Readings (Year C):
Isaiah 66:18 – 21
Psalm 117:1, 2
Hebrews 12:5 – 7, 11 – 13
Luke 13:22 – 30
Reflection: Practice the wideness of God’s mercy
Back to school time is upon us. Students are walking, carpooling, getting on buses from far and wide, and gathering with their teachers to learn. At the end of the day, teachers send students out to share or practice what they are learning, to unpack mysteries, to grow and then be gathered again. This rhythm of gathering and sending is the rhythm we hear in Isaiah this Sunday— amplified, of course, further and wider, with greater diversity. In Isaiah, we encounter the wideness of God’s gathering, and the diversity of peoples God calls to be together.
Biblical Scholar Ellen Davis notes that this last section of the Isaiah is written to a community that is divided and disillusioned. Isaiah is written for us—a nation in which we imprison people because of the color of their skin or the language they speak, in a world that is war-torn, in which we bomb and starve one another to death, a world quite literally on fire. We are divided, fractured, and at odds with one another. In this world, Isaiah underscores the wideness of God’s merciful gathering and sending.
Wideness is the way of God. And yet here comes Jesus and the narrow gate! What are we to do with this narrow gate? When asked if only a few will be saved, Jesus responds in true Jesus fashion and offers a story. He begins with advice: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.”
Then Jesus continues: “After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from. And you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’
Notice the passive nature of their response. Not, “we prepared meals together, conversed, laughed, spent time getting to know one another.” Not, “we learned from you, you are our teacher, and we are your students.” Learning, as every teacher reminds their students, is active.
Jesus, the great rabbi and teacher, seems to say, “you can’t just hang out with the teacher and hear the Word. You must be an active learner.” Jesus invites us to be students who develop the discipline of love, who practice the wideness of God’s merciful gathering, who go to the ends of the earth to proclaim and enact this love.
Jesus doesn’t necessarily say that the gate will be narrow. He simply invites us to strive, to be active learners who practice the discipline of discipleship, so that we can enter with the prophets who were concerned not primarily with the intellectual knowing of God’s Word, but with its embodied practice. God’s gathering is wide. I suspect that the path may feel narrow at first, because our hearts are narrow. When we practice the discipline of living the wideness of God’s merciful love, the path widens like the expansiveness of God’s gathering and sending love.
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