To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate
The Gospel of St. Luke for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time is a summons to enter the Kingdom of God through a narrow gate, but it requires shedding some baggage.
August 17, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Readers of a certain age who grew up in the United States might remember “S&H Green Stamps.” The Sperry and Hutchinson Company first introduced them in grocery stores in 1896 as promotional bonus awards to promote retail purchases. By World War II, gas stations and other retail outlets caught on. By 1960, ninety percent of U.S. retailers were awarding Green Stamps. In 1962, S&H issued more stamps that the U.S. Post Office.
My mother was a dedicated collector. About once a month, when I was seven or eight, I was cajoled into sitting at our kitchen table to paste the month’s supply of Green Stamps into collection booklets. When enough books were accumulated, they were taken to a place that I thought then to be magical. It was called the “S&H Redemption Center” where Green Stamps of dubious value could be redeemed for something new. S&H published the world’s largest catalog of redeemable items. It had a whole page of skateboards which had become all the rage in 1962. Alas, my mother passed it by in favor of a boring toaster.
By 1982, the year I became a priest — having never broken a bone because I never had a skateboard — Green Stamps disappeared from the retail landscape of America and our collective consciousness. The Redemption Centers are gone now, but hope for redemption never left and must never leave. Losing that hope would be catastrophic for humanity. We express that transforming hope every day, even if we do not realize it, and it is far more than a marketing ploy.
What do you mean when you pray, “Thy Kingdom Come,” “Adveniat Regnum Tuum”? It’s the third subordinate clause of the Lord’s Prayer, the “Pater Noster,” also known by its first two words of address in English, the “Our Father.” You pray, “Thy Kingdom Come” once at every Mass. If you pray the Rosary, you say it at least six times. A core expectation of the Gospel is that “The Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:5). In Volume One of his great book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI described the implications for that statement:
“The core constant of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God is at hand. A milestone is set up in the flow of time; something new has taken place, and an answer to this gift is demanded of man: conversion and faith.” (p. 47)
The phrase “Kingdom of God” occurs 122 times in the New Testament. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) it is found 99 times and 90 of them are from the direct words of Jesus. In the post-Vatican II world, some came to believe that this expectation of the Kingdom of God is fulfilled and made manifest primarily in the Church. That may be true, but it is not the only truth as Pope Benedict explains in this surprising analysis:
“Instead of the great expectation of God’s own Kingdom, of a new world transformed by God himself we got something quite different, the Church! And what a pathetic substitute it is … Is changing the subject from the Kingdom of God to the genesis of the Church really just the collapse of a promise and the emergence of something else in its place?” ( p. 48)
The Cross and the Kingdom of God
The answer to that question depends on how we understand “Kingdom of God” as Jesus meant it. As Pope Benedict asked: “Is Jesus just a messenger charged with representing a cause that is ultimately independent of him, or is the messenger himself the message?” In other words, is Jesus Himself the Kingdom of God?
In the Gospel, “Kingdom of God” and “Kingdom of Heaven” refer to the same destination. Heaven — which I always capitalize — is distinct from “the heavens” which refer to the material universe. “Kingdom of Heaven” is not uttered as a substitute for God, but is rather in respect for the Jewish tradition that the name of God was not to be uttered or written. This is why you may often see Hebrew scholars write G-d in place of God.
Among the Fathers of the Church, Origen, in his early Second Century treatise, On Prayer, wrote,
“Those who pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God pray without any doubt for the Kingdom of God that is contained in themselves. For in every holy person it is God who reigns and has dominion. So let God stroll in us as a spiritual paradise and rule in us with his Christ.”
The idea of that beautiful image is that the Kingdom of God is not found on any map. It is not the kingdom of a fallen world. It is Christ himself and the extent to which he lives in us. So even if there is doubt that the Kingdom of God somehow touches my life, at least there is always hope. Just like most of you, I, too, struggle with that hope.
I think that most of our readers have come to understand that I have had my share of hardship. To be falsely accused and cast into prison for the last 28 years and counting seems the equivalent of living on the wrong side of a rather famous parable. It is one of the parables that most represents life in the Kingdom of God as it exists in the here and now. It involves choices. Commonly known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it is more accurately called the Parable of a Man Beaten by Robbers and Left for Dead.
