The Narrow Door - a Lenten Journey, Part 5
With an apology for the delay in posting, we are pleased to share the fifth instalment of Fr Gwilym Evans FSSP’s Lenten reflections, which follow Jesus’ path towards His Passion in the Holy City of Jerusalem as told in the Gospel of Luke. This week, we meditate on Luke 13:22-30.
Door from the Franciscan cloister into the Basilica of the Nativity, Bethlehem © Fr Lawrence Lew, OP
“Strive to enter through the narrow door.” (Lk 13:24)
As we cross the threshold into the second half of St Luke’s ‘Journey to Jerusalem’, the atmosphere of our pilgrimage shifts. The road is no longer just a place of formation; it has become a place of decision. As the physical distance to the city of sacrifice diminishes, the spiritual demand for a choice—to be “with me” or “against me” (11:23)—becomes more urgent. Having girded our loins for the road, we now confront the rigour of its end.
The central message of this journey concerns the Kingdom of God, first likened to the surprising growth of a mustard seed (13:18-19), then to the hidden work of leaven (13:20-21). Now, in this third ‘parable of the Kingdom’, Jesus is asked a theoretical question that remains controversial today: “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” (13:23). Christ refuses the bait of this theological abstraction. He turns the question back upon the questioner — and upon each one of us: do not ask who is saved; ask if you will be!
His answer pivots on a single command: strive (13:24) — in Greek, agonizesthe (“agonize”, if we give it an etymological translation). The word is athletic and military at once; it is the vocabulary of the Olympic Games (Olympiakoi Agones) and of the battlefield (the “good fight”—kalon agona—of 2 Tim 4:7). It also anticipates Christ’s “agony” in Gethsemane, once we arrive in Jerusalem (22:44). The Christian life is not a vague aspiration — not merely to “seek” (13:24) — but to wrestle, to train, to deny oneself: an ascetical effort to place God first. It demands of the disciple what the musician demands of his fingers, the athlete of his body, the scholar of his mind. A saint, as St Teresa of Calcutta put it, is not someone who never falls, but one who gets up and tries again: one who strives most to cooperate with grace.
The image of the narrow door carries deep resonance. The Fathers saw here the single door of Noah’s Ark, closed not by Noah but—as the careful reader will have noticed—by the Lord (Gen 7:16): the one entrance to salvation. This door, set “in the side” of the wood of the ark, prefigures the pierced side of Christ on the wood of the Cross (Jn 19:34; cf. Jn 10:9). When the “master of the house” rises (a subtle pun on the Resurrection?) to shut the door (13:25), we are reminded that the time of grace is not indefinite. The time of decision is now.
The urgency is sharpened by another sobering reversal. Ancestral privilege (or even membership in a noble Order!) will not suffice: “We ate and drank in your presence” (13:26) will not open the door. Yet those who come “from east and west” will “recline at table” (13:29), while the entitled are left outside. Luke (the ‘Gospel of the Table’) is preparing us for the Parable of the Great Banquet and, later on, the Last Supper itself. Christ, once turned away at the inn (2:7), now becomes the Host of a Kingdom where everyone is invited, but only those who have striven through the narrow door of conversion will find their place at His side.
Keyhole of the door of the Grand Priory of Rome, Aventine Hill, Rome (Piranesi, 1765), with St Peter’s Basilica visible through the narrow opening © Harald Pizzinini