Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

“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.

Are not these words conclusive against the doctrine which I have said lately that we should preach to Christians, to Hindoos, to Mussulmans, to all people whatsoever? A Gospel that God is the Father of all in Jesus Christ, Who is the head of every man; a Gospel that all gifts with which men are endowed are gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are signs of His presence,—must not such a Gospel open that wide gate which we are told here leadeth to destruction? Must it not hinder those who preach it and those who hear it from seeking to enter through the strait gate, to walk in the narrow way which leadeth to life? How can we proclaim that as a blessing to all which we are told is found only by a few?

These questions are very serious; no one who considers his own responsibilities as a teacher or as a learner must shrink from them. No one of us, I think, can safely say that they are questions which do not concern him; that he has no temptation to overlook this text or to evade the force of it. I feel the temptation strongly: the words are sharp—sharper than a two-edged sword; they strike some of the habits and tendencies which belong to our age, which accord with our individual tastes and temperaments. It would be very pleasant to our slothful nature if we could persuade ourselves that the choice of Hercules is not to be the choice of the Christian youth; that endurance was the characteristic of Greek heroism, but may be exchanged for silken dalliance by those who are signed with the sign of the Cross; that every physical student must be on his guard against idols on the right hand and on the left,—idols of the marketplace, idols of the cave,—must steer his narrow course through them both if he would reach the port to which he is bound, but that the seeker after Him who made the world has no discomforts or perils besetting his journey, no fear of not reaching his home. Such an opinion, I say, would be agreeable enough to the indolence that lies so near all human hearts; but just in proportion as it has this recommendation, would it be offensive to all that is earnest, vigorous, hopeful, in those same hearts. If the faith of Christ asserted this claim to our sympathy, every sufferer, every earnest wrestler, would say,—would have a right to say,—“It is not for me; I do not want it.” I am quite convinced, therefore, that we ought to search out the meaning—the whole meaning—of this sentence; that to explain away any part of it is a proof of cowardice and dishonesty; that if it should clash with any of the notions which we have cherished most fondly, we are bound to cast them off.

How then may we best arrive at the discovery of that meaning—that whole meaning—of the text, which is so needful for us? I know but one method. The gate through which our Lord Jesus Christ Himself passed must be the strait gate through which He would have us pass. The way in which He walked must be the narrow way in which He would have us walk. The issue to which this gate, this path, led Him must be the Life which He would have us seek. And by this strait gate and this narrow way of His we may be able to learn what is the wide gate through which so many pass, what is this broad way which so many choose. By the Life to which this path is leading we must understand what the destruction is which is the goal of theirs.

I. Open what page you will in any of the four Evangelists,—let the passage you choose contain one of our Lord’s formal discourses or a mere casual sentence, let the crisis be that of the Temptation, of the Transfiguration or Passion, or of the Resurrection,—these characteristics will certainly force themselves upon your notice. You are reading of One Who claims to be the Son of God; you are reading of One Who, because He claims to be the Son of God, abjures all independence, all separate authority. He is one with the Father, therefore He can do nothing of Himself. He will not make the stones bread; that would be a denial of his Sonship. He gives bread to the multitude, for it is His Father’s will that He should give it. He is doing what He has seen the Father doing. His countenance becomes changed, for the Father’s brightness shines through it. He is alone, and yet not alone, for the Father is with Him. The agony of the Cross is the sense of separation from the Father. Into the Father’s hand He commends His spirit. Mary Magdalene is to tell His disciples that He is about to ascend to His Father and their Father, to His God and their God.

The highest assumption which it is possible for one clothed in human flesh to make—an assumption which sounded to His Jewish hearers as the most frightful blasphemy—was then the foundation of a deep, an entire self-abandonment, which no one clothed in human flesh had ever approached. Through this strait gate of absolute, unreserved confidence in the Eternal God as a Father, when the evidence of events, the denials of men, the anguish of His spirit, contradicted the faith that He was a Son at all,—through this strait gate of absolute denial of His right to have anything and be anything apart from His Father,—did He pass. If we fail to perceive either the greatness of the pretension or the completeness of the renunciation, we fail to see Him Whom the Gospels set forth to us. If we look for any balancing of the one against the other, for any attempt to qualify boldness by humility, we fail to see Him. In the entire, the necessary union of these seeming opposites consists the simplicity and calmness of the life. Take away either and you introduce an element of artifice, confusion, restlessness, into the character. You mix with Him something of that sin into which we have fallen.

