Narrow Door

FR. TERRY RYAN, CSP
Luke 13: 22-30
August 26, 2007

From a young age, many women think about their wedding. Their thoughts are then often filled with happy times to come. But as the actual event gets closer to reality, the wedding reception invitation list becomes an issue. Who makes the cut? Who gets invited? Well, you have to invite your relatives. You don't really choose who your relatives are. So you send out a list of invitations, and maybe hope that some say no. The wedding reception is limited by space and money. Say you can only have 200 people. You might invite some people from your work and hope that some of them don't accept. Then you have to invite all the people who invited you to their wedding, some of whom may be your good friends. Your good friends you want to come.

On the other hand, there are those who think that they are your friends and expect to get invited. They are shocked if they don't get that invitation. They think that they spent lots of time with you and you did lots of things together in the near or distant past. What the uninvited “friend” does not realize is that most of the time spent with you, they were talking about themselves and not really wanting to listen to you or ask what you might want to do. It was all about them as the focus of the friendship.

We have this same self-focus with God. We spend time with God in Church worship. We may be doing it to get something from God, and we focus on our petitions to God. We may be giving God some time as an eternal life insurance policy. We want to end up in heaven! But we really don't spend much time listening to God or being concerned about what God might want to do in our lives or through us. Jesus saw this with the people who spent time with him and ate with him. It was all about them and they were not much changed by the experience.

The people who ask about who is saved are really focused upon themselves. They want to know that they are on the invitation list. To this self-focus, Jesus suggests the narrow door. In a large house with farm land around it, there was a main entrance to the home, and then there was a much smaller, entrance in the back, coming off from the fields or gardens. It was a low door, not entered easily. It was sort of humbling to enter that way. It was for the people who did not sense their importance or need to be noticed.

The narrow door image says that we should not be so exclusively focused upon self in our relationship with God or one another. I know that when I was the primary caregiver for my dying parents, living with them in their home, I lived in a very narrow world focused upon them and their needs. It was difficult, but ultimately a very precious time. Jesus is God and the world is created through him, but he narrows himself to the Incarnation and lives among us in this small world. When I cared for my parents, I never thought about whether I was saved or not. I suspect that I was being saved without thinking about me. When God came into this world as a human being, I doubt that God was thinking much about God. The divine focus was on us. If we are really made in the image and likeness of God, we have an example of how to live that out. Try the narrow door.