‘Get a life,’ people will say when their friends confess their ignorance of the latest tourist destination or the benefits of 5G. If we are in that miserable condition, we are probably overwhelmed with as much shame as it might be when somebody says to us: ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’ In our society it is indeed shameful to be out of the swim, blinkered, unacquainted with the latest that human ingenuity can offer.
This is not a hundred miles away from the prevailing view of quality of life. A worthwhile life, one worth saving, that is, is a full life, a life of awareness, of action, of adaptability. It is comical, to put it no worse, to be living in a nostalgic capsule, denied the benefits that research and technology have placed at our disposal. Not to accept this makes one an oddity.
So when we turn to the New Testament and find a word like ‘narrow’ used in a positive sense (Matthew 7.13,14), we find ourselves wondering. To be a Christian, are we required to live a life of restrictions? Do we have to regard large and beckoning activities – travelling, fashion, cuisine, play-acting for example – as no-go areas? Is the Devil behind these enticing offers?
We may well conclude from what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that this is indeed the case. We must restrict our enjoyments in case they make a take-over bid and become the be-all-and-end-all of our daily life. It may be called holiness by subtraction. And this has developed in the course of Christian history into a world-renouncing frame of mind which regards the secluded full-time practice of religion as the highest endeavour man is capable of. But we do not find that this narrow view of life was something that appealed to Jesus. He mixed freely with all kinds of people and took people as he found them.
Well then, what exactly did Jesus mean when he said that the gate to life is very narrow? He was certainly contrasting it with the gate to destruction, which, he said, is wide – and a lot of people go through that gate. We have to use our imagination here. And we are not going very far wrong if common sense tells us that our life is indeed narrowed by trivial, debilitating pursuits when there is a whole wide world to explore and enjoy.
When Jesus talked about a narrow gate, he used an expression that in our Greek New Testament (which is the nearest we can get to what Jesus said in Aramaic) is close to the word ‘squeeze’. Like ‘cleave’, this is a word with two connotations. Lovers squeeze. So do debt-collectors. Sometimes we are well advised to accept that to narrow our focus in life is to broaden the prospect. Who said it’s easy being a Christian?
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