II. Again open any of these same four Gospels where you will, and you will find that you are reading of One Who, without saying that He was a king, proved Himself to be a King over Nature and over Man. The man of Nazareth, He Who is called the carpenter’s son, speaks and He is obeyed. His word has a power in it, such a power as does not dwell in the storm and the thunder. But you are also certain—every sentence of the Gospel conveys the impression—that this King of Men is distinguished from all other men, by not exalting Himself above the lowest of the race, by not looking upon the lowest or the worst as an inferior, by feeling such an intense sympathy with the lowest and the worst, as none who shared their corruptions had ever been able or had dared to feel. Here is a narrow path to walk in! The highest royalty, the lowest service; the greatest unlikeness to the members of the race, the most entire identification with every one of them! One step to the right or the left, one claim of authority and dignity which lessens the sympathy, one exhibition of sympathy which takes away from the Kinghood, and the Christ is lost: His person and His work are changed altogether. And yet it would cause one a shudder, a sense of horror, to think of Him as choosing a safe path, like some Aristotelian moralist, between two extremes. Such a course was certainly not the course of Jesus. He moves on naturally, majestically, shrinking from no perils. Nearly every word He speaks, nearly every act He does, is open to misconstruction, is always misconstrued. He does not shrink from being too much a King, lest he should be accused of being the enemy of Cæsar. He does not shrink from being too much the servant of all, lest He should be called a gluttonous man, the friend of publicans and sinners. He cannot be too much of either. To be one He must be the other. He must be perfectly both.

III. Through this strait gate, along this narrow way, He was moving on to that Life which He had with the Father before the worlds were. It was therefore His proper Life, His Original Life, the life of trust in a Father; the life of entire delight in the Will of which His own was the reflex. But in another sense He was moving to a new Life, the life of manhood which He had redeemed and reconciled. If the love of God could have been content with anything less than this redemption and reconciliation, with anything less than the imparting to men the full rights and condition of Sons of God, the Word would not have been made flesh, the life on earth which the Evangelists set forth to us would not have been lived. Therefore this is declared to be the goal and end of that narrow way through which He walked, the fruit of the Baptism with which He was baptized. Till this was accomplished He could not see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied.

IV. The command then, “Enter ye in through the strait gate,” is the same command as “Follow me.” “I, Who open and none can shut, have opened this gate for you; in your nature I have claimed for you the rights of Sons of God. In your nature I have disclaimed for you all independence and self-sufficiency. Do not you, my sheep, choose another entrance than that which the Shepherd has chosen. For the gate through which He has gone—the gate through which He would guide you—is the gate to Life. You cannot find life if you refuse to own the Father Whom I have declared to you; you cannot have any life but the life of dependent, trusting children. Assume that state to be yours, wonderful as it is. Without this assumption you cannot be humble—you must be proud.”

For, He goes on to tell them, there is a gate, there is a way, which does not lead to life, but to destruction. This gate, He says, is a wide one. It will admit all kind of persons, the most unlike each other in their associations, habits, dispositions, apparently in the objects which they are seeking. If we have at all understood what His gate was, what the strait gate was, we shall be at no loss to interpret the wide gate—Alas! which of us does not know it, from having gone through it?—The gate of trust in God as a Father is the one, the gate of distrust in God as an enemy is the other. And as the two gates are contrasted, so the two ways. The way of sympathy or fellowship with human beings as all sharing in the love of the same Father, as all having an inclination to wander from Him, is the one way; the way of self-exaltation, of setting ourselves up as having interests separate from those of our fellowmen, as being more favoured, more wise, more holy, than they are, is the other. How difficult it is to find the first of these ways, how readily a man falls into the second,—from whatever point he starts, whatever end he proposes to himself,—I think we might learn from our own experience. But that I may illustrate the subject more completely, I will take the classes of persons who are most strongly contrasted in the Gospels —the publicans and outcasts, the disreputable portion of Jewish society whom Christ called to repentance, the Pharisees who were its highest religious models.

