The Narrow Gate

Sermon on the Mount pt. 8

Last time, when I found myself condemned and helpless before the Law as Jesus expounds it in the Sermon on the Mount I was rescued by the amazing Gospel which forms the climax of that passage, ‘Everyone who asks receives and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened’. Isaiah describes the same thing in his 49th chapter saying,

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
And not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Surely they may forget,
Yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; Isaiah 49:15—16a

This stunning piece of Good News hangs not on anything that we are or do but only on the paternal goodness of the deity and of His own covenant keeping nature. We can finally see here, I think, the point of the Lord’s Sermon and understand what He has been driving at.

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! ¹² Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. ¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. ¹⁴ Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. Matthew 7:7—14

It is easy to take Christ’s words about entering the Narrow Gate and avoiding the broad way and apply them to whatever happens to be our hobby horse. Any cause or teaching that seems to be marginalized or disfavored or just low profile can, and probably has been, called the narrow gate by its followers. And since every course of action involves some difficulties these can be easily brought out to support calling ‘our side’, whatever it may be, the difficult way to life. How can we then, determine the Gate and Way which He had in mind? Throughout this study, our rule has been to treat the Sermon on the Mount not as a set of disjointed proverbs or sayings but actually as a Sermon, as a single work produced by the Lord’s mind which proceeds logically and thematically to make certain points.

Since then ‘context is king’, I look to verses 7-12 to identify the Narrow Gate and the Way to Life, and indeed as the Gospel cornerstone on which the entire sermon is built.

It is a frustrating feature of our Lord’s words that at various times He describes following Him as a very easy yoke and light burden and at others as being a very difficult way and the carrying of our cross. Well, which is it? I think that the way of dependence that He describes here and which we found throughout chapter 6, of waiting on God’s good gifts, of faith without works, or any righteousness of our own, fits both descriptions as nothing else does. The question that everyone wants an answer to is, ‘What ought we do to please God?’ When we give the answer, paraphrasing the Lord in John’s sixth chapter,¹ ‘trust without making any contribution, believe and add nothing to that faith’, then our questioners think that we are making a joke out of them by making something so great as pleasing God, justification, to depend on believing something they consider so small and easy that it is done as easily as thinking of doing it². Once you have actually convinced someone that you are serious, only after he has tried a time or three to get you to back down and add just a few little works in a few little ways to the finished work of Christ³ then next He will usually mock you for your laziness, for a faith that only sits idly on a shelf and does nothing, as if believing a thing that your whole nature and history are bent against believing were a matter for an idle moment and not a consuming passion for a whole lifetime. For a fallen man to wait on the Lord, to do nothing when the world, the flesh, and the devil within us cries out for us to act, to do something, ANYTHING, is the hardest thing that I have ever tried to do. You can tell that I haven’t succeeded because if I had successfully waited on the Lord I would be flying on my eagle wings, running without getting tired⁴ and, feeding on the food of angels instead of getting worn out by toddlers and dragging my fat, old ass to KFC in a 16 year old pickup.⁵

Why doesn’t Jon ‘wait on the Lord’, you might ask? To put it bluntly, God just takes too damn long. I don’t see any sign that He is doing anything. My needs, my problems, and my desires are becoming more urgent all the time and the things that I would like to add to the Gospel just seem better and more necessary and the hope that He will do something for us seems smaller and further away each moment. ‘Surely there is work that I must do to obtain bread or fish.’, I say, ‘It can’t be mine simply for the asking. Surely spiritual growth requires some effort, some sacrifice, some work.’ My talents and my works and my efforts are making me spiritually obese and the gate is too narrow, too small for me to pass through.

All of our religion perversely is the exact thing keeping us out of Heaven. The prompt ‘fat guy stuck in a narrow gate’ produces a guy that looks disturbingly like me on the first try. Even AI, which doesn’t even exist, can diagnose my spiritual problems.

