[AI translation] This saying of Jesus is also one that, if we listen to it only superficially, we can quickly reassure ourselves: 'Well, we are not on the broad road that leads to destruction. Here we are in the church, singing a psalm, listening to the Word. In fact, we are listening with pleasure. We are preparing for communion, we are the few who love the Church, we carry in our hearts the hope of eternal life. Not like the many who are now walking the wide road of the world, somewhere, without a care in the world, without a care for God, for the soul, for religion. We are wanderers on the narrow road. It is as if Jesus' words were not a warning but a praise, as if he were saying: Well, continue on this path, it will lead you to life. But these words of Jesus are not reassuring, they are very disturbing! They are some of the hardest words Jesus ever spoke to those who would follow him. For the gospel, however good news it may be, is a hard thing. I want us to feel the hardness of this gospel now.I myself have long believed, and I think many others have believed with me, that the broad road that leads to perdition is the road of men who have fallen into gross sin: the road of robbers, immoral debauchers, blasphemers, hooligans, dishonest men. I realized that on that wide road there are not only people who blaspheme, but also people who pray and sing psalms. On that wide road are not only taverns, but churches. There are also crowds of people walking along it with banners that read: God, religion, Christian morality. And that is why this particular wide road is dangerous, because people, while uttering Christian slogans and quoting biblical quotations, do not even realise that they are walking along it! Let us now leave the burglars and murderers and other debauched wanderers of the broad way, - they may enter the kingdom of God even sooner than those who think they are on the right path!
Let us try to approach the problem from another angle. Today, there is a strong public concern worldwide about the fact that there is a general process of decay in the moral life. Hundreds of newspaper articles are devoted everywhere to the world problem of the breakdown of marital fidelity, the lack of respect for parents, the relaxation of discipline at work, the increase in crime. Many blame the rise of secularisation throughout the world for these worrying phenomena. They say that morality has become so lax because people have turned away from God, religion and faith. So there is only one way to stop the deterioration: by trying to reassert the moral ideals of the purest religion, Christianity, in the lives of the masses. Everything must be done to restore respect for the eternal religious values and laws. I read the testimony of a young man who said: 'I have returned to the Church - although I personally have no use for the Church's beliefs - because I recognise Christian morality, the ideal of respect and love. I believe that only through these can we find a way out of moral chaos. Many people believe that Christianity in the world should unite and form a common Christian front against the dangers in the moral sphere.
However pious these words and slogans may sound, this is exactly what Jesus does not want! It is precisely those who utter such slogans who march along that broad road, calling on the name of God and waving the banner of Christianity. How far from the spirituality of Jesus any Christian ideological front is to be formed is poignantly illustrated by the part of the story of His temptation when Satan offered Him the whole world and its kingdoms. What that meant was to offer Jesus Himself, His name, His teachings as a program that could be made the basis of a world domination effort. As if Satan had said: You, Jesus of Nazareth, your principles, your Christianity are so great that they should be the basis for the whole of human culture, for the whole worldview! Thus you would open up such a great, wide road for yourself, on which the great masses of the world could all follow! It would be a pity for you to die on the cross, for you could be the master of the world! You have a great program, go for it! Jesus did not bring any political agenda, he did not announce any ideological claims. The problem for Jesus was not at all how to make the moral ideals of Christianity dominate the lives of the masses, but how can I and you become Christians, that is, people who live the life of Christ? Every well-meaning Christian walks that particular broad path, one that focuses on Christianity and not on Jesus. To proclaim any Christian morals, principles and Christian ideals is empty talk without Jesus. What is needed is not Christianity as an ideology, but Jesus! Jesus who said of himself, "I am the way". And he marked the direction of this way by dying unpopular, abandoned by everyone, alone on the cross. And so he continued, "No one comes to the Father but through me" (Jn 14,6), through me, the loneliest, the most despised, the man of sorrows, the man crowned with thorns and mocked. This is the narrow way and this narrow gate: Jesus himself!
Let us not want to profess Christian principles, let us not want to proclaim Christian moral ideals, let us not want to propagate them. This is the wide road: many walk it, but it does not lead to life; but we want to follow Jesus, the Jesus who came to serve everyone and who sacrificed his life for others! This is the narrow way. The way of life in Christ is not so simple. Sometimes it would be more comfortable not to be a Christian. It would be more unscrupulous and intact to live in the world. It's not easy to love where one is hated, to forgive those who slander, to do good to those who drill, to stand by those who are despised, to work for peace where everyone is angry. It is a very narrow path. You can get off it very quickly. Jesus is on that road, and whoever wants to follow Him can only follow that road. And whoever does not want to follow Jesus in this way, who does not confess Jesus in this way, falsifies Him and makes Him into the sweet Nazarene that you see in kitschy depictions. On this narrow road on which Jesus walks, there are crosses and mockery and all sorts of unpleasantness. And the more seriously one takes following Jesus, the more of these things one experiences. And this path may also lead through a lot of renunciation, self-denial, farewell, and Jesus says: few walk it, sometimes so few that one is left all alone. So it is not an easy road.