Opposite as these classes were, they had a common characteristic. Distrust of God was at the root of the indifference and recklessness of those whom their countrymen scorned; distrust of God was at the root of the rules and practices of those whom their countrymen reverenced. A voice within him said to the extortioner, said to the adulterer, “Thou art breaking a law; the Ruler of the Universe is at war with thee.” There was in him a skulking shame, the fear of exposure, the desire to escape from a Judge. He must console himself by putting such thoughts as far away as may be possible, he must eat and drink and do his best to be merry; if that end was not to be reached, then the steadfast pursuit of money, with the perpetual anxieties and dim hopes which accompany it, might perhaps make him forget the future as well as the past. Think how many with entirely different schemes of happiness, or with no schemes at all; how many oppressed with the cares of the world; how many lighthearted triflers, only caring to be without care, entered then, enter now, through this wide gate! And all who did enter it or do enter it must also go along in that broad way of which our Lord speaks. Distrust of God thus leads to separation from their fellow-men. Each has an object of his own; his fellows interfere, in a more or less degree, with his pursuit of it or attainment of it. What jostling there is! the broad road is yet not broad enough to prevent perpetual collisions. Yes, to each man who moves along in it, having that dread of One who may some day call him to account for his wrong-doings, for his carelessness of his neighbours, must try to make out a special case for himself. He must prove that other men are wrong, and that he is right. He may not be perfect, but at all events he has not sunk to the level of that man, and that, and that.

You see at once how the extremes meet, what a point of resemblance there is between these irreligious men and those who say that they are righteous, and despise others. The resemblance does not begin there; it is more radical. The Pharisee makes long prayers in the Temple and at the corners of the streets, for the same reason that those whom I have just spoken of eat and drink. To forget an enemy or a tyrant, to keep out of his sight as long as may be, is the aim of the sensualist and the money-getter; to persuade a tyrant and enemy to forget him is the aim of the laborious petitioner. “Oh, God! I will make Thee all these offerings of time, of money, of wearisome, painful toil, if Thou wilt only allow me to escape from Thee, not to behold Thy face in Righteousness!” The Pharisee is opposed to Christ in his relations with Man, because he is at war with Him respecting his relations with God. He will not believe that God is a Father. He will not believe that God can speak to men, through a Man, a Brother. He will not believe that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins. Therefore, while Christ stoops to the level of all men, dies the death of all men, and so proves Himself the true Shepherd of the Sheep, these Pharisees only prove themselves shepherds by dividing themselves as much as possible from those whom they rule and guide.

That this way was leading to destruction those who walked in it, in the days when our Lord dwelt on earth, the history of the Jewish nation sufficiently proves. The habit of suspecting God, which prevailed alike in the religious and irreligious classes, led to the denial of Jesus as the Christ, led to the superstition and cruelty which reduced the worshippers of Jehovah far below the level of the idolaters around them. The self-exaltation, the suspicion of each other, which characterized the religious party most, but which might be traced in all classes and conditions of the people, was hastening the destruction of their city and polity. Those tempers which were the destruction of the social life of the nation were destroying also the individual life of every man who cherished them. All that was patriotic, humane, godly in him was dying out. What was base and selfish was becoming supreme. He had chosen the broad way, the way which it was so easy to enter. At every step he found the way growing closer and more contracted, till at last he could see nothing but frightful shadows of himself, till all ends in utter darkness.

How could men be brought out of this broad and dark road? Our Lord told publicans and sinners of a Shepherd who was seeking after His lost sheep; of a Father who allowed His child to wander in a far country, and to eat the food of swine, that He might awaken him to thoughts of his home, that He might bring back to His embraces. Publicans or Pharisees who received this Gospel entered through the straight gate of faith and trust, walked in the narrow way of self-renunciation, entered into the divine and universal life. The message concerning this narrow way was spoken first to His disciples, that they might preach it as a Gospel to all nations.

