We’ve got a hard saying of Jesus in today’s Gospel from St Luke Chapter 13 verse 24: ‘Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because, I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed’.
I find the image of Christian commitment as a narrow door challenging. It seems to go against thinking in church circles that’s generous to outsiders. Whilst God’s love is immense and reaches out to everyone our response to that love has to be focused.
Putting God’s kingdom first means a narrowing down, or cutting away of what’s superfluous in our lives. Speaking of a rich young man who declined to follow him Jesus spoke of something even narrower: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:25).
We need our desire for God enhanced and purified by the Holy Spirit so we can ‘enter by the narrow door’. Being a Christian is a discipline. Like a concert pianist devoted to improving her playing, believers are called to narrow down superfluous activities to prioritise worship, prayer, bible study, service and reflection.
G.K.Chesterton used Christ’s narrow door to explain to a non-Churchgoer how from outside the Church looks like an imposition that narrows our lives.
Only when you pluck up faith to go through that narrow door do you find how spacious Christianity as you find ‘the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ spoken of in the eighth chapter of the letter to the Romans from where our first reading was taken.
If we are feeling something of a constraint in our lives that may be a sign of a God-given imposition we need to squeeze ourselves through for which he needs us to leave some unnecessary luggage behind.
Picture of Brydges Place off St Martin’s Lane, London’s narrowest alley coming down to 15 inches
No comments:
Post a Comment