Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time • Year C

Jesus was in the last few months of his life when the incident in today’s gospel happened. The story goes something like this:

Jesus had arrived at a new town followed by the crowd of disciples and sight-seers who had accompanied him now for some days. As they walked along, suddenly out of the blue someone asked that anxious question that has plagued believers ever since: Lord, are there only a few to be saved?

No doubt the questioner had been with Jesus for a few days and had witnessed the anger the Lord had shown when dealing with the Scribes and Pharisees…the supposedly best people of society. Perhaps he thought to himself: If the Lord is displeased with these paragons of virtue, how in the world can he ever be pleased with “poor slugs” like me?

In response Jesus said: The gate to heaven is a narrow gate and so only the “thin” can enter…those who are not so bloated with themselves as to be unable to squeeze through the opening.

He was speaking about the most serious spiritual illness: the sin of pride. It is most serious because the infected do not even know that they are sick. The proud pay no attention to the warnings of friends because they don’t think friends have any worthwhile knowledge to communicate. They pay no attention to divine threats because they are firmly convinced that they are the only divinity of any importance. They become trapped in their self-created heaven.

Jesus made it plain that God will have no sympathy for such bloated spirits. He said to the listening crowds words like these: When the proud come to the gate of heaven so “filled with themselves,” God will simply say, Go away! I do not know you!

And it will be no use for a person to claim: But God, I walked with your authority and talked in your name throughout my lifetime. Why, I am part of your peer group!

God will simply repeat: Go away! You have done the ultimate evil in your life. You pretended to be Me.

If you try to force yourself into heaven because you think you deserve it, you will see strangers coming from all over the world…people with strange faces and strange accents and (perhaps) even strange lives. They will crowd into heaven instead of you because their humble search for God through a lifetime has made them small enough to get through the narrow door. Then you will finally understand that those who seemed to you to be last are really first and that you who have pretended to be first shall be forever last…separated far, far from me for all eternity.

And with that Jesus moved on to another town.