V. But after all that has been said of the many who choose the broad way, is there not something exceedingly discouraging in the words about the few who find this narrow way? Must they not have been discouraging to those who received their commission to preach the Gospel from Christ’s own lips? Must they not discourage us in these latter days still more? The prophecy may have been saddening enough to the disciples; but could it have been as saddening as the actual experience of its truth? They found, when they went forth, that those who received their report were few in comparison of those who rejected it. Among their own countrymen, among Greeks, Romans, barbarians, it was a feeble minority which confessed God as a Father and themselves as members of His family; a vast and powerful majority which continued to regard Him as an object of distrust, which stood aloof from each other as if they had no common relationship, or only herded together because—so God had established His universe—it was impossible for any one to obtain his own ends without the co-operation of some whom he was inclined to consider as his rivals.

This must have been a trying discovery, no doubt, to men who were to preach God’s Name and God’s kingdom to all tribes of the earth; but was there no discovery more trying still? Had they not to learn that they themselves, the chosen heralds of this Kingdom, had no power of finding the narrow way when they were walking along in the broad way; had no power of keeping themselves in the narrow way when they had once been brought into it? Had not God Himself led them, in spite of themselves, to trust in Him? After repeated lessons respecting the wisdom and duty of trusting Him, were they not sliding continually into distrust? Did not self-confidence continually overtake them? Were they not tempted at every moment to relapse into the Pharisaic thought that they were better than other men? When some fall had convinced them of the folly of that opinion, were they not tempted, instead of arising and going to their Father, and telling Him they had sinned against Him, to take some equally Pharisaic method of pacifying Him, and of seeking to recover the position they had lost?

Few they be that find Thy narrow way, O Lord! Are there any who find it? No, surely, we do not find Thee; but Thou findest us. We do not bring ourselves into the narrow and thorny way; but Thou hedgest up our paths, that it may be impossible for us to walk in any other. Thou takest from us trust in ourselves, that we may be compelled to trust in Thee. Thou showest us that we are not better, but worse, than other men, that so we may commend all men with ourselves to Thee. So Christ’s heralds learnt to speak then; this was the preparation which made them able to bear all opposition. It was this which made them fit instruments for raising a Christendom on the ground of God’s Fatherhood to mankind, testified in His Son. They were sure it was God’s will that all men should be saved, for they felt that it was only He who gave them the will that any should be saved.

VI. And this, I think, must be the preparation of those who, in these latter days, are to speak of Christ among the worshippers of Brahma or the disciples of the Prophet. So long as we are not going through the strait gate of simple trust in God as a Father, Whose Son has been born of a woman, that He might claim those who are born of women as God’s children, and might seal them with His Spirit,—so long as we are not walking in the narrow way of denying that we have anything of our own, that we are better in any one respect than other men,—so long, I believe, our message to the nations of the earth if we have strength to utter it at all, must be a powerless message, not a message of life. The mere announcement that the path to heaven is a difficult and thorny one, that there are few who find it, is no new announcement to Hindoo or Mussulman. It is a staple article in the creed of both. Every torture by which devotees hope to bring themselves into union with the Divine Nature, every sacrifice for propitiating evil powers, testifies how it has blended with the philosophy and the worship of the one race. Again, that Paradise is the prize of God’s warriors, of those who give themselves up for life and death to His service,—is the maxim of the Koran, which has borne great fruit in the past history of those who accept its teaching.

Just what Hindoos need to learn is, that the Divine Nature is a nature which has been revealed to men in a Person Whom they can trust; that by trust in Him they may enter into participation of His Nature; that all evil whatsoever is abhorrent to His Nature; that we may take refuge from all evil in Him. Just what they want to know is, that God has Himself made the sacrifice for men; that they have not to reconcile Him to them; that He has reconciled them to Himself. Just what the Mahometan wants to understand is, that the God Who calls for his devotion and his perpetual warfare, is not a tyrant, but a Father; not One Who is hopelessly separated from His creatures, but One Who is eternally united with them; not One Who seeks their death, but their life; Who desires His creatures, His children, to wrestle with the powers of death, to be the bearers of life.