Let’s look at the ‘therefore’ at the beginning of verse 12.⁶ The Golden Rule of verse 12 surprisingly is not actually stated in the imperative form in which it has become so famous⁷, as a command, but rather is made conditional on the truth of verse 11. Which is to say it follows from, or flows out of the preceding verses, which are in the form of an argument from the lesser to the greater like this: If we are evil, but we still provide for our children’s desires, then God who is good will certainly not overlook our desires. The ‘therefore’ of verse 12 indicates that if we believed this we would, in fact, fulfill the Law which we are currently failing so miserably at. Fulfilling the Law then is not conditional on doing the right things, having the right motives or any of our other imagined goodness but depends only on believing in the goodness of God.

Our road through the Sermon on the Mount began with the recognition that Christ is not blessing the rich or the cheerful or the discerning or the spiritual or the courageous or those with any virtues at all but is blessing men who are trapped in weakness, willfulness, worthlessness, and wickedness. He blesses us not on the basis of our value but on the basis of our need. When He began to bless sinners and sufferers, as opposed to the righteous and the worthy, His first listeners must have been up in arms. They weren’t as practised at glossing over shocking gospel as we are. They noticed the discontinuity, the unmistakable break with everything that had been called righteousness and life and Law before the Word spoke this new thing into existence.⁸ In His talk of light and salt coming through persecution you could almost say that they scented the cross, the end of the old creation and the arrival of the New. They had the feeling that men would later get around Paul that the whole world had been turned upside down. And they naturally howled about it. They screamed that Christ was destroying God’s Law. Whether Christ’s audience openly challenged Him, or murmured amongst themselves, or He simply perceived what was in their hearts, most of the Sermon is a response to, and refutation of, what He knew we would all think and feel when confronted with His determination to bless the unblessable, to accept the unacceptable, to sanctify and justify the unlovable.

What they were feeling was premature enlightenment. You are not your righteousness. We are the all blessed, all rejoicing rejected refuse of a world drunk on its own self-righteousness. image credit obviously Fight Club.

Christ had to lead us through a hard path and a winding one from His promise to fulfill rather than destroy the Law in chapter 5 to telling us at last, here at the climax of the Sermon how, the Law is fulfilled, but it is so different from what we expected that we had to be brought up the difficult path of belief by degrees. We covered up the Law with our traditions, our interpretations, our applications, our precedents and accepted practices so that we could forget our failures. He spent the second half of chapter 5 clearing away this mountain of self-righteous religion. He showed us in chapter 6 what fulfilling the Law would actually require, namely sincerity, simplicity, spiritual poverty, needs honestly asked for and freely supplied. Our failure to fulfill the Law is not because we aren’t trying hard enough or aren’t good enough. Our failure is much deeper than a violation of some particular statutes. Our lawlessness is that we don’t believe in the goodness of God and His gift to us, a primary fault that taints our every action, our every perception, our every thought, and each motive. And as long as we look at ourselves or our lives we can never stop seeing God as angry and armed for our destruction. Our works cry out to heaven for punishment. As Isaiah has it our righteousness, not our sin note but our righteousness, is disgusting garbage. Adding more works or better works just makes us fatter, more spiritually rich when spiritual poverty, destitution is what is called for. Christ is dragging us kicking and screaming through the gate that is as narrow as the eye of a needle, the gate that we can only enter when we are ‘without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me’ and the jellyrolls of our religion keep getting hung up. The lovehandles of our works are bigger than a camel’s hump. It is only when we look beyond creation, beyond the natural order which appropriately condemns us and view the Creator Himself, view Him not disdaining criminals such as us, not condemning rebels, murderers, theives, and insurrectionists but joining them. The only words that can ever convince us of the goodness of God and His graciousness towards us are, ‘This day you shall be with me in paradise.’ spoken to one such as I. We need to do the opposite of what we have been doing, namely, drop our burdens of works and righteousness. Stop justifying ourselves and become small enough, insignificant enough to enter the Narrow Gate, a gate made for children who have nothing of their own, no claim on one another or on God, but who merely ask trusting in the Good God to give them all that He has.

