Many or Few?

Lent 2-C Luke 13: 22-35

7 March 2004

7mar10It is fairly difficult to make a lot of sense out of our Gospel lesson this morning if we try to meditate on it by itself. It really requires that we hear the part of the story that came just before it—and I will read that to you, once I set up a little wider context for our discussion.

In the Gospel of Luke, from the latter part of chapter Nine through the middle of chapter Nineteen, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will face his final confrontation with the authorities and be crucified. Today our Gospel lesson places us in the middle of that journey. As Jesus travels, he teaches and works miracles. But as he travels he also warns. Specifically he warns the present generation of people in Judea that they live in perilous times. The choices they make now will have tremendous repercussions in just a few years. And the choice they have to make is a stark one. They can either accept Him as the long-awaited Messiah—with all His teaching about the Kingdom of God—or they can continue to follow the direction set by their leaders and agitate for the creation of an independent nation again. Jesus offered them a new way, a different mode of life, a different kind of identity as the people of God. Most of His contemporaries wanted a remake of Judas Macabbaeus—the second-century B.C. leader who threw off the yoke of the Greeks and established a Jewish monarchy. Jesus told people that to agitate for this would lead to disaster.

In fact, the end of the ages had come upon the present generation. Jesus’ appearing amongst them had brought all of OT history to its climax. All of the past had caught up with current generation of the people of God. It might seem unfair, but the present generation had to answer for everything. And their answer was the answer to one question: would they accept or reject the One the Father had sent. This is what Jesus meant when he said in Luke 11:50-51: “so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation.” It may seem unfair, but sometimes life does not go on as usual. People who just want to do their work, enjoy their families, take their part in their communities, are caught up in interesting times. How they respond will have an effect that generations to come will have to deal with and it will change everything. I sometimes think we are living now in a time such as this—things are not how they were and will not ever be again and what we decide as a generation will have profound consequences. But even if that is not true now, it certainly was for Jesus’ generation.

He saw which way things were going and knew that He would be rejected by this generation of Jewish leaders. He saw the doom that it would bring upon the nation and it is that doom which he took upon Himself. He accepted the whole weight of the rebellion against God which was concentrated in the answer of His generation. For those who received Him, this doom that Jesus bore became their liberation. Most did not. Many of them perished in the disastrous war which took place within a generation of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

A little earlier in the Chapter from which our Gospel is taken, we read this: “Jesus went through one town and village after another, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem. Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” He said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able. When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out. Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.””

When someone says: “‘Lord, will only a few be saved?’” the context means that Jesus’ answer is not dealing with getting to heaven when we die but with who is going to survive in the present generation. Who is going to make it through the present crisis? Many or few? Jesus’ answer implied that only a few would make it: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” Then he tells a parable about a man who gave a party and all the invited guests were inside and the door was locked. Then other people who had known the host socially came and begged to be admitted and were turned away.

The parable becomes an allegory of Jesus Himself hosting His Messianic banquet. It was not enough, He said, that people, like the crowds he was speaking to, saw Him, heard His preaching, enjoyed His miracles, or even ate his miraculous food. They had not acted upon what they had experienced, they had not followed Him as true disciples. They had not renounced the illusions of nationalistic self-importance in which their political leaders had placed their hopes. They had chosen the Kingdom of the world over against the Kingdom of God—and it would cost them. Jesus saw it coming and warned them what they faced. He knew there was no solution to the real problems of the people of God in fighting a war with Rome. He said he would have desired to gather Jerusalem under His protection to save it from disaster, but it would not listen.

That is the context in which Jesus’ words were first spoken. That being so, do they still say something to us today? Luke apparently thought so: he wrote them down after the fact. The question still has some kind of resonance with us, doesn’t it: will many or few be saved? But as soon as we ask the question, do we know what to do with it? What does it mean, for example, to be saved? And what narrow door must we find? Or have things changed now? Are all the ways to salvation broad and easy?

What does it mean to be saved? Many people once would have said: “being saved from sin and getting into heaven when we die. Jesus is the Saviour and he came to die so that we could be forgiven.” But do we really understand that way of talking any more? Are our sins really so serious, especially to ourselves, that we feel we need to be saved from them or else we perish? Is being forgiven really so hard for God to do that Jesus needed to die? And what is a sin, anyway? Is it simply some little error of judgement I make, or failure of will? I forgive people who sin against me in these ways almost every day—why not God?