The parable, found in Luke 10:25-37, begins with a question posed by a lawyer/Pharisee, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer, an expert in Hebrew Scripture, already knows the answer but he poses his question “to put Jesus to the test.” So Jesus answers the famous question with one of his own. “What is written in the law?” The lawyer responds correctly by combining two verses from the Hebrew Scriptures which were very familiar to Jesus:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Deuteronomy 6:5) “and your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
Elsewhere, in Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus called these two Scripture verses “the greatest Commandment,” the one upon which all others depend. The Ten Commandments and the 613 precepts of the Mosaic Law — all the dietary and ritual laws of purity in the life of Israel — are distilled into striving for these two. Love of God and Mercy to others are the towering rules of the Kingdom of God.
In the parable itself, the man beaten by robbers and left at the side of the road is simply passed over by a priest and a Levite. The lawyer hearing this understands well that their religious duty, written in the laws of ritual purity described above, requires them not to touch the body of a dead or dying man. The Samaritan, on the other hand, is already an outcast from the religious practice of Israel, and is thus the only one free to show mercy.
The lawyer/Pharisee hearing this Parable would find it painfully familiar. It recalls a very similar story from the Second Book of Chronicles (28:8-15). About 1,000 years before Jesus told this parable, a group of people from the Kingdom of Judah were assailed and captured by the Northern Israelite army. Four men from Samaria came upon the beaten captives. The four Samaritans clothed, fed, and, anointed them, and placing them upon their own beasts of burden, took them peacefully to Jericho. The fact that the parable had a precedent deep in the history of Israel would have crushed the lawyer’s resistance to the story of grace imparted by way of mercy.
The Narrow Gate
The question posed by the lawyer/Pharisee that opens the Parable of the Man Beaten by Robbers is very similar to one posed in the Gospel at Mass on the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time. Jesus had just described the Kingdom of God as being “like leaven.” Leaven used in dough is a rising agent. So what is it about the Kingdom of God that gives rise to it like leaven? He earlier refers to the kingdom as “like a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds that grow into great trees where birds may make their nests.”
Then a question was posed. “Lord, will those who are saved be few? (Luke 13:23) The response of Jesus that follows has been disheartening for many, but I believe it is misunderstood:
“Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter but will not be able.” He then went on to talk about weeping and gnashing of teeth and “seeing Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God and you yourself cast out” (Luke 22:28). Not exactly a hopeful narrative.
The place I turn to for context is one that I have written about before. It is the story of the only human being, at first glance a seemingly unlikely one, who was directly given salvation and eternal life in the Gospel. I wrote of the story of this man in “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.”
In Jesus of Nazareth Volume II: Holy Week Pope Benedict XVI wrote of that same account: “Of the two men crucified with Jesus, only one joins in mocking him. The other grasps the mystery of Jesus.” To do so while in the middle of one’s own crucifixion is the most hopeful and encouraging image that I have found in all of Sacred Scripture. The crucified Dismas asks but one thing, and it is not deliverance from his cross. He asks only, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”
Clearly, while on the cross, the penitent Dismas realized that this powerless man beside him is a true king. He wanted to be at this man’s side in both crucifixion and in Glory. The simple response of Jesus recognized both the weight of this man’s cross and the depth of his conversion and transformation: “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43).
The Greek word Luke’s Gospel used in describing what this man will encounter that day is “Paradeisos.” It is used only three times in the New Testament and was first used in all of Sacred Scripture in Genesis 2:8 where it refers to the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. There is no talk between Jesus and Dismas of weeping and gnashing of teeth, nor is there any mention of entering the Kingdom through the narrow door. Jesus promises to this repentant man nothing less than life in the eternal dwelling place of God.
There are hints for this through Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” (John 14:6-7). This conveys to me a truth that Dismas Crucified to the Right, came to see only from his own cross.
Jesus does not have a map to the narrow gate, nor is he a key to it. He is not even a ticket through it. Dismas discovers on his cross that Jesus is Himself the Narrow Gate to the Kingdom of Heaven, the only passageway from this life to eternal life. It could not be clearer.
So our only task is to follow Him, to imitate Him, and not even perfectly because He knows we can do nothing perfectly. What he seeks in us is mercy in our hearts, the knowledge that the measure with which we measure will be measured back to us. This is the leaven, the stuff that expands the Kingdom of God within us.
Strive to enter through the Narrow Gate.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post which will be placed in our Library Categories, Catholic Spiritual Life and Sacred Scripture. You may also want to visit — or revisit — these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found
The Measure by Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past
To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary
The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead
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Courtesy of L’Obsservatore Romano