Strive

Readings:

Isaiah 66:18-21
Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13
Luke 13:22-30

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In our Gospel message today, which is from Luke, chapter 13, Jesus is traveling along, teaching, and heading towards Jerusalem. Along the way, someone asks him: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” Jesus doesn’t answer that question. He answers a different question. He tells the person, or tells the crowd, “strive to enter through the narrow gate.” That’s His answer to this question. What does that mean? One thing we know it doesn’t mean is to actually be perfect. Following the law doesn’t save you. We know this because Jesus says, over and over again, how we will fail to follow the law perfectly. We simply aren’t going to do it. We don’t always turn the other cheek. A man may look at a woman with lust in his heart, and so forth. All these kinds of things happen. There are all kinds of things where people are simply going to fail to measure up to the letter of the law and to the spirit of the law. That’s what Jesus tells us all the time. He’s saying, you are not going to make it by trying to follow the law. Paul says the same thing, repeatedly, in his letters. The law doesn’t save us. We are saved by faith through the grace of God. That is what saves us, not following the law, because we are going to fail to do that. We are.

Jesus also says that there will be people who are surprised to see prophets in the Kingdom and that they themselves are not. What He’s talking about here, people who see people from all over the world going into the Kingdom of Heaven, when they themselves, who were part of the chosen people, Israelites, were not. This would come as a surprise to them. This is His likely audience, the person asking Him this question. So being from a particular group, being an Israelite, is not going to be enough either.

Our Old Testament reading today was from Isaiah. Isaiah tells us God is going to save all these other people who are not Hebrews. He says, “I will set a sign among them; I will send fugitives to the nations: to Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan, to the distant coastlands that have never heard of my fame, or seen my glory.” He says, I’m going to bring people from all over the world to be saved. He even says, “some of these I will take as priests and Levites, says the Lord.” That means a lot, because in the Hebrew faith at that time, in order to be a priest you had to be a Levite. They don’t have a priesthood now, they have rabbis. But back then, when they had the Temple and they had the priesthood, you had to be from the tribe of Levi in order to be a priest. You had to come from a particular group to occupy that priestly station. Here, Isaiah is saying, that’s not going to be the case. In the future, people are going to be priests of the Lord who are not Levites, who are not even originally Hebrews. So, being a particular group of people is not going to save you. Following the law is not going to save you.

There’s a story I’m reminded of. I read about it yesterday, when I was preparing this. Some of you may have seen Fulton Sheen on TV. Anybody ever seen Fulton Sheen? You won’t see him a lot. It’s from a long time ago. In the 1950s and 60s he was very popular commentator on Christianity. He was a Roman Catholic clergyman. He had a certain style. You wouldn’t forget if you’ve seen him on TV. He was a very stylish guy. Anyway, he said, people will be surprised on the Last Day. They’ll be surprised at some of the people they see in the Kingdom of Heaven, and they’ll be surprised, too, at some of the people they don’t see in the Kingdom of Heaven. This what Jesus is saying right here. Our way of thinking about people is all upside down and totally different than what God thinks about people. This is the kicker, Sheen says, people will also be surprised to see themselves in the Kingdom of Heaven. I often think that, too. I get that.

Anyway, the standards of the world are not God’s standards. It’s not what group we’re in or what other people think about us or even what we think about ourselves. None of that is going to save us. None of it. So what can we do? First, we have to understand that salvation is a gift from God and not an accomplishment. It is not something that we do for ourselves. It’s something that Jesus Christ did for us on the Cross. It is a gift. A free gift of the grace of God, and we have to accept that gift to receive it. How do we do that? How do we accept that gift of salvation? Jesus is telling us that here. He says, “strive to enter through the narrow gate.” So what does that mean? Let’s break it down. Striving. This is how we accept the gift of salvation. That is, accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior is not a one-time thing. Instead it is a way of living, and it’s something we have to strive to do, because we are all imperfect. Jesus knows that. Paul knows that. All the Saints know that. God knows that. We are all imperfect. We are going to fail to measure up. But what God expects of us, is that we strive – is that we keep trying, that we keep reaching out to accept that gift of salvation from Him. We have to be willing to give ourselves to God.

When we say Jesus Christ is our Lord, think about what that means to have Jesus as our Lord. Think about what the word “Lord” means. The Lord is the boss. The Lord is who we serve. We look to the Lord for guidance. We live for Christ, our Lord, in everything that we do. Whatever we do, we do it for the Kingdom of God: our work, our relationships, the way we treat other people, what we do with ourselves each day, we should strive to do all of these things for our Lord, Jesus Christ. This is the striving that Jesus has in mind here. That we keep trying, even though we know we’re not going to always measure up. We keep trying. We keep reaching out to accept that gift of salvation from God.

“Enter through the narrow gate.” That is the other part of what he says. What is that? Jesus is the narrow gate. Jesus is it. “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus is that narrow gate. We strive to be closer to Jesus. We strive to live our lives with Jesus as our Lord. This is what God expects of us. Strive, and don’t give up. This is a way to live, and this is how we enter into eternal life in the presence of God.

In Luke 13:22-30, at the end of it, he talks about a banquet. A banquet in which “people will come from the East and the West, and from the North and the South, and recline at table in the Kingdom of God.” This is reminiscent of what Isaiah says about God bringing people from all over into His salvation. “For behold, some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last.” It’s not what we think, it’s not the standards of the world that’s going to save us. It’s that striving to make Jesus Christ our Lord. And that banquet is something we can enjoy while we’re living, too. If we strive to be closer to God, we don’t have to strive for things that don’t satisfy and that don’t have a real meaning. We all do that. We strive for all kinds of things that are meaningless and that never will satisfy us. We can strive instead for the one thing that counts above all: the presence of God in our lives, now and for eternity.

Amen.