To prove His sincerity, God will send a sign to remind the Israelites of His enduring love. In fact the history of salvation has been a history of God providing sign after sign. Abraham left Ur for the land that God had promised. Noah and the rainbow at the end of the Great Deluge. Moses and the parting of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to enter the Land of Milk and Honey. The list goes on and when the fullness of time came, He sent His only Son to die for us.
However, the 2nd Reading and the Gospel provides a more nuanced understanding of God’s generous invitation to His banquet. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author speaks of God’s chastisement as a sign of His love. Amongst His children, punishment was never for the sake of itself. It was never capricious. Rather, God sometimes permits bad things to happen, even to good people, because there are lessons to be learnt. It would appear that allowing misfortune to befall a person is compatible with God’s love. But we are more accustomed to thinking that God’s love and bad luck are mutually exclusive.
The Gospel gives us a Jesus who speaks not of the multitude saved. Instead we should strive to enter through the narrow door or gate. Implicit in the definition of a door or a gate is the notion of restriction. What is the purpose of the door to a house if it were wide open. Doors and gates necessarily suggest that there is a narrow aperture as opposed to a wide-open gap.
If Isaiah in the 1st Reading, began with the idea of “all”, in the sense that God invites everyone to the table, then the narrow door in the Gospel implies that not everyone invited will make it through. What gives? When the speaker in the crowd asked Jesus who will go to heaven, it was a question which brings us into the heart of the present dilemma.
Today we are urged to embrace equality, diversity and inclusivity. These qualities belong to the moral compass of any society that prides itself as being on the right side of progress and modernity. The sinister shadow of these values is that they cannot be universal in an absolute manner. It means that they cannot be applied in all instances. Take for example, making sure that everyone is treated equally. We all have an impression swirling in our heads that justice means everyone must be treated equal. In the economic sphere, what happens to our natural abilities? Not everyone has the same talents. In order to ensure an equal outcome, it implies that those who are more talented would have to have their wings clipped. You live in this country and you should know what positive discrimination means. To guarantee the delusion of “equality” how many of your children have had to migrate to other countries? How many of you have told your children not to come back?
This is just one example whereby equality is not an absolute value. The same can be said of the other two. In terms of diversity and inclusivity, we instinctively “exclude” rapists or serial killers from the diverse and warm table of brotherhood, no? What has happened to both diversity and inclusivity is that the decision of “who is in and who is out” is determined by thought police who patrols our thought highways to ensure group think. A better question that may clarify the limits of our inclusion is this: “Who are we trying to include?”. In biblical times, that question was decided by the moral integrity of the person seeking entrance. Today we are mired in the quicksand of fighting who to be included. It is no longer a moral-ethical question. Instead one’s place at the table is determined by the requirement of society fitting into the idea of progress that is proven through diversity and inclusivity, no matter how far the criteria may have strayed from our moral principles. LGB has become LGBT, then LGBTQ and the alphabets can only grow longer. I am not criticising the act of inclusion but the word by definition has to be followed to its logical conclusion. Otherwise, it fails its own description. That being so, to be inclusive, we should maybe add in “P” for paedophiles or pederasts?
Hidden in the shadow of our inclusivity is that we have always been exclusive. We necessarily exclude. From race-based exclusion to gender-exclusion and now to thought-exclusion, meaning that, anyone who fails to meet the approved thoughts will be excluded. A good example now would be those who are anti-vaxxers. Are they not labelled immediately as nutters?
Beyond the morality of self-righteousness, in answering the question with entering through the narrow gate, Christ actually takes us away from the nomenclature or classification of inclusion and exclusion. For in Him, inclusion is not a confirmation of heaven. On the other hand, exclusion is not a condemnation of hell. Just because you have not robbed, killed or murdered is not a guarantee of heaven. On the contrary, to have robbed, killed or murdered does not mean one cannot be saved.
In other words, the narrow gate is really narrow not because it is exclusive but rather because it requires first and foremost our following Him which therefore renders inclusion and exclusion relational in the sense that we become “included” when we follow Jesus. To follow necessarily translates to belonging to Him, that is, to be counted as His with not just the rights accrued to us but also the duties expected of us. These demands will exclude accordingly some thoughts and behaviours. To follow Jesus is to be good and to do good. Our challenge is that we are used to a feel-good environment. It is wonderful to feel good but that itself is no indicator of our goodness.
Goodness comes because we follow Him and in Him, there is no tension between inclusion and exclusion. Everyone is included at the table of the Lord. No one is excluded. However, the inclusion is never on our terms but under the terms of the Lord and Saviour. Check out Dismas. He was crucified with Jesus, along with the other thief. He asked for salvation. He was promised it. But still he needed to pay the price of his sins. The price of salvation included the punishment for our sins.
It sounds rather calculative but if we translate the terms of inclusion as love, then we see how love is not directed at the self. It wills the good of the other. Here itself a conversion is needed. We think that love means we must love everything and accept anything. It is a fallacy to equate love as tolerance. Instead, love that seeks the good of the other must be tied to our salvation where the canon of our inclusion and exclusion is Jesus Christ Himself. We have been created in love and we are saved by love. In His love for us, He sacrificed His life for each one of us so that we can be with Him. He is measure of what baggage we ought to leave behind in order to enter the narrow gate so that we can be with Him forever.
e. There are priests who refused to use the word “many”. From the perspective of a God who owes it to us, “many” does come across that God is stingy with salvation. How dare God not want to save all? The profound truth is the Lord Jesus came to save all people. The reality is, however unappetising, some will be lost not because God is stingy with salvation but rather God cannot save us without our consent. St Augustine was right to remark that the God who created us without our consent cannot save us without our consent.