“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” —Matt. vii. 13, 14.
The passage: Enter by the narrow gate, for the wide gate and broad road lead to destruction, and many go that way; but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and few find it.
Do not these words contradict the doctrine I have lately preached — that we should proclaim to Christians, Hindoos, Mussulmans, everyone alike, a Gospel that God is Father of all in Christ, head of every man, and that every gift men have is a gift and sign of the Holy Spirit’s presence? Must not such a Gospel throw open the very wide gate that leads to destruction, and keep both preachers and hearers from seeking the strait gate and the narrow way to life? How can we call a blessing for all what Scripture says only a few find?
These are serious questions, and none of us can honestly say they don’t concern him. I feel their force myself: they cut against habits and tastes of our age and of our own temperaments. It would suit our laziness to think that the hero’s hard choice belongs to Greek courage but not to the Christian, who may trade endurance for ease; that the scientist must steer past every error on either hand to reach truth, but the seeker after God faces no such perils. Such a view would flatter our indolence — and precisely because of that, it would offend everything earnest and vigorous in us. If Christ’s faith really made this claim, every sufferer and struggler would rightly say, “This is not for me.” So we must search out the whole meaning of this text; to explain any part of it away is cowardly and dishonest, and if it conflicts with opinions we hold dear, those opinions must go.
How do we find that whole meaning? I know only one way. The strait gate must be the one Christ Himself passed through; the narrow way, the one He walked; the life it led to, the life He would have us seek. And by studying His gate and way we can learn what the wide gate and broad way are that so many choose, and what destruction awaits them.
I. Open any page of the Gospels — a discourse, a casual saying, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the Passion, the Resurrection — and you find the same features. Here is One who claims to be the Son of God, and precisely because of that claim, renounces all independence and authority of His own. Being one with the Father, He can do nothing of Himself. He will not turn stones to bread, since that would deny His Sonship; He feeds the multitude because it is the Father’s will; He does only what He sees the Father doing; His face shines with the Father’s brightness. Alone, yet not alone, for the Father is with Him. His agony on the Cross is the sense of separation from the Father; His last word commits His spirit into the Father’s hands; His message after the Resurrection is that He ascends to His Father and theirs.
The highest claim a man in the flesh could make — blasphemy to Jewish ears — became the foundation of the deepest self-abandonment ever known. Through this strait gate — absolute trust in God as Father even while events, denial, and anguish seemed to deny His Sonship, and absolute renunciation of any right to be or have anything apart from the Father — He passed. Miss either the greatness of the claim or the completeness of the renunciation, and you miss the Christ of the Gospels. Try to balance boldness against humility, and you miss Him too. Their entire, necessary union is what gives His life its calm simplicity; separate them, and you introduce artifice and confusion — something of our own sinfulness.
Open the Gospels again, and you find One who, without calling Himself king, proves Himself King over nature and man. The carpenter’s son speaks, and is obeyed, with a power greater than storm or thunder. Yet this King distinguishes Himself from all other rulers by never exalting Himself above the lowest, never treating the worst as inferior, but feeling for them a sympathy no sinner sharing their corruption could feel. Here is a narrow path indeed: highest royalty joined to lowest service, greatest unlikeness to the race joined to closest identification with it. One step toward mere authority that lessens sympathy, or mere sympathy that lessens kingship, and the Christ is lost. Yet He does not walk a cautious middle course like some moral philosopher avoiding extremes; He moves naturally and majestically, courting misconstruction at every turn — not shrinking from being too much a King for fear of seeming Cæsar’s enemy, nor from being too much the servant of all for fear of being called friend of sinners. He must be perfectly both, for to be one He must be the other.
Through this gate and way He moved toward the Life He had with the Father before the world was — His own proper life of trust and delight in the Father’s will, of which His own will was the reflection. But He moved also toward a new life: the redeemed and reconciled life of manhood. Had God’s love been content with less than this — less than giving men the full rights of sons — the Word would not have become flesh, nor would this earthly life have been lived. This, then, was the goal of His narrow way, the fruit of His baptism, without which He could not be satisfied for the travail of His soul.
