Sunday, August 21, 2016

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle C

Luke 13:22-30
When I was reading today's gospel, I remembered a novel I read many years ago. It was called “Damn Yankees.” It was made into a movie and a broadway musical, both of which were great in their own right. But the book has a little darkness in it. Basically, the hero is a middle-aged fan of the Washington Senators who longs for them to win a pennant. He sells his soul in exchange for becoming an unbeatable baseball player. He did build in an escape clause, though, and when he tries to take advantage of it, the devil sends a beautiful woman to seduce him – but she fails. It turns out that her beauty is the result of her own bargain with the devil. To punish her, the devil removes her beauty and of course she is still damned. I don't remember what the hero had on the devil, but he apparently had one demand he can make. He offers to make the devil release the woman from her bargain. She instead asks that her beauty be restored. If you saw the movie or the musical, it didn't end like that; but I remember the book and how it ended and it deeply disturbed me.
I think Jesus is talking about something like this today. Someone asks him if only a few will be saved. That would seem to be an easy question to answer: yes or no. But Jesus gives a little sermon, beginning with “strive to enter through the narrow gate”. Many will try to enter but not be able to. And when they plead with the owner to open up, he will say he does not know them.
Hell, our church teaches, is a reality. There are a lot of people who have convinced themselves that there is no hell and they give some very good arguments. They say, how could a merciful God send any of his children into an eternity of punishment? Is God some kind of sadist? Where's the mercy? And our image of hell comes from scripture as well; Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus and we hear about fire. And he implies fire in a few other places. But actually, most of the time Jesus uses different analogies for hell. He talks about Gehenna, which everyone who heard him knew referred to a place where everyone threw their garbage. He often talks about being locked out of a party – remember the five foolish virgins, or the king who threw someone out of a banquet because he wasn't wearing a wedding garment? And of course, the gospel we've just heard makes no mention of fire, just being excluded, kicked out.
And it all starts with “strive to enter through the narrow gate”. What on earth is Jesus talking about? In Jesus' time larger cities had walls around them. Of course you could get in through the main gates if someone opened them. But many cities had passage ways about as wide as a person moving sideways. You could squeeze through but you couldn't take anything with you. If you were an enemy, you would not be able to bring weapons in with you; and if you were an army, it wouldn't matter if you had to enter the city one person at a time without weapons. So in order to get in you had to leave everything behind. If you wanted to bring in stuff you had to have someone open the main entrance.
That's kind of what hell is all about. God says, “Come on in, my child. But you have to leave all that stuff outside.” What stuff is that? It has to do with the so called seven deadly sins – pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. Now those aren't the sins as such; they are the roots of the sins, or the baggage, that we will have to let go of if we are to squeeze through the narrow gate.
We read about some of those saints who wore hair shirts, or rolled in thorn bushes or fasted for weeks on end, and we are usually repulsed by this. But they had a point. They were working on detachment, trying to separate themselves from the baggage that might keep them from entering through the narrow gate. Saint Francis saw this; he gave up his inheritance, even the clothes on his back to follow Christ. And we see that in so many other saints. And that is why we say martyrs go straight to heaven; they willingly give everything up, their very lives, for the sake of Christ.
CS Lewis envisioned an afterlife in which people found themselves living in a small house in a featureless plain. They had everything they needed. Eventually some would get restless, and get on a bus that took them to the end of the line, where they could climb a steep mountain on the top of which was a cross – just a big, dark cross. They could also enter a cave where they heard music and laughter. Needless to say most went down there. Only a few began the climb to the top of the mountain, which implied leaving everything behind.
Most of us mistakenly think of God as a great king who demands justice rather than a merciful father who wants us to give us everything. But God's justice has been taken care of by Jesus. Our only problem is the baggage we can't let go of.
The story from Damn Yankees made a real impression on me because I couldn't conceive of a person who would prefer physical beauty in this world to eternal happiness in the next. But I was pretty young then. Since then I've met a lot of people who would have an extremely difficult time letting go of their baggage. I know a lady who went into a profound depression when her cat died. I've met a man who almost divorced his wife because she threw out his favorite easy chair. And these all sound ridiculous, I know. But what is your baggage?
The Church has a wonderful tool to help us identify our baggage and do something about it. It's called Confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. When we honestly review our lives, we can see where we don't quite hit the mark, and we can work back from there and identify the “deadly sin” at the root of our problem. Maybe it's pride; maybe it's sloth or laziness; maybe it's gluttony of some sort. By asking us to review our lives every now and then, the Church tries to help us identify those things to which we are so attached that they pose a danger to our soul. We can always be forgiven, but if we know why we commit a certain sin over and over again, we can begin to work on the root. If we are gluttons – for pleasure, food, drink – whatever – we can fast. If we are lazy, we can get up every morning and accomplish everything on our list; if we are envious of our neighbor, we can find a way to rejoice in his good fortune.
Strive to enter through the narrow gate; leave your baggage outside. It is a lot easier now than it will be in the next life.