“Will many be saved?” In our day the question maybe, “What does it mean to be saved?” or “Is there any such thing as salvation?” Among some Christians, “Doesn’t everyone automatically go to heaven when they die?”
We seem quick to auto-canonize everyone. This is why we rarely if ever pray for the souls in Purgatory, let alone seek indulgences on their behalf. Yes, praying for the dead and seeking indulgences are still a thing. Like Ember Days or belief in angels, they remain part and parcel of the Catholic faith that has been handed to on us. This Jubilee year, you can even obtain a plenary indulgence, as opposed to a partial indulgence. But this is a bit beside the point.
In context, Jesus words in today’s Gospel are addressed to an audience of Jewish people. It seems necessary to point out these days that Jesus himself is a Jew. Note that Jesus does not answer the question “Will many be saved?” directly.
The Lord doesn’t say whether many or few will ultimately be saved. What He seeks is to bring his questioner and those listening (including you and me) back to their “I,” to a consideration of your own life. His aim isn’t to cultivate self-awareness but to bring about repentance, spark a change in your life and how you live it, to reorient your existence.
His immediate point is that being a member of God’s chosen people, even one who endeavors to observe the 613 mitzvot, is not what brings salvation. In this passage, harmonized as it is with our reading from Isaiah, the Lord indicates that through Him, salvation is open to everyone, even the Gentiles, some of whom will be saved while some in Israel will not! The scandal of this assertion is largely lost on us.
While open to everyone, the road to salvation can only be accessed through “a narrow gate.”1 Elsewhere in scripture, Jesus says plainly that He is the gate.2
That Jesus is “making his way to Jerusalem” is not a throwaway line intended to contextualize what follows within Luke’s larger narrative. It is a marker on the road to redemption. Luke’s whole narrative shifts a few chapters earlier, toward the end of chapter nine:
When the days for his being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem3In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, & Luke, Jesus journeys to Jerusalem only once.
Reading semi-continuously through Saint Luke’s Gospel during these weeks in Ordinary Time, we journey together with Jesus and His disciples toward Jerusalem. For a Christian, this is nothing other than the pilgrimage of life, making us pilgrims of hope.
By making His way to Jerusalem, Jesus makes His way to the Cross. Only when understood through Christ’s cross does human suffering make any sense. Just as hope lies beyond optimism, eternal life lies beyond the cross. Therefore, the only way to eternal life is through the cross of Christ, which is the narrow gate.
Christ and His Disciples or Breaking the Law, Karoly Marko, 1854
To reject the cross is to reject Christ. This is a bit scary. Saint Paul urged the Christians of Philippi to imitate him and others who embraced Christ’s cross, noting that there are those who “conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ.” He says of these enemies: “Their end is their destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their ‘shame.’ Their minds are occupied with earthly things.”4
Over the past month or so and for the next several weeks, our readings are about discipleship, about what it means to follow Christ. Their aim is to teach us both how to be a disciple as well as the cost of Christian discipleship. At root, a disciple is one who observes the disciplines taught by a master.
Saying discipleship is intentional is like saying circles are round. Hence, Christ has no accidental disciples. A Christian life is a disciplined life. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving together are the fundamental disciplines taught to us by our Lord Himself. Just as hope joins faith to love, the practice of fasting connects prayer to almsgiving. Practicing these, are the foundation of Christian life.
Practicing these disciplines costs something. Prayer takes time. Fasting requires suppression of bodily desires. Almsgiving requires effort and sacrifice, maybe even doing without something I may want to provide someone else with what they need.
“But, but…,” you might be tempted to say, “the discipline written about in the passage from Hebrews isn’t about the practicing spiritual disciplines!” This passage seems to be about the way God works in and through your life to bring you to Himself, your origin and your destiny. As all of us know, a child who seeks to do right on her own requires less parental discipline.
The best discipline is self-discipline. This is true, too, in God’s household. With God’s help, train your will, recalibrate your thinking. This may mean addressing something very deep: the reorientation of desire. “Our only desire and our one choice should be this,” wrote Saint Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, “I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.”5
Just as a gift not received or refused is of no benefit to the intended recipient, salvation requires not only your cooperation but your desire. Don’t live a life of presumption. According to the Church, presumption is a sin. It is “the condition of a soul that, because of a badly regulated reliance on God’s mercy and power, hopes for salvation without doing anything to deserve it, or for pardon of… sins without repenting of them.”6 Jesus tells us the cake of life everlasting is not frosted with a life lived in and for the flesh.
While “fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” it’s important to experience for yourself how, through Christ’s cross, “perfect love casts out fear.”7 While one can experience this in extraordinary or even mystical ways, the most common way is through the sacrament of penance (i.e., going to confession), the sacraments being ordinary and accessible means of grace.
God desires your salvation. God is never an obstacle to salvation. Christ became human, suffered and died for your salvation. Through the Holy Spirit, He wants to teach you not just that but exactly how, through your particular the circumstances, God seeks to make all things (the good, the bad, and ugly) work together for your good.8 By His life, passion, death, and resurrection, He wants you learn to how to use everything to let Him draw you closer.
Contrary to a popular pious platitude, at least at times, God gives you more than you can manage. He allows this so that you learn to rely on Him. This is part of the discipline addressed in the reading from Hebrews: in cooperation with God’s manifold grace, you learn how all things can work together for your good.
As so many saints show us, abandoning yourself to God completely, entrusting yourself to Him entirely, is what gives you the freedom to do God’s will in all circumstances regardless of the cost. This is what it means to enter through the narrow gate of the cross of Christ. This is the way to salvation.
1 Luke 13:24.↩
2 John 10:9.↩
3 Luke 9:51.↩
4 Philippians 3:17-19.↩
5 Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual Exercises, as cited in “How Ignatian Spirituality Gives Us a Way to Discern God’s Will.”↩
6 “Old” Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “Presumption,” Vol 12, pg 403.↩
7 Proverbs 9:10; 1 John 4:18.↩
8 Romans 8:28.↩
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