Someone in the crowd asks Jesus a question that sounds like idle theological curiosity. 23"Lord, will those who are saved be few?" It is the kind of question that can be debated endlessly from a safe intellectual distance, numbers and percentages and abstract categories. Jesus refuses to engage it on those terms. His reply turns the question on the asker: 24"Strive to enter through the narrow door." What matters is whether the person asking is striving to enter right now.
24"Many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able." That is a sobering warning on its own, and the scene Jesus paints next explains why the seeking fails. The master of the house rises and shuts the door, and only then do latecomers begin to knock. There was a window when the door stood open, and its closing marks the end of an opportunity with a deadline, if unstated. The knockers are not strangers. Their appeal assumes familiarity. 26"We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets." They had proximity to Jesus, ordinary contact, meals shared and teaching heard in their own streets. And the answer is devastating because that proximity turns out not to be the thing that mattered. 27"I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!"
This is the warning Jesus gave earlier about hearing the word without doing it, sharpened now into its final and irreversible form. Nearness to Jesus, even repeated and ordinary nearness, meals in his presence and teaching heard in familiar streets, was never itself the narrow door. Striving to enter it while it stands open is something else, and the two can be mistaken for each other right up until the door shuts.
Then a twist that would have unsettled his mostly Jewish audience. 28"You yourselves cast out" while they see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God. Natural descent from Abraham, the inheritance many in that crowd assumed guaranteed their place, offers no automatic entry. Meanwhile 29"people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God." That language comes almost straight from the Psalms, where God promises to gather his scattered, redeemed people in from east and west, north and south (Psalm 107:3). Jesus takes a promise Israel had long read as its own homecoming and hands it, on purpose, to a much wider guest list, Gentiles streaming in from every direction to sit at the table some of Israel's own children will find themselves locked out of.
30"Some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last." It is the reversal Mary sang before Jesus was born, the proud brought down and the lowly lifted (Luke 1:52), playing out here in its final form, assumed insiders finding themselves outside, and assumed outsiders seated at Abraham's own table.
Ask what you have been treating as the door when it was only nearness, a church you attend, a family you were born into, a habit of hearing. Then stop speculating about anyone else's odds, and strive to go through.
Prayer
Father, keep us from asking about the salvation of others while neglecting to strive, ourselves, toward the narrow door still open before us. Do not let familiarity with you, meals shared in your presence, and teaching heard in our own streets, become a substitute for the striving this door requires. Seat us, whatever direction we came from, at the same table as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, by your mercy and by no inheritance of ours. In Jesus' name, amen.