The Narrow Gate

It’s often rightly said that the Gospel is neither ‘liberal’ nor ‘conservative’, but as something not of this world, represents a fundamental challenge to any and every human belief system. The Gospel simply refuses to accept our stereotypes or the often bizarre coalitions that comprise our political parties. We have a great example of this aspect of the Gospel in the saying of Jesus we’ll be looking at today, as it doesn’t play nicely with how we often look at things.

This is the saying about the narrow gate, Jesus says:

Enter through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and spacious the road that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate that leads to life is narrow and the road tight, and there are few who find it. (Matthew 7.13-14)

Over the centuries, these verses have been beloved by legalists. As Fundamentalists liked to say while I was growing up, “If you have an open mind your brain will fall out.” (I’ve also heard “An open mind is how the devil gets in.”) And this saying of Jesus seems to support this intentionally narrow approach to life. After all, according to this, the wide and open road leads to destruction.

But, while this is the easiest interpretation of these words standing on their own, it doesn’t make much sense in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes bless this world’s ‘losers’, his radicalization of the Law obliterates legalism, he warns against the public displays of piety loved by the ‘good religious folk’, he rejects judgmentalism, and speaks of God the Father as superabundantly generous and benevolent. This is an expansive (one might say ‘wide’ and ‘spacious’) approach to God and faith. And Jesus lived this out in his life: in his notorious friendships with outcasts and ‘sinners’, his gracious interactions with Gentiles, and his making a Samaritan the hero of one of his greatest parables.

So, how do we reconcile the narrow gate through which we must enter the Kingdom of God with the expansive approach to faith Jesus demonstrated?

I am increasingly convinced that not only are the two not opposites, but in fact they are one and the same thing. The expansive way of Jesus is the narrow gate. Why? Because, as generations and generations of Christians have demonstrated, a restrictive and legalistic religiosity is paradoxically more attractive and satisfying to many than the open-hearted way of Jesus. As I wrote the other day, I think much of what passes for Christianity is little more than an innate human religiosity that likes well-defined rules and lists and rituals that can get us off the hook. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to concern oneself with ritual purity than loving one’s neighbour. It’s easier to make the sin offering than to reconcile with the person you’ve done wrong. It’s easier to look out for one’s own than to welcome the refugee or exile in your midst. And so, the way of generosity, grace, and love is the narrow gate that only few seem to find.

This means is that the barrier between humanity and God — the reason why “there are [only] few who find” the Kingdom of God — lies not in God but in us. It’s not that God has made the way intentionally hard, like some sort of extreme obstacle course, so that we have to prove that we’re worthy to enter the Kingdom. No, the Gospel is clear. God welcomes all with open arms. Rather, it’s our constricted hearts that keep us from the narrow path of love and grace.