recalled from the time before the war, when he came together with all his relatives, his aunties and uncles and cousins, for a great feast, and the soldier sees himself there in the midst of them.  He is happy, until he looks down and finds he is covered in blood, his clothes, his hands, all soaked in the blood of others.  Suddenly there is silence in the room, and then the child’s relatives begin to ask him, “What have you done?”

            These dreams and their variations are archetypes of judgment: personal, terrifying, inexorable.  They cannot be turned off or escaped.  They are reminiscent of the experience of the people of Israel gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai, face-to-face with the sheer holiness of God, the unmediated power of his majesty and presence, and the constant reminder of their unworthiness, their smallness and weakness.  The dreams of the child-soldiers are indicators of interior lives marked by trauma, by a shattered conscience, and a stricken heart.  Were you to see such children walking around, you would find them no different from others you might know, except for the way they have, from time to time, of closing their eyes and putting their faces in their hands, not saying anything for a long time, only massaging their brows and the sides of their heads, as if to ease the pain.  Were you to look into a child’s mind at that point, you would find what the letter to the Hebrews describes: a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words make the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them, but still the same words come, words of their victims, “Why did you kill us,” words of their families, “What have you done?”  The children close their eyes and rub their foreheads and wait for the scenes to go away.

            What is enough to blot out the memory of such terrors?  We wish that there could be a broad-spectrum mental antibiotic, or any number of techniques that, applied to one who has done, and endured, such things, might resurrect them.  And, there are many things that do give some relief.  Therapy helps somewhat, and loving guidance from committed adults helps somewhat, and fellowship with other children in a secure environment helps somewhat, but all of these get at the symptoms more than the cause of a child’s agony, unless they are powered by something else.  And, given the extent of the damage, one wonders what the recovery rate will be, whether in the end, the number of kids who make it out of their long nightmare into fully functioning lives might not be very small indeed. 

            When the disciples ask Jesus, Will those who are saved be few, they are asking two questions really.  On the one hand, they are asking whether they have signed on with the right team, whether by claiming to be affiliated with Jesus, they will actually be included in the Kingdom Jesus promises.  But, more than this, and perhaps without fully realizing it, they are asking how much of an answer to the agonies of the world Jesus represents.  His reply is designed both to encourage them and to give them pause.  Strive to enter by the narrow gate, he warns.  If you put this together with other sayings of Jesus, you might rephrase it as follows:  claiming to know Me is not enough, and good works are not enough, and obedience to the law is not enough, not even being a member of the fellowship that bears My name is enough.  These things may help somewhat, but in the end, what saves a person is a relationship with Me, trusting me, not pretending to be my friend, but allowing me to be your friend, your guide, your Savior and Master and Lord.  The “narrow gate” – and I believe that “gate” is the correct rendering of the word in the first part of this parable, rather than “door” as our present translators have chosen--  the “narrow gate” is evocative of sheep entering a sheepfold through an opening that allows them to pass through only one at a time; when many try, that is, all at once, crowding to get through as a group, they find, they are not able, and none of them gets through.  If Jesus is himself the gate he speaks of, then the parable declares that entry into the Kingdom of God is the result of a personal decision of total commitment to Christ, not a vague trust in a loose affiliation of those who might reasonably claim to be recognized by him.  The second part of the parable, the story of the guests who show up at the banquet and are shocked when the host does not remember them, is told against this kind of false confidence.  Do not think, Jesus warns, because you are an Episcopalian, or a Republican, or a Democrat, or a right-thinking person in the company of other right-thinking people, that this will be enough to admit you to Life. 

As much as people in mainline churches might find distasteful the language of Jesus as a “personal savior” given its formulaic use by fundamentalists of all stripes, this passage clearly points to our entry into all that it means to be truly human through the personal struggle of the soul, as each of us contends in the privacy of his or her own conscience, with the promise of all that Jesus offers and the consequence of all that He demands.  Is He my gate, or am I trying to enter by another?  Am I cobbling together a spirituality based on an amalgam of notions about God and welded together by my own self-will?  Or am I surrendering my self-will to know only Christ, his mercy for my wrong, his healing for my harm, his death for my life, his life for my death? 

            The narrow gate turns out, in the end, to be surprisingly attractive.  In answer to the disciple’s question, will those who are saved be few, Jesus might well have answered, they will number more than you possibly could imagine, and be of a variety you cannot conceive.  More than a few child soldiers of Africa will be there.  They have found again and again that there is deep healing in the narrow gate. For when they hear that their identity, which was robbed from them and warped and tortured and killed, has in Christ been ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, then they begin to consider there may be hope in this world.  When they hear these words from others who they know have also suffered, and see that these witnesses are alive in ways that they had given up imagining might be possible, then the charges of their victims begin to fall silent, and the remembered shame of their families begins to recede.  And when they grasp, acknowledge, embrace in the depths of their own hearts, one by one, that everything in Jesus’ own experience-- the sorry manger, the dusty roads, the bloody Cross, the empty tomb-- all was for them, for their sake, for their life, then they find the blood gone from their clothes and their hands, and the accusing relatives changed into a welcoming host; they see they have left behind the wrath of Sinai and come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood [of the Cross] that speaks a better word than the blood of [revenge].  Then their hands drop from their brows forever, and they smile.  Once you have seen that smile, then you have a good idea of what angels might look like.  And you know that if the joy of Christ can overcome such terrors in such children, then surely he can bring you also safely home, a kingdom that cannot be shaken.