What’s worse, we don’t see that at all because the church has created this fiction where justification and sanctification are two separate things, where passing through the Narrow Gate is over in a moment and our works are valid and meaningful for life or rather eternity, but they are not. Justification by faith alone is a matter for every moment of life.⁹

The whole robe of salvation is one piece woven without seam, not made to be divided. If we would study the Law¹⁰ then we would know that God does not make garments from a patchwork, here one thing and there another, or plant fields with multiple crops¹¹, His works, obviously including salvation are the same from one end to the other. He is not in to hybrids or chimeras. Trusting in Christ is not a matter of a moment and then we move on. Believing in His goodness to sinful men is the whole matter of life, this life and the next. Loving God and believing in His unmerited favor are not merely synonymous, they are identical. They are coextensive. He who believes in the goodness of God and the gift of Jesus Christ is fulfilling the greatest commandment by that very belief, and it is this position as a believing beggar which fulfills all of the Law not by doing anything but simply by continuing to be itself.

Let me paraphrase then the Lord’s conclusion, His Golden Rule, ‘If all that you desire is yours for the asking, then there is no reason whatsoever to be stingy or hard with your fellow man. You can love Him freely because I(Christ) have loved you freely.’ If scarcity is a myth, if competition for limited resources is a delirium caused by being high on our own righteousness, if we are truly heirs to the cattle on a thousand hills, in short if the bride of Christ can write checks on her husband’s account then all of the sharp ways that we treat other people are pointless and utterly unnecessary, stupid in fact. It is this that we are condemned of, the imagined necessity of our prudence, our sacrificing, our study, our works, our wheeling and dealing, and whatever else we dream makes a contribution to our lives or His kingdom or, God-forbid, His righteousness. Freely you have received, freely give.¹²

Stop justifying yourself and accept the free grace that is poured out on the scum of the earth but not on one person who is right or good or who did his best or who acted with the best intentions. There are blessings promised to you if your spiritual tank is at the bottom of the E, There are blessings for the chronically depressed, the weak, the cowardly, the mentally ill but none for those who were given lemons and made lemonade. None for the one who did his best with a bad situation. None for the fellow who got a raw deal but it wasn’t his fault. It’s time to figure out what group you identify with and lean into it. As for me I am not a victim but a sinner, a free moral agent who deliberately, knowingly, persistently screws up.

By Grace Alone through Faith Alone in Christ Alone to the Glory of God Alone, no expiration date.

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

As in chapter 6, clothing here represents righteousness. The false Christians have righteousness that looks and feels like a sheep like Christianity, but it doesn’t come from God with the gift of birth, it doesn’t grow naturally the way that a sheep gets its wool. It is a product of labor and artifice of toil and cunning¹³. Those who would lead us have all of the characteristics of good trees except good fruit, all of the characteristics of Prophets except that they were never commissioned by God and do not come with the Everlasting Gospel of Free Grace. They come instead with the tangled, thorny mess of their own righteousness.

There are then, many rich, many proud, many judicious, many diligent, many religious who will never fit through the Narrow Gate. These have taken up the occupation of teaching the poor in spirit how to pass through the gate. ‘Those who can’t do, teach!’ By their fruit you will know them. And what fruit they have! They are so productive, so hard working, so missions minded, that they cross land and sea seeking a single convert, and then they make him twice as much of a son of hell as they themselves are! All then of the spiritually rich are incapable of teaching us how to pass through the Narrow Gate. It is not a gate for the successful, the happy, the victorious, the admired, or the prosperous. It is for the failures, the mourners, the depressed, the losers, and the disgusting. It is rather for debtors than creditors, tenants than landlords, sinners rather than the righteous. It is not for the spiritual warrior but for the little one who would avoid temptation and hide from the Evil One if he knew how but sensing his own inability can only cry out, ‘deliver us from evil!’. We need rather to learn to leave our virtue behind than to accumulate goodness.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. ²² Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