So the command “Enter ye in at the strait gate” is the same as “Follow me.” “I who alone can open have opened this gate for you; in your nature I have claimed for you the rights of sons of God, and disclaimed for you all self-sufficiency. Do not choose another entrance than your Shepherd’s, for His gate leads to life. You cannot find life refusing the Father I have shown you; you can have no life but the dependent, trusting life of a child. Assume that state, wonderful as it is — without it you cannot be humble, only proud.”
For He also tells of a gate and way that lead not to life but to destruction — a wide gate, admitting all sorts of people, however different in habits or aims. If we understand His strait gate, we can read the wide one just as well — many of us know it from having passed through it. The gate of trust in God as Father is one; the gate of distrust in God as enemy is the other. So too the ways: fellowship with all as sharing one Father’s love and one tendency to wander from Him is the narrow way; self-exaltation, setting ourselves apart as more favored or holy than others, is the broad one. How hard the first is to find, how easy the second, our own experience should teach us. Let me illustrate from the two classes most sharply contrasted in the Gospels — the publicans and outcasts Christ called to repentance, and the Pharisees, models of religion.
Opposite as they were, they shared one root: distrust of God. It told the extortioner and the adulterer, “You are breaking a law; the Ruler of the universe is against you,” and left him in secret shame, fleeing the Judge — so he sought forgetfulness in pleasure or in restless money-getting. Many enter that wide gate with no plan at all, only care to be careless. And all who enter it walk in the broad way distrust of God produces: separation from one’s fellows, each pursuing his own end, each jostling against others in the crowded road. Each man, dreading a reckoning, must make out a case for himself — proving others wrong and himself, if not perfect, at least better than this man or that.
The extremes meet here. The Pharisee’s long public prayers serve the same purpose as the sensualist’s eating and drinking: both try to escape the sight of a feared tyrant — one by making him forget them, the other by trying to buy him off. “I will give you offerings of time, money, and toil, if only you will let me escape you, not see your face in righteousness.” The Pharisee opposes Christ in his dealings with men because he opposes Him in his belief about God: he will not believe God is a Father, that God speaks through a Man and Brother, that the Son of Man can forgive sins on earth. So while Christ stoops to the level of all and dies the common death, proving Himself the true Shepherd, the Pharisees prove themselves shepherds only by separating themselves from those they rule.
That this way led to destruction is proved by the history of the Jewish nation. The habit of suspecting God, shared by religious and irreligious alike, led to the rejection of Jesus as Christ, to superstition and cruelty that sank Jehovah’s worshippers below the idolaters around them. The self-exaltation and mutual suspicion, worst among the religious but present in every class, hastened the destruction of the nation, and destroyed the individual life of every man who cherished them — what was patriotic and godly died, what was base and selfish grew supreme. Each step down the broad way he had chosen made the way narrower and darker, until it ended in utter blackness.
How could men be brought out of this broad, dark road? Our Lord told publicans and sinners of a Shepherd seeking His lost sheep, a Father letting His child wander to a far country and eat the food of swine so as to bring him home. Publicans or Pharisees who received this Gospel entered by faith and trust, walked the narrow way of self-renunciation, and found the divine and universal life. This message was given first to His disciples, to be preached as Gospel to all nations.
V. But is there not something discouraging in the saying that few find this narrow way — discouraging to those first commissioned to preach it, and more so to us now? The disciples found, when they went out, that those who rejected their report far outnumbered those who received it; among their own people and among Greeks, Romans, and barbarians, only a feeble minority confessed God as Father and themselves as one family, while a vast majority stayed in distrust and mutual estrangement, cooperating only where they had no choice.
That discovery was hard enough for men sent to preach God’s kingdom to every nation — but was there not a harder one still? Did they not have to learn that they themselves, chosen heralds of this kingdom, had no power to find the narrow way while walking the broad one, nor to stay in it once brought there? Had not God led them into trust in spite of themselves? After repeated lessons, did they not keep sliding back into distrust, self-confidence, even Pharisaic pride at feeling better than others — and then, once some fall exposed the folly of that, were they not tempted to some equally Pharisaic way of appeasing God rather than simply confessing their sin to Him?