Let us try to think through these ideas a bit further and let us begin with the final purpose of salvation. Salvation is a holistic concept in the OT. It refers to healthy people in healthy communities in healthy relationships—all that is implied by the word, Shalom. If we look at the entire biblical picture I think we could say that salvation’s final effect is to enable the whole of creation to participate in God’s purposes. We have a short-hand way of talking about this: the Kingdom of God. What we mean is a state of affairs in which human society exists in perfect alignment with the will of the God who created all things: humans living in perfect harmony with each other and with the whole created order, in a society in which there will be no suffering, no evil, no need, no poverty. The Christian God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the God who created this world to be this way and will one day see His plan come true. That is the summary of all our hopes; without this end result nothing makes any sense.

But as you and I know, the world is currently far from this state of affairs. It is a place of much goodness and delight, love and friendship—but also a place of sickness and tragedy, suffering and sorrow. There is wrenching poverty alongside astounding wealth; there is malnutrition amid gluttony, hunger amid obesity—in fact obesity may be a symptom of hunger: to many cheap calories and not enough nourishment; there is murder and hatred, prejudice and genocide. And in the end, no matter what we have done or the good we have accomplished, we all die.

How did things get to be this way? With the promise of community and harmony and joy, how did we get so much partisanship and bad feeling and sorrow, not to mention real wickedness and profound evil? The answer is complicated. There are intricate systems that seem out of anyone’s control, there are inherited patterns of prejudice and inequity, but the deepest answer to all of these things is the evil that cuts through the heart of each and every one of us. We are all sinners and sin is at the root of the world’s mess.

C. S. Lewis once defined sin, brilliantly, I think, as the irrational preference we each have for ourselves. God made us, He revealed to us how to live, and He even sent His Son to show us in Person His own love for us and what genuine humanity looks like. But when we saw Him, we did not want Him, because we didn’t want to hear what He told us. We wanted a god adapted to our own tastes, made in our image, who would give us our own way, patronize our wars, underwrite our national pride, and meet our own needs. And that inner perversity—our sin—became the burden our Lord took to the Cross. It could only be forgiven by being killed by the power of a greater life.

On the third day when our Lord was raised, there came to life with Him a new possibility for us. Sin no longer has to dominate our lives—we can put it to death in the death of our Lord—we need no longer be trapped in our own obsession with ourselves and our needs. We can learn to live in faith—that is, confidence in Jesus—and in love, with Him being our guide. And that is what it means to be saved. As Paul put it, “In Christ the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” Salvation is not simply a warm acceptance given by God to us for our apology that, yes, sometimes we have not been as good as we should have been. Salvation is the power of a new life we receive when we decide finally to listen to Him, to accept His way, to lay down pride and self-will, and learn what it means to be fully human from the One who made us: this is the life of the Kingdom of God, the life of the renewed world to come.

It is also the narrow gate. There is only one ultimate source of life and information about the content of real life—the One by Whom it came into being, the One Who died to restore, renew, and redeem it. To accept that life and learn to live it, to renounce all that detracts from it and has falsified it—that is what it means to be saved—faith working through love.

Will there be many or few who are saved? I don’t know. Given the infinite Mercy of God, given the ways of the Spirit, given long enough time—there may be many who are saved—more, perhaps, than those who were able to escape the judgement of Jesus’ generation. It is, however, fearsomely possible not to enter through the narrow gate. Many times in history has Jesus’ lament been true: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” In our generation as in the generation of Jesus, we are under no compulsion to accept the truth, to embrace real life, to forsake comfortable illusions, to enlist in God’s Kingdom. We still seem to have that irrational preference for our own ways and selves regardless of the truth. Will God save us in spite of ourselves? No matter what we do? No matter what we want? No matter how we live?

Jesus told His first hearers that it was not enough simply to have been acquainted with Him, to have eaten His holy food, to have seen or even gotten a miracle of His. Or as we might say, it is not enough to have heard about Him at Mass, received the Communion of His Body and Blood, or even to have had warm feelings about Him. As Matthew puts it in a parallel passage: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

Salvation is something we live, not something we only think or feel—which means that repentance is a real change of mind about what we have done and how we have lived, and results in a new direction, a new way of life—a determination to walk through the narrow door: faith working through love. That is, confidence in Jesus resulting in a way of life based on following Him. Lent is a time for repentance, which means a time for a reconsideration of our lives and their meaning and purpose. Are we on the way to salvation? Are we striving to enter by the narrow door? Are we becoming now the kind of people who will be at home in the renewed world of the Kingdom?

Let us pray. Almighty God, may we, by the prayer and discipline of Lent, enter into the mystery of Christ’s sufferings; that by following in the Way, we may come to share in the Glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.