An Exposition
13. Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (TNIV)
Jesus drops a bomb at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Is Jesus playing some kind of video game? Some of us are more familiar with the gates of the old-fashioned pinball machines. In the prior verses, 7 through 12, he has promised us that if we seek God, we will find him, if we knock on God’s door, the door will be opened and if we ask of God, we will be given an answer. Does not Jesus say to us with these words, my Father God is readily available to those who seek him? Believing this, what are we seekers to make of the two bomb verses?
In these verses
that there are two gates or openings to experience the eternal truth of God in our
lives on earth. One gate is wide and one
is narrow. The unspoken assumption is
that all seekers choose one or the other, narrow or wide. We can also assume that most of us wrongly choose
the wide gate because it appears to be the most popular and user friendly. This is the religion entrance that Jesus
identifies as “the Law and the Prophets” in verse 12. Jesus was born into the 1500-year-old
religion of Israel, the long-corrupted faith of Israel and its spiritual
leadership. Every religion fails in the end
because the religion promises easy spirituality while it clutters up the
playing field with a lot of other stuff, like dividing people into groups of
sinners and saints, budgets, buildings and bluster.
Jesus goes
on to say that “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to
destruction” (13). Nothing like being
blunt, the wide gate and broad road of religion will only lead us to be the loser. The Bible concordance gives us “loss” as the
first meaning of the Greek word everywhere translated as “destruction”. The translators probably chose destruction
because the word carries a heightened sense of finality, which may or may not
be the meaning Jesus intended to convey.
In modern language we might say that the wide gate and that road will
lead to a dead end.
The narrow
gate is the gate that will lead to authentic spirituality, reserved for those
seekers who badly want a taste of the certainty of eternity in this life. This is the gate of the “Golden Rule”, simply
treating others the way that you would like to be treated. The tragedy is that few will choose to pass
through the narrow gate. Who are these
few seekers? Potentially, they are the
people listening to Jesus on the hillside that day and the people in the synagogue
as long as they are willing to choose the narrow gate and not follow the crowd
within religion. The few are sincere individual seekers of authentic spirituality;
they want it bad. Theirs is the willingness
to set aside seemingly normal human priorities to follow the priorities of the
entire Sermon on the Mount. No longer is
their priority to be better than most; better personal security, food and
housing, better status and relative success.
The few do not run after a bigger and bigger bank roll, looking good no matter
the cost to others and surrendering to the distractions of our world.
Once through
the narrow gate, the road that leads to spiritual life in this lifetime remains
narrow and it will be difficult to navigate. The narrow road is like a coin,
one side says that God has provided a way and the other side says that way will
ever be difficult. Why will this road be
a difficult narrow road? Reason one, in
verse 16 he warns us, “Watch out for the false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but
inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” Who,
pray tell, are the false prophets? There can be only one answer that fits, the proponents
of the corrupted faith of Israel who parade in fine robs and collect the
religion taxes. You got it, the
religious leaders of the day. Jesus says, they are the bad trees of religion
that can only bear bad fruit.
The second
hazard on the narrow road is the company we keep while traveling on this road. Not everyone on the narrow road has the best
of intentions. Some have not been
willing to give up designing their own world.
They or we tend to make a show of spirituality, self-identifying as
prophets of God with great power over the demonic and doers of the spectacular.
A showy religion carries no weight with
Jesus for the only spirituality that counts is one experienced in a relationship
with our Father God (v.21). In fact, those who count on showy religion Jesus
calls evildoers.
Jesus uses
the Greek word “kurios” for his ministry in the affairs of God on earth. This word is translated as Lord, Lord, in verse
21. What did Jesus mean to say in this
verse with this self-designation? The
Apostle Paul uses this word among his new Gentile Christian brothers to mean
that Jesus was co-equal with God, a concept easily accepted in their confused
God-Man culture. The word had a similar meaning among Jewish converts to
Christianity but this would seem to conflict with the strict monotheism of Judaism.
To this day there is disagreement among
scholars as to what Jesus was saying with the word “kurios”, God or spiritual leader.
There is an
interesting article entitled “LORD” by J. Y. Campbell in “A Theological Word
Book of the Bible”, edited by Alan Richardson.
On page 131. J.Y. Campbell sums up the disagreement among scholars as contrasting
theories regarding the history of the word.
In any event, Jesus’s self-designation as “kurios” may not have meant
what the Christian doctrinal theologians insist upon, that Jesus was also God. I am not a biblical scholar but the God-Man
theory sounds like an assumption without clear biblical standing. However, the life and message of Jesus was a God
given pivot point as God reaches from the heavens to you and I, of this, we all
can agree.
