Proper 16
The Narrow Door
August 22, 2004

When priests write sermons they do study. I subscribe to a Bible Study for Episcopalians based on the Sunday Bible readings. I also have several books in the office where I can read up on interpretations others have made of the Bible readings. This week’s story about the narrow door, the gnashing of teeth and householders telling you to get out, really produced a lot of different “takes” on the story. I shall attempt to bring a condensed version of this rather interesting parable to about ten minutes of sermon. So I thank and acknowledge Bible scholars Sue Armentrout, Barbara Crafton and Robert Capon whose thoughts I have taken to weave together.

On the face of it, I think the fundamentalists could preach on this story with great gusto because if you look at it literally and with no imagination about what the context of Jesus’ teaching was, it really looks like this: the faith is strict and narrow so keep your noses clean, your zippers zipped and obey all the rules or you will surely burn in hell, ha, ha!

Now, I’m not against purity of living, but I think a little more imagination is needed here. First of all, Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem to be crucified and die and he knows it. Jesus’ death is a big theme here. The narrow door, I think, is the redeeming death of Jesus. You get to salvation through Jesus and you have to die with him to achieve eternal life. No one has special privileges. The door is narrow, but is open to all and by Jesus’ own words, he is the “door” and “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all people to me.” So, Christians ought not get too hasty with the “ha, ha I made it and you didn’t.” Indeed, the image Jesus develops here is designed to confront people who claim privilege on the basis of their previous actions. These people seek God through the teachings of their religion. They have eaten and drunk in the Lord’s presence by sharing in the temple sacrifices and Passover meals. They have received God’s teaching about daily living - yet none of this in itself can guarantee acceptance. It is not enough just to be part of the religious “in group.” What was necessary was to desire, to long to be with, Jesus. This is a strong warning to those who would become overconfident in their own works and sets the context for Jesus’ pronouncement of reversal, “some are last who will be first and some first who will be last.” The point is you can’t earn salvation by good works or rules even though those are good things. The offer here is of God’s free grace. The door of the Kingdom is open to all. The issue becomes, how will we respond?

Now, about the householder who has closed up for the night; Fr. Robert Capon, who is a little irreverent, but a great Greek scholar, reads it this way:

The householder locks the door, turns off the light and goes to his proper bed. But, on his way to sleep at last, he is interrupted by insistent banging on his front door. A mob of people claiming to be his friends wants to come in, maybe to bend his ear with the latest gossip, or perhaps just a chance to prove to the neighbors they are important enough to be let into his house any hour of the day or night. Whatever it is, it will be something based entirely on THEIR concerns, THEIR convenience, THEIR problems—in short, THEIR lives. At any rate, as Jesus portrays them, they talk like a bunch of selfish religious social climbers who respond to Jesus like someone who’s trying to convince the Rector to bend the rules just for them this once. “But, we’ve done LUNCH together. We’ve had DRINKS with you at the club. We’ve even listened to your wonderful SERMONS. My child made HIS FIRST COMMUNION here 12 years ago! Despite all this cajolery, Jesus has the householder tell them they simply don’t fit in with his plans. For all he can understand of their crazy lives and preoccupations they might as well be from another planet. They certainly haven’t the foggiest notion of how HE wants to operate.

Then Fr. Capon goes on to propose this interpretation:

The householder represents Christ. The nap out of which the householder/Christ awakes is Jesus’ three-day nap in the tomb. The door he closes is the door to the exchanges of ordinary living and the sleep to which he finally goes is the endless Sabbath of eternal life. And that narrow door… well, it is the remote possibility that, instead of noisily insisting on their notions of living their way to salvation, they might just join him in the silence of death and wait in faith for resurrection. So, the closing of the door by the householder should be interpreted not as the locking out of the damned, but as the closing of the door of ordinary living as a way to eternal life. Thus, this is a parable about grace not about going to hell. If you trust Jesus he won’t let you down.

So, having woven the theologians together I will venture a few thoughts on my own. Grace is always hard for Christians. We are work and achievement oriented. Why go to church, why try to be good, why help the poor, why keep them zippers zipped if, in the long run, God, through Christ, is going to do it all for you anyway? And I think the answer to that is, if you really love Jesus you’ll act like it. There is an old Spanish poem, probably from Muslim Spain, that says, “I do not love you because I hope to earn heaven. I do not love you because I fear if I don’t, I’ll go to hell. I love you because you are God and loved me first.”

And then, one more thought about narrow doors and the preoccupation about what happens to non-Christians after death. Now, I believe Christ is the perfect word of God made flesh and he is the way, the truth and the life. In other words, I think Christianity is indeed true and other religions don’t quite measure up to its truth. However, making guesses on who goes to heaven and who goes to hell just ain’t where it’s at. The apostles missed that point today when they asked, “will only a few be saved?”, and got a rather impatient answer from Jesus about the first being last and the last being first. Secondly, I do believe that everyone sees Jesus after death; that is the judgment. Some people may be so enthralled by what they see that they embrace him and some of those people may never have been part of the visible church. Other people after death, facing such perfect goodness, may flee from it terrified and choose to be away from him. That is hell. I believe in hell. I am not sure people stay there forever, but then, that’s me and C.S. Lewis. I think Jesus keeps on giving chances, even after death. So, I think that Christianity is not just one path among equals on the way to God; I think Christianity is the right path for all humankind just because it is, indeed, the most human-oriented. However, that doesn’t mean everyone who is not a Christian gnashes their teeth in the outer darkness. And to that end, let me get back to the parable: Jesus says, “The people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the Kingdom of God, indeed some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last.”

So, I end with one last quote from Fr. Capon: “That imagery suggests not a trickle of guests who, after heroic efforts, will find their way to some slow leak of a house party, but a flood of billions upon billions who – free, for nothing – will be drawn by the love of Jesus into the ultimate wedding blowout. True enough, they will be drawn through straight gates and narrow ways, but they will be drawn by the Narrow Door himself, and they will be drawn inexorably. All they need is the willingness to be last – and lost – and least and little – and dead – for by his grace upon their deaths, they will be first in the resurrection of the dead.”

Robert Farrar Capon: Kingdom, Grace, Judgment. Wm. Eerdmans Pub. Co. 2002