The narrow gate and the broad way.
This is a part of the Sermon on the Mount that has passed into everyday language. We speak of people being "on the straight and narrow." But we do not mean by it quite what Jesus meant.
We take it to mean that a man lives an upright, serious, self-controlled and abstemious life; no wandering into places where temptations wait to trip you up. As a child I used to feel a wistful sort of sadness when I read this verse. I had a notion there was laughter and gaiety on the broad way, but none on the straight and narrow, and I was inclined to think, "A shame! I wish there was fun, too, on the narrow path I suppose I'll have to tread"! To be honest, I still feel a certain regret. I know now that the laughter on the broad way, much of it, is hollow laughter, forced and desperate; and the people who rollick their way along it are not at all as carefree as they would have us believe they are, or even as they try to persuade themselves they are. I have met too many of them suffering conscience distress, and seen too many of them frightened or embittered by the things that happen to them on the broad way to be under those old illusions any more. But I do wish the people who walked the narrow way were freer: more blithe, more cheerful, more generous, warm and kindly. There is a rigidity and sourness in many of them which is not a good advertisement for Christ's way.
As I hope we shall see, the people who do go through the straight gate and walk the narrow way should be cheerful people. To be sure, what Jesus says here has its solemn side; but what He is really saying is that though it is painful finding your way on to the straight and narrow, it is by far the cheeriest path to be on. Its happiness is not hollow; its satisfactions are very real.
Another thing in this verse too used to sadden me: the impression it gave that those who are saved will be few, that the great bulk of folk in this world all down the ages are irretrievably lost. The broad way is a crowded way, whilst those who walk the path to life are few. And I used to feel about that too, "It's a shame. After all the trouble God has gone to to make salvation available to all, He won't get many takers" - like a business man with a good product he cannot sell. Such a huge effort to so little effect! I think now that I was wrong about that too. It is illuminating to look at another occasion when Jesus said this, of which Luke tells us. (Luke 13:22-30) There He said it in answer to the very question, "Will those who are saved be few?" At first glance it looks as though He said "Yes." But when you look at it a little harder, you wonder. It does not read like a straight answer to a straight question.
"Will those who are saved be few?"
"You strive to enter by the narrow door." As though to say, "Never mind about the rest: what about you? Which path are you on?"
True, Jesus went on to say, "Many indeed, will seek to enter, and not be able to." And you might be tempted to stop there, feeling, "What a pity," and feel smug while you said it, for whilst the general forecast for humanity might seem to be a sadly gloomy one, at least you would have the comfort of knowing that you were not included in it. After all, you would hardly be bothered by the question at all unless you had taken salvation seriously!
But if you heard Jesus out, you would find your complacency rather rudely disturbed, for you would hear Him go on to say, "It is precisely for the few who fancy themselves safe that the biggest surprises are in store. There will be many who will find they never went through the door at all who thought they had. And if that surprises them, they will be even more astonished to see, as they gaze over the wall (from the wrong side of it), that it is the many after all who got in! Those who sit down to the great Feast will have come from all over, whilst many who felt sure of their place at that table will find themselves shut out. O it will be a day of surprises, I tell you." And you begin to feel the ground shifting under your feet. A question you asked about other people has been turned round by Jesus to become a question now about yourself.
That is typical of the way Jesus answered many of the questions we ask. He does not satisfy our curiosity about other people; He makes us ask about ourselves. The woman at the well learned that, to her acute discomfiture. So did Nicodemus, and the man who wanted to know who his neighbour was, and even Peter, when he wanted to know what would happen to John! That is what Jesus does here. He says in effect: "Just who goes through the narrow door that leads to life, and how many go through, is a question I don't propose to discuss with you. The question I will discuss is whether you go through."
But if that is the case, why did Jesus introduce at all the thought of the many who miss the way? Because he did persist with it. Against the challenge to our own commitment, He Himself sketched in the background of the many who ignore it. Why, if He does not mean to satisfy our curiosity about them, does he keep before our minds the thought of the crowds who throng the broad way?
The reason is simply that you cannot come to grips with the really serious issues of life but it separates you from the crowd. You have to do it by yourself and for yourself. Nobody can do it for you; so if you do it at all, you do it alone. That is why Jesus says that the door that leads to life is a narrow door: we can only go through it one at a time. You cannot settle the really big questions about your life running with the herd.
It reminds me of my first algebra lesson at Parramatta High School. Our maths teacher introduced us to the basic principles, how to use 'x' and 'y' to stand for unknown quantities, and how to manipulate them to solve equations. Then he set us all a simple test to see if we had understood what he had told us. I have never forgotten what happened. Having given us a little time, he asked each of us in turn for our answer, beginning at the end desk in the front row and working along the rows to the back where I was sitting. To my dismay, as I heard the others giving their answer one by one, nobody was giving the answer I had worked out. They were all giving the same answer, what's more - but it wasn't mine. So as it came nearer to my turn, I had a problem! Should I give the teacher their answer or my own? How could they all be wrong? I am ashamed to have to admit I funked it. I gave the same answer they all gave. And it turned out they were all wrong and my answer was right. Only I hadn't given it! If only I had had the courage to do so, I would have been the only one in the class who was right! It taught me a more important lesson than mere algebra ever did: to give your own answer, no matter what others say, "because they can't, surely, all be wrong." They can all be wrong. I have tried to live by that - not always successfully: I can still be a coward. But I have tried to let it guide my ministry; I will not be a parrot!