Few indeed find your narrow way, Lord — are there any? No: we do not find You, You find us. We do not bring ourselves into the hard way; You hedge our paths so we cannot walk any other. You strip us of self-trust so we are forced to trust You; You show us we are worse, not better, than others, so that we commend all men, with ourselves, to You. This is how Christ’s messengers learned to speak — a lesson that made them able to endure all opposition, fit instruments for building a Christendom on God’s Fatherhood revealed in His Son. They were sure it was God’s will that all should be saved, because they knew it was only He who had given them the will to wish it.
- This, I think, must also be the preparation of those who in our day speak of Christ to worshippers of Brahma or followers of the Prophet. So long as we ourselves are not passing through the strait gate of simple trust in God as Father — whose Son was born of woman to claim all the woman-born as God’s children and seal them with His Spirit — and are not walking the narrow way of denying we have any superiority of our own, our message to other nations, however forcefully spoken, will be powerless, not a message of life. Merely announcing that the path to heaven is hard and rare is nothing new to Hindoo or Mussulman — it is already central to both creeds. Every self-torture by which devotees seek union with the Divine, every sacrifice to appease evil powers, shows how deeply this belief runs in one; and the Koran’s promise of Paradise to God’s warriors, which has shaped so much history, shows it in the other.
What the Hindoo needs to learn is that the Divine Nature has been revealed in a Person he can trust, that trusting Him lets him share that nature, that all evil is foreign to it, and that we may take refuge from evil in Him — that God Himself has made the sacrifice, so that men need not reconcile Him to themselves, for He has reconciled them to Himself. What the Mahometan needs to understand is that the God who demands devotion and perpetual struggle is not a tyrant but a Father, not separated from His creatures but eternally united with them, desiring not their death but their life, wanting them to fight death’s powers as bearers of life.
Our conviction that we have the right to proclaim this, because it is truth, will meet fierce resistance from all that is exclusive and selfish in those we address. It would be miserable to blame that hostility on peculiarities of their race and creed if we cannot find its causes in ourselves as well. Take Caste, which we call distinctly Oriental and hopeless of reform. Is there anything in it we lack a counterpart for among Christians, among Englishmen — anything in it not put forward as characteristically Christian or English? So far as it asserts the superiority of the spiritual over the merely animal man, it holds a truth not to be crushed. So far as it asserts the superiority of one set of spiritual men over another, it is the same Pharisaism found in Judea and rampant among us now. So far as it asserts the Brahmin’s inherent superiority as priest over the Sudra, it is the same self-exaltation found on every page of church history. So far as it merely boasts of one race’s eminence, let him who has never boasted of unrivalled Teutonic virtues throw the first stone at the Asiatic boaster. So far as it claims hereditary superiority and privilege by birth, Englishmen are not exactly strangers to that prejudice or its effects. So the way we rightly call destruction — the loss of moral life in societies and individuals — is a broad way that any country or person may slide into. Deliverance from it must come not by preaching ourselves and our supposedly caste-free systems, but by preaching Christ, who died to make Oriental and Occidental, bond and free, one family in Him — where true distinctions of race and family will only stand out more clearly within the unity of His body, while the separations pride has invented will be abolished forever.
Or take the doctrine attributed to the more warlike faith — a sensual Paradise, so terrible to Christian ears as a reward for those who fight and die for God. I would be wary of simply denouncing this. If there is no blessing for the senses as well as the spirit, I do not know what St. Paul meant by the promised redemption of the body and of the earth, which comforted him and the persecuted churches he founded. That this truth has become gross materialism through selfishness — through believers expecting an exclusive reward, having no higher standard by which to measure the world to come than their own worldly pursuits, and imagining their own salvation only by consigning others to ruin — the history of Islam painfully proves; this is the downward road that has drained the moral energy of Muslim nations. But dare we say it is not a broad road that Christians, at the height of their profession, have also stumbled into and walked? Have we not thought of heaven’s rewards as personal prizes, made more valuable by others’ exclusion? Have our dreams of the world to come escaped the coloring of our waking desires here? If our business here is pursuing selfish gain, must not our expected reward there be cast in the same mold? We must leave this broad road ourselves, for it clearly leads to death. Then we can tell Mahometans of a way to life open to them as much as to us — because Christ, who is the Way and the Life, laid down His life for them as for us, and His Spirit seeks to bring us, and them, and all men, to the one living God, the universal Father.