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Gospel: Luke 13: 22-30

Jesus passed through towns and villages,
teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him,
“Lord, will only a few people be saved?”
He answered them, 
“Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter
but will not be strong enough.
After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door,
then will you stand outside knocking and saying,
‘Lord, open the door for us.’
He will say to you in reply,
‘I do not know where you are from.’
And you will say,
‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’
Then he will say to you,
‘I do not know where you are from.
Depart from me, all you evildoers!’
And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth
when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God
and you yourselves cast out.
And people will come from the east and the west
and from the north and the south
and will recline at table in the Kingdom of God.
For behold, some are last who will be first,
and some are first who will be last.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

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“Lord, will only a few people be saved?” an anonymous person asks Jesus in today’s Gospel.

The Lord does not respond with a precise number or percentage. 

If he said, “Only 5% of humanity will be saved,” then we’d all be sweating! But if he said, 99%, then we’d be shouting for joy. We’d bet our odds, quickly presuming that the warlords, criminals, and evildoers in this world will be the 1% left behind.

But we simply don’t know.

“Strive to enter through the narrow gate” Jesus says. This verb “strive,” means to, “struggle; fight vigorously.”

Think of heaven’s gate as narrowly cracked, requiring force or momentum for us to squeeze through. 

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This does not mean that anyone will be excluded.

But think about heaven’s gate in terms of airport security. Although millions of people pass through our airports each year, each passenger is screened individually. If someone is not deemed a threat, then that person is allowed to pass through.

Similarly, every soul is “screened” by God – analyzed, purified, washed clean – before being allowed to enter into eternal life. 

This is what makes the gate narrow: individual responsibility.

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In what ways am I striving for eternal life? What gives me momentum? What slows me down?

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“Lord, will only a few people be saved?” an anonymous voice asks.

No, Christ died for all.

Thus, there’s a better question to be asked: “Grateful for what God has done, in what ways am I striving for eternal life?”

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Image credits: (1) Sound Cloud (2) Simply Catholic (3) Artza Box

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Gospel: Luke 6: 12-16

Jesus went up to the mountain to pray,
and he spent the night in prayer to God.
When day came, he called his disciples to himself,
and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles:
Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew,
James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew,
Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus,
Simon who was called a Zealot,
and Judas the son of James,
and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

The Gospel of the Lord.

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Immediately before electing the Twelve Apostles, Jesus spent the entire night in prayer to his Father. I don’t imagine it took very long for the Lord to know who his Father had chosen; I can recite all of the Apostles’ names in less than a minute.

So, why did Jesus have to pray all night about it?

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I wonder if he struggled to accept that these were the men his Father wanted. 

Peter, the one who will sink into the Sea of Galilee; the one who will try to stop Jesus from entering Jerusalem; the one who will deny Jesus three times before abandoning him at the cross; the same one who will be entrusted with the keys to the kingdom.

Simon and Jude, whose feast day we celebrate today. Like Peter, they will abandon the Lord in his hour of greatest need. And well before that, they’ll will struggle with their faith, argue over who is the “greatest,” and fail to understand the paradoxes of Christ’s teachings. 

None of the Twelve are educated; none are wealthy, influential, or scholars of their religion. Many will struggle to get along.

And, of course, there’s Judas Iscariot, who will help to bring Christ’s life and ministry to a bloody end. 

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No wonder it took Jesus all night to pray – and, perhaps, to accept – what his Father wanted. But this will not be the last time he struggles in his prayer.

In Gethsemane, Jesus will plead with his Father again, “Let this cup pass from me.”

But his prayer ends with, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” 

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Sometimes we all struggle to understand or accept God’s will for our lives. (Some may also feel this way about our Church as our Archdiocese undergoes the restructuring called for in We Are His Witnesses). 

But Christ shows us that long periods spent in prayer strengthen us, lead us to acceptance, and fill us with peace.

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Image credits: (1) Learn Relgions (2) Drive Thur History (3) Catholic Virginian

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Gospel: Luke 13: 10-17

Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath.
And a woman was there who for eighteen years
had been crippled by a spirit;
she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect.
When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said,
“Woman, you are set free of your infirmity.”
He laid his hands on her,
and she at once stood up straight and glorified God.
But the leader of the synagogue,
indignant that Jesus had cured on the sabbath,
said to the crowd in reply,
“There are six days when work should be done.
Come on those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day.”
The Lord said to him in reply, “Hypocrites!
Does not each one of you on the sabbath
untie his ox or his ass from the manger
and lead it out for watering?
This daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now,
ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day
from this bondage?”
When he said this, all his adversaries were humiliated;
and the whole crowd rejoiced at all the splendid deeds done by him.

The Gospel of the Lord.

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This is the last time we see Jesus in a synagogue. He knows he has captured the ire of the religious authorities. They are now starting to plot his death. Breaking the Sabbath by healing a crippled woman only adds fuel to the fire.

As Christians – or simply people of good will – we can imagine the pain this woman endured. For 18 years, some 6,500 days of her life, she was unable to straighten her bent body.

The curvature of her spine produced tight knots in her shoulders and sharp pain in her neck, making simple tasks like getting dressed or looking up to see who’s in front of her torturous. 

No wonder Christ was moved with compassion.

I’m sure the leader of the synagogue also felt bad for this woman, but there was something he valued more than her health: sticking to the rules. For Jews, no work – not even a work of compassion – was permitted on the Sabbath.

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Jesus heals her intentionally on this sacred day of rest in order to teach his people a lesson. There are times when the laws that define our lives, even religious ones, need to be stretched, re-interpreted, or updated.

There is no rule higher than charity. If we find our neighbor hunched over, weighed down by the pressures of life, then we are obligated to help them. Suffering should never last a second longer than necessary. 

Yet how much human misery continues in our world because people are either blind, indifferent, or paralyzed by politics, culture, civic, even religious institutions?

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Beneath it all, we are human. 

We share the common dignity of being made in God’s image and likeness. May we do something to reflect this truth today.

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Image credits: (1) Pointing the Way by Arrow (2) Bent Woman, Milos Todorovic (3) Facebook