The conviction, deeply rooted in our hearts, that we have a right to make this proclamation,—because it is truth, and no lie,—will combine with all the strongest, most earnest convictions in the hearts to which we address ourselves, will disturb and set in fierce opposition all in them that is exclusive, selfish, hateful. It will be miserable for us if we impute this hostility to some peculiarities of their races and their faith, if we are not able to detect all the causes and principles of it in ourselves. Take the institutions which we are wont to speak of as specially Oriental, which we say make the intrusion of Western belief and civilization most hopeless? What is there in Caste which we are not familiar with; what good or evil belongs to it, which has not its counterpart among Christians, among Englishmen; which has not put itself forth as characteristically Christian, characteristically English? So far as it is an assertion of the superiority of that which is intellectual and spiritual to that which is animal, of the man who seeks the highest ends, to the man who is stooping to the ground and eating dust, it contains a truth which must not be denied or crushed. So far as it proclaims the superiority of a set of spiritual men to a set of carnal men, it is part of the Pharisaism which was found in Judæa when our Lord appeared in it, which is rampant among us at the present day. So far as it is an assertion of the intrinsic superiority of the Brahmin as priest, to the Sudra as one of the people, it is a part of the same self-exaltation of which every page of ecclesiastical history presents us with specimens. So far as it merely implies a vaunt of the eminence and right to eminence in a particular race, let him who has never vaunted of the unrivalled, unconquerable Teutonic virtues cast the first stone at the Asiatic boaster. So far as it is a naked assertion of a necessary hereditary superiority, and of high employments as appertaining to that superiority, Englishmen have not been generally supposed to be quite incapable of comprehending such a prejudice, quite without experience of its effects. Here, then, is an illustration, in the case of the most exclusive of all institutions, that the way which we rightly say is a way to destruction,—to the loss of moral life in a society and in individuals,—is a broad way, a way into which one country and one man is in danger of sliding as well as another. When we seek a deliverance from it, it must not be by preaching ourselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord; not by proclaiming that we have a moral, or political, or religious system which is not leavened with caste feelings and caste notions, but by saying that He was born, and died, and lives to make the Oriental and the Occidental, the bond and the free, one family in Him; that all true distinctions and varieties of race, country, family, individual, which God has established, will only make themselves more evident in the Unity of His body; that all separations which the pride of man has invented to rend His body asunder shall be abolished for ever.

Or look again at that doctrine which we attribute to the professors of the other more energetic, more conquering faith. A sensual Paradise! How terrible that is to Christian ears! To think of such rewards being presented to those who fight and die for God! I should be afraid of merely denouncing this tenet. If there is no blessing for the senses as well as for the spirit, for the outward man as well as the inner, I do not see what is meant by the promises of a redeemed body and a redeemed earth, which St. Paul speaks of, which cheered him in his own pilgrimage, and which he held forth as a strength and encouragement to all the persecuted Churches which he had founded. That this truth has been turned into a terrible falsehood by the selfishness with which it has been mixed,—by the believer’s expectation of a special and exclusive reward which he should win by his faith and devotion; that it has become gross and base materialism, because there has been no high standard of human and divine life to which the believer could look, and in which he could forget himself; that he therefore could only measure the world to come by the things which were the chief objects of his pursuit here; that he could only realize his own salvation by consigning others to perdition, all this the history of Islamism abundantly and painfully proves; this it shows to be the downward road which the Mahometan nations have taken, the road to the destruction of all the moral energies that once belonged to them. But, brethren, dare we say that that has not been a broad road, a road into which Islamites have stumbled most naturally, seeing that Christians, in the height of their profession and belief, have deviated into the same, and have walked in it? Have we not thought of the rewards of heaven as prizes for our individual faith and services, prizes that were enhanced in value by the exclusion of multitudes from them? Has it been possible for our dreams of the Paradise that is to be, not to derive their colour from our waking thoughts of the world that we see? If the pursuit of certain selfish possessions is our business here, must not the attainment of such possessions be our recompense there? Oh! surely we must leave this broad road ourselves, for it is clearly leading us down to death! Then we shall be able to tell Mahometans of a way to life, into which they may enter as well as we, because Christ, Who is the Way—Christ, Who is the Life—laid down His life for them as well as for us; because His Spirit is seeking to bring us, and them, and all men, to the Living God, the Universal Father.