As Paul tells us, prophecy is the greatest of the spiritual gifts. Surely exorcism and great works are the sorts of fruits that those who are great in the kingdom of Heaven show. But, no. The fruit of a prophet or an exorcist or a miracle worker is simply thorns and thistles. Even the greatest and most celebrated of charitable or religious works are of no value, for they are not ‘the will of My Father in Heaven’, which is to only believe in and rely wholly on His pity for us. All of our attempts to love our neighbor fail, will always fail, because we can’t stop competing with him, because we have never believed that God will provide for us and so the great works, the great sacrifices which we make, which we imagine as crowns and cherries on top of Christ’s gift of righteousness are merely lawlessness. The free grace of Christ must each moment drive away the fear of failure and judgment and deprivation in order for us to love God or our neighbor. We cannot love our neighbor because we are both pulling chicken out of the same limited bucket and anything that he gets we have to do without. It is only the free and unlimited gift that puts an end to the competition, as soon as we add anything to the gift we are back in the rat race, and rather than loving our neighbor we snatch food from his mouth to shovel into our own cakeholes.

We all know the look and feeling when you look down in the bucket and only crumbs are left(delicious crumbs but still). Turns out you can’t get that image from a search engine, I assume that KFC doesn’t want you feeling the terrible loneliness and desolation of an empty chicken bucket. Normally I would be happy to do the work necessary to get that image for you but my ‘food plan’(it isn’t a diet because you can eat ‘unlimited cucumbers’) doesn’t allow me to, which might explain this piece’s weird focus on eating. I have been hungry for three solid months now.

²⁴ “Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: ²⁵ and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

²⁶ “But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: ²⁷ and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.”

The one thing required is trust. The child who has nothing but trusts his father gives freely, loves unconditionally and no one else ever has or ever will. This is the work, to believe in God and Jesus Christ who He sent. Our challenge is to place ourselves on the foundation which He has built and to remain there, but we always want to be partly on the rock and partly on our own selves. The rock is too small, too narrow for us and we always want to see how much we can expand it. We are much too big and the plans that we think that God has for us are too big, and the kingdom and the church and the ministry and the career and the future that we are building is too damn big. They won’t fit on the tiny stupid rock of the free gift. Lord take pity on us because we are pitiful. In Dr. Luther’s famous last words, ‘We are beggars. This is the truth.’

1. ²⁸ Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?”

²⁹ Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” John 6

Covered very ably in my first outing in the pulpit December 2016 if memory serves:

2. We talk like we simply choose what to believe and what not to believe by an instant and rather superficial act of the will, but my experience tells me that it is not so. Each belief that we hold is at the center of a complex web of evidence for and against, of actions taken affirming and denying. We are stuck to our beliefs by an investment of time and passion which is not easily or quickly moved, and in the case of the most core beliefs of our being to change them would be rather like actually lifting ourselves by our bootstraps and hauling ourselves through the air to another place.

3. He will of course emphasize how much you must thank God for making you such a good fellow not like the rotten tax collector across the pew.

4. ³⁰ Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
³¹ But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40 obviously

5. FWIW, to paraphrase Bocephus, ‘If Heaven don’t have fried chicken, I don’t wanna go.’ If I ever wind up with any ecclesiastical influence I promise to promote the canonization of the Colonel with the same unfailing faithfulness with which he has provided me delicious chicken.

6. All actual preachers are contractually bound to say ‘What’s the therefore there for?’ since, ‘no one has ever laid their empty hands on my empty head’ I can get away with putting it in a footnote here and skipping it altogether in the oral version however much it evokes the feeling of an unresolved chord.

7. 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’

8. Although it was, of course, contained implicitly in all of the promises which precede the Law.

9. If you have already had faith and passed beyond this elementary step then perhaps the question is a bit indelicate but, what is it that you have moved on to?

10.  ‘You shall keep My statutes. You shall not let your livestock breed with another kind. You shall not sow your field with mixed seed. Nor shall a garment of mixed linen and wool come upon you. Leviticus 19:19 reading the whole chapter would be a very profitable exercise though. The Lord repeatedly emphasizes His character and His relationship to the people after each particular statute. ‘I am the Lord your God’ so that we can see that the point of each rule was always to reveal the character of God. It is in our honoring parents and caring for the poor, in seeing justice done that His goodness is revealed.

11. As in the parable of the Tares that is the work of the Enemy.

12. ⁷ And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ ⁸ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Matthew 10

13. Or of violence and murder which comes to the same thing in this context.