A priest I know shares this story. Recently, on their priests’ retreat, the retreat director began his opening presentation with these words: we take for granted that most people are going to hell. Then he tried to ground this assertion by quoting Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7, 13-14)
On the surface, this would indeed seem to indicate that most people are not taking the road that leads to heaven but are taking the road that leads to hell.
Are most of us going to hell? Is this what’s implied here? No! That’s not what’s being taught. This teaching of Jesus needs some parsing.
First, when Jesus says, “but small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not talking so much about going to heaven or hell, but rather about our lives, here and now.
Indeed, we can all relate to his words that the gate that leads to life is narrow and few find it. How? By simply asking ourselves: How many times in our lives do we have a moment, let alone a lengthy season, where we are without any depressions, without regrets, without undue restlessness, without jealousies, without frustrations, and without any sense that we are missing something in life, but rather have a deep sense of soul that we’ve arrived at the deepest meaning of life, that we’ve found the deep secret, that there’s nothing more to strive for?
Sometimes we do have moments like this when we have passed through the narrow gate that leads to life, though mostly we are still struggling to get there.
We can experience this when we look at the lives of others. Without being judgmental, how often do we look at someone’s life at the level of soul and say: He’s found it! She’s there! That’s what a full life looks like! We say this of very few people.
Moreover, what precisely is the gate and why is it narrow?
Simply put, the gate that leads to life, to the deepest and fullest happiness of all, is the invitation Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 5-7) For Jesus, this is what makes for fullness of life, namely: to be poor in spirit; to be in touch with the world’s wounds and our own wounds; to be meek; to hunger for justice; to be merciful; to be pure of heart; to be peacemakers; to suffer for what is right; and especially to love those who hate us.
That’s the narrow gate leading to life, and we struggle to pass through it because most everything in our world militates against this. Our world tells us that it’s best to be rich, that meekness and empathy are weaknesses, and we may in good conscience hate those who hate us. Our natural instincts agree. Both our world and our natural instincts invite us to a wide gate where we can justly curse those who curse us and may execute murderers.
The Sermon the Mount proposes a narrow gate, and it becomes particularly narrow at the end of the Sermon when Jesus invites us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate and spells out what that means.
God’s compassion, unlike our natural instincts, goes out equally to the bad as well as to the good, like the sun that shines indiscriminately on weeds as well as on vegetables. God loves sinners and virtuous persons equally.
And so must we. Our virtue, Jesus says, must go deeper than our natural instincts, where quite naturally we love those who love us, hate those who hate us, curse those who curse us, and refuse to forgive someone who murders our loved ones.
The narrow gate that leads to full life is the gate of wide compassion, that is, we pass through that gate which leads to the fullness of life, when we love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.
Sadly, much inside us and much inside our world resists that narrow gate.
However, when Jesus says: “Small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not saying that most of us will go to hell and only a few will go to heaven. Instead, he is speaking about our lives right now and astutely pointing out that what ultimately makes for happiness and full life here in this world, namely, living out the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the part that invites us to love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.
That’s a gate we struggle to pass through.