I know that for many of us today, the biggest problem with Jesus teaching is the narrowness of it. We really do live in a “small world after all.” There are so many different paths, so many different ways, it really can’t be about following the words of one, just one man, one teacher, one carpenter from Galilee that has been dead for 2000 years. That is so…narrow. I know it may seem really hard to believe this, but it’s really, really true: Only the narrow gate leads to the wide grace of the Kingdom.
Listen again to Jesus’ teaching here. What echo do you hear in this story? What theme is being played out here? What is the music that is reverberating in this passage? “Hear my words and act on them…” The God of the universe is coming to us like he did the first humans in the Garden of Eden and asking us to trust him.
Remember, life with God didn’t start out so narrow. God made humans and told them that they could have everything, everything. All of creation was theirs to enjoy and take care of. Be fruitful and multiply! Enjoy the world and each other. It’s all sex and gardening. Intimacy and enjoyment, freedom and responsibility.
We were to live together in perfect love and peace, perfect enjoyment. God the Creator would be the King of a good, delightful and lovely world. The grace of God was so wide, so vast, so immeasurable. There was only one thing, one command, one prohibition. They had to trust God by not eating from the fruit of one tree. That was his word to us. Enjoy all the wide, wide world that I have given you except this one tree.
But we didn’t listen to God’s words. We didn’t act on God’s words. Humans listened to Satan’s words and acted upon his words not God’s words and everything in Creation was turned inside out.
Now in Jesus, God himself comes to show us the way, to be the way, to take us from the tree in the garden that brought our condemnation to the tree on Calvary where he would atone for our sins.
In Jesus we are offered a chance to regain the Kingdom, to begin now to live under God’s reign and rule, to be assured of the day when peace and beauty, enjoyment and loveliness will be the experience of every person, but there is but one door, one gate, one road and it is simply the way that Adam rejected. To do God’s will. To hear the words of Jesus, the son of God and act on them. To follow Jesus and live out the Kingdom.
Eden was the widest life with one narrow way to death. And we took it.
Jesus offers us the narrow way out of death that leads to the widest way of life
…if we will take it.
My friends, in the same way that my Father’s voice had to break through fog of my fear and grab my attention when I was rock climbing as a teenager, Jesus is doing the same thing at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe he saw their furtive glances, maybe he knew their hearts, maybe he just knew his own heart well enough to know the temptations that awaited all who would seek the Kingdom that is only possible through the cross. But before he leaves that mountainside and takes his disciples in into a new season of ministry, he speaks to them directly.
Enter the narrow gate. (Jesus)
Do the will of (Jesus’) Father in heaven.
Hear these words of (Jesus) and act on them.
When it all comes down to it: Do we trust Jesus? Will we build your lives on Jesus?
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