Jesus was saying here, "Don't be ruled by the mob." Between the crowd outside, all skipping merrily along toward unforeseen disaster, and those inside who are secure in the Father's house, there is this narrow door, so narrow you can only go through on your own.
And Jesus is the door! We have to turn aside from the crowd and front up to Jesus by ourself, with none to 'crowd' us, and give Him our own answer. It is a narrow place, a pressure zone, where we have to do our own repenting.
It is like driving along a Freeway: you have to turn off where the exit is, or you will be trapped in the freeway for another five miles. You have to say, "They are not going where I have to go. If I stay in the traffic, I shall never get there. I have to turn off ... here!" You have to say, "Christ is right, and they're all wrong. I can't run with the herd any longer. It's Him I've got to trust, not 'the boys'."
Jesus knows very well that that will be the effect of His words. They make us for that little while a man, a woman alone, face to face with Him Who is the door that opens into life. There is no way any of us can avoid this personal and very private encounter with the Son of God. We have to get with Him, face to face, and give Him our own answer. On the outcome of that everything depends ... our whole life, here and hereafter. Knowing what He asks of us - our life, and knowing what He promises us - our life, we have to choose. Either we say, "Lord, it's You I'll trust. Here I am. I'm all Yours." Or we drop our eyes and turn away, back to the comfort and safety of the crowd, and we fall into step again with the free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky mob.
In which case, nothing changes much for perhaps a long time ... until there comes, unexpectedly as it always does, one of those big crisis situations in life that separate us from the mob anyway: and we stand revealed for the person we chose to be: a stranger to God who preferred the faceless mob to the face of His Son. Only then will it dawn on us what has been happening: that we have become more and more like the mob.
The mob is nameless, featureless, aimless; and the will that rules it is always the will of its lower nature, never the higher. Go with the crowd and not with Christ, and we will find ourself ruled by the worst in us. We become characterless, a mere blob. We become less and less a real person, and more and more a sort of 'meeting place' for chains of events we did not start and cannot stop.
"That's the way of the crowd," says Jesus. "Its way is a free-and-easy way, a broad way, where anything goes and everybody is welcome, but where in the end everything goes and nobody is welcome. Those who tread it finally come apart at the seams." That is the meaning of the word 'destruction' that He uses: "the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction" - in the Greek apoluo. It means 'to unloose,' the way you untie the string around a parcel so it will not hold anything together any more.
Go with the crowd and we end up where three characters ended up in the film about the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II, "The Longest Day." Three men end up in a muddy farmyard beside a deserted barn: a pilot who broke his leg when he parachuted down from his shot-up aircraft, a dead German whom he had shot when the German discovered him there, and an American G.I. who had got separated from his platoon and was lost. It was one of those scenes that prints itself indelibly on your memory. Richard Burton played the pilot. Sitting propped up against the barn wall with his broken leg, the dead German lying face down in the mud, he says to the G.I. who has just asked what this war is all about, "He's dead, I'm crippled, you're lost. That's what it's all about."
In the film it was intended as a comment on the futility of war. But it is a comment too on the futility of life without Christ. You end up crippled, dead or lost.
The crowd is no use to you then, for be warned: if you will not face the loneliness of fronting up to the Son of God, life will isolate you anyway. Distress and fear, grief and guilt afflict us all - yes, even those in the sloppy, lovable, easy-going crowd. And when that happens, a man finds himself terribly alone, a woman finds herself dreadfully alone. The crowd does not stop for you. The crowd only knows to do one thing: to move on, in pursuit of the next diversion, the next sensation, the next pub down the road. Though you kneel, stricken, in the road, holding out imploring hands, the moving column will not stop for you. Some perhaps will look at you with sympathy as they jostle by, and even mouth encouraging cliches. But to stop for you is the one thing the crowd cannot do. All it can do is edge you out to fall by the wayside where you will not be a nuisance, where you will not be an obstacle to its pursuit of mass happiness.
Then you are alone
... with your trouble and your hurt
... with your grief and your pain
... with your shame and your guilt
... with your bewilderment and despair.
The crowd rushes by, and no-one in it knows how to heal you of these things. The crowd does not have remedies, only diversions and entertainments, and the blind will to move on, God knows where.
The remedy for all these things we will have left behind us long since, back there at the turn-off where Jesus once called us by our name, and beckoned us out from the crowd, home to the Father's House.
Like Moses of old, Jesus is saying to us, "I call heaven and earth to witness to you this day that I have set before you life and death, blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life - loving the Lord your God, and cleaving to Him, for that means life to you."
We will have to step out from the crowd to go to Him. The crowd will always be there, laughing - even at us - and shouting slogans, the way it does, which we have heard a thousand times. But its laughter is empty. Its slogans are just words; there is no healing, no life in them.
There is healing for us in Jesus. There is life in His Words. There is joy in His companionship. And the way He will lead us will take us home. All the lights are on in His Father's house. They were lit long since to show us where in the dark to find it. It is always a place of merriment when we do. It is the cheery way, His narrow, but satisfying way.
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