Jesus is not at all someone who wants to win over the masses to his ideas and rule the world with them. On the contrary, He always turned from the great masses to the individual: to souls who, in their sins or other troubles, had become lonely and abandoned, and who were really not fit to win the world and launch a broad propaganda campaign for Christianity. Jesus is still taking people one by one today. He never speaks to the masses in general, but always to the individual soul. And this is the narrow gate through which one can only enter into life, the Christian life. Standing alone before Jesus, face to face with Him, completely alone with Jesus, in the radiance of His X-ray vision. Remember the sick, the lepers, the blind, the demented of those days. They all stood alone before Jesus. For we all carry our batyas alone, only ourselves, even if thousands are in the same fate. For each one of us lives and bears and suffers his own troubles in his own way. That is why we are alone in suffering. All suffering makes us lonely. And that's why they always step out of the crowd, all alone, before Jesus, so that Jesus is then only theirs.
Or think of the tax collectors, the sinners, the fornicators. Oh, how lonely sin makes you! Sin has a terrible isolating power, an effect! And so they stand before the eyes of Jesus: Jesus exists wholly and only for them, as if he were the only lost soul in the world.
Or think of the people who were struggling with problems, religious questions. Nicodemus goes to Jesus secretly, at night, because there is no one who can understand him. Our inner problems also isolate us. My friends don't understand me, my parents have no idea what's going on inside me," says a sad young man, "and Jesus has a word of help for them. He confronts such a problematic person, him alone - he always has time and love for such a person. When the man with the stroke is brought by his friends to Jesus - to Jesus standing almost pinned down in a crowd - it is as if the two of them, the sick man and his divine physician, were there alone, even though the crowd and his friends were crowding around them. But then Jesus is there for the only one, as if there were no other person in the world besides him. But this one miserable, tormented fellow human being is worth being there almost just for him. This is the narrow gate, the intimate, intimate double with Jesus, through which all who would follow Him must pass. In this very narrow gate, where you meet only Him, the world shrinks. He alone stands before you, where no man or anything else can take you. Here you too must stand face to face with Jesus and talk to Him. As if there were only two of you in the world.
To get to this point, one has to forget this whole crowded temple. Many people are here by blending in with the crowd, blending into the congregation and simply drifting along with the crowd, just as one in the crowd does to himself what one in the crowd does to others. This is also how church worship becomes a wide road, where the individual is lost in the crowd, merging into the crowd. It is no more than that one is carried away by the atmosphere of a devout crowd. This is the wide road on which the multitude is addressed, which is heard by many at the same time. But if you, personally, are hit by a single word that you feel: it has spoken to me, it has pierced a festering sore in my life, or touched my secret sin; or you feel that now some divine balm is being dripped on my wound, on my secret sorrow, on my doubt - the other hundreds may go out of here with nothing having happened to them, but I have been struck to the heart by the word - then, only then, has Jesus himself spoken to you in these words! And when we are about to say the Lord's Prayer together, and we come to "forgive us our trespasses", you are not thinking of the iniquities of the whole world, but of your personal sin. You know exactly what it is that you must bring to the narrow gate before Jesus today. And then you can be sure that Jesus is here today just for you, and will proclaim a royal amnesty over you: 'Your sins are forgiven you'! (Mt 9,2b) It is like going through a narrow, narrow gate, where everyone can only pass through alone, and cannot avoid meeting the One who stands at the gate. It is not easy to go through that narrow gate and walk that narrow road. But it will lead you to life. It has always been the case that whoever has passed through that gate has had the horizon opened up to him, a new horizon opened up to him, a new man moving on to a new future. Blessings never before experienced have accompanied him on his journey, new tasks have made his life interesting and useful. He began to see the world, people, his family, his illness, his sorrow, his whole destiny, through new eyes.
In short and simply, it is a question of not trying to assert Christian moral ideals with an unconverted heart and an unregenerate life, because it is worthless. "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mk 8,34b), says Jesus. Only those who are willing to die will receive new life. Only the one who is willing to go through the narrow gate, to lay down everything and walk on the narrow way, will receive everything back as a gift, because he has found the One from Whose hand all things come: pleasant and unpleasant. People we need and who need us. Gifts and tasks. Joys and sorrows. We can be happy in the knowledge that it all truly comes from His hand, the hand that reaches out to us and blesses our lives as if we were the only ones in the world - and yet reaches across the oceans, holding the universe in His royal embrace!
Amen
Date: 27 June 1965.
Lesson
Mk 7,31-37