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.” (Luke 13.22-24)
In professional baseball, there is a term used by coaches when speaking of certain young recruits. The term is “morning-glory syndrome,” a reference to the flower that unfolds into full bloom in the early morning. Then, after an hour or so, it starts to fade, closing up for the rest of the day. So it is, coaches say, with some recruits who perform in stellar ways in spring training. However, once the season begins and they are put to the test of a lengthy time on the field, they begin to wilt like a morning-glory flower. By June, they’re wiped out and their batting average drops. By July, they’re done for and released from the team.
The evangelist Luke tells us today that Rabbi Jesus was questioned on one occasion about the number who would be saved. “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” the questioner asks the Rabbi. When answering, Rabbi Jesus gives no definite number, but also makes clear that many won’t have what it takes to reach the goal. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” he tells his listeners, “for many will attempt to enter, but will not be strong enough.”
If it sounds like the Rabbi is speaking of the morning glory syndrome, he probably is because baseball and discipleship are not all that different when it comes to the stamina that is needed to persist and to win in the end. Staying in the game takes strength. It’s why not everybody makes it to the big league and it’s why not everybody makes a good disciple. Bottom line–many aren’t strong enough.
As conveyed to us by the evangelist, Rabbi Jesus uses a singular word that gives emphasis to the demands of discipleship. The word is strive. Strive to enter through the narrow gate. Our own overuse or misuse of the word belies its true import, often substituting the word strive for seek or try. But, the word conveys much more than a mere effort. It connotes a herculean effort.
In Greek, the meaning is much clearer, the Greek word agonizesthe. Our English word agony comes from the same root, which leaves little doubt, then, about the intensity contained in the word strive. To strive means to struggle or to fight vigorously. It is not a coach slapping a player on the back and saying to him as he runs onto the field, “Give it a shot!” More likely, it is like a coach saying, “The only way I want to see you come off that field is on a stretcher!”
We are not mistaken to find in the word a sports analogy. Saint Paul, writing years before Luke, uses the same word several times to describe the lengths to which a disciple of Rabbi Jesus must go and, in each instance, it carries overtones of an athletic competition. For example, he tells the Greeks in Corinth–the Greeks, as we know, being originators of the Olympics–“Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.”
In the letters to Timothy, the word appears on at least three occasions, once in the first letter and twice in the second letter. “That is why we labor and strive,” Paul writes in his first letter, his use of the word labor along with the word strive underscoring the intense work that is part and parcel of being a follower of Rabbi Jesus. In his second letter, he uses the word again, saying, “Fight the good fight of the faith,” the word now used in the context of a fist fight or a boxing match. Later, he says to Timothy and the other disciples, “Train yourselves,” again using the word to connote an athlete preparing for competition.
If we are to understand what it requires of us to follow Rabbi Jesus and his way in this world, then we must keep this image in front of us, reminding ourselves that becoming a disciple is like an athlete training for the Olympics. To be clear, this is not t-ball. This is the major leagues, if not the Olympics. If, at the end, every bone in our body doesn’t ache, then we haven’t really strived for the gold.
Years ago at the Montreal Olympics, a young gymnast from Japan, Shun Fujimoto, was competing as part of his country’s gymnast team. Somehow, during floor exercises, he broke his right knee. Everyone knew he would have to withdraw from the competition. But everyone did not know that Fujimoto understood the meaning of the word strive.
The next day, he competed in his strongest event, the rings. His routine was excellent, but the critical point remained–the dismount. When the moment came, Fujimoto showed no hesitation. He ended with a twisting, triple somersault. As he landed with a tremendous impact on his broken knee, there was a moment of stunned silence in the stadium. Then came a thunderous applause as he stood straight on the ground, not buckling, not bending.
Later, when queried by reporters about that moment, he answered, “The pain shot through me like a knife. It brought tears to my eyes. But now I have a gold medal and the pain is gone.” Ponder, if we can, the great effort it took for him, not only to compete, but to fight impossible odds. But he did it. “Strive,” Rabbi Jesus said, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”
We see, then, that the narrow gate that the Rabbi speaks of is our discipleship. It is our efforts to follow in his footsteps. A narrow door, as Matthew says in his gospel or a narrow gate as Luke says here–both images conveying a challenge–is a space that few can pass through, much like some of the narrow spaces intentionally constructed in the pyramids to deter thieves and scavengers, but granting access to the truly fearless, the truly committed who were willing to risk life and limb to make their way to the interior chambers.
It is not as if the Rabbi doesn’t know what he is asking of us. He knows full well because he is asking the same of himself. Luke leaves no doubt as to that point. Recall that the passage begins with Luke telling us, “Jesus passed through towns and villages, teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.” That is the place of the final event, where all his training will be put to the ultimate test.
In Jerusalem he will be beaten, mocked, and forced to carry a cross on his back, three times stumbling under its weight before he is nailed naked to it. But he continues up the hill, committed to this contest between good and evil until his last breath, the final indignity done to his dead body by a soldier who stabs a spear into his side.
Yes, the Rabbi knows what it means to have to give everything, to fight ferociously for a cause, to stay on the path however rough the road and however high the climb. He sees Jerusalem in the distance and he walks ahead, not running away, not looking for an easy out, but fighting the good fight until he has spent every last drop of strength he has, blood and water flowing from the knife wound in his side, forming puddles at the foot of the cross.
We may be inclined to ask why so much was required of Rabbi Jesus and why, accordingly, so much is asked of us. The answer is simple. In this world, there is a continuous contest between good and evil, and, truth be told, evil often seems to have the bases loaded. We cannot expect to prevail over evil if we are lukewarm, half-hearted, or weak-kneed.
It’s plain to see that evil has a foothold in this world and it will not be uprooted until and unless we fight it as ferociously as a gladiator in the coliseum. It is not a wily cat that we can tame with tuna treats and a jeweled collar. The fact that evil continues to be such a malignant force in this world says as much about our weak efforts to do good as it does about the strength of our foe.
Hence, the radical call that Rabbi Jesus makes to his followers, that we train as athletes do for the race, striving for the gold, refusing to take second in this fight against evil. When we finally accept the seriousness of purpose that the Galilean asks of us, then the world will be a very different place, a place where, as he often said, “the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Back when Michael Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls, he faced off against the Utah Jazz in a game that is still remembered. Already 34-years-old at the time, suffering from a debilitating viral infection that night, he stayed on the floor to bring the Bulls from 16 points down to the lead. His teammate, Scottie Pippen, had to literally hold the basketball star up at the end of the game. Describing how weak Jordan was before the game, Pippen said, “I didn’t even think he was going to be able to put his uniform on. But he just made big shot after big shot.”
How did he do it? Sports commentators said it was Jordan’s utter refusal to quit, his willingness to let his team climb onto his weakened shoulders, and his steel-will to perform regardless of sickness or exhaustion. In that moment, Jordan was the epitome of the athlete that strives, someone who demands more of himself, gives more of himself, and doesn’t stop until the lights go dim on the scoreboard.
Understanding our discipleship in much the same as an athlete competing in the arena, and probably finding ourselves far less the athletic contender that Jordan was, then we have to accept it is time for us to condition ourselves to become stronger, better, and more able to meet the challenges that this world throws at us. That conditioning calls for a daily regimen in the gym of doing good, lifting heavier and heavier weights until we can power lift, pushing ourselves beyond our levels of comfort, striving to become the best disciple we can be.
And should we flag or falter, then we can find motivation to push on and to prevail in the words that Rabbi Jesus gives us today. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.” Our hope–with daily conditioning–is that we will be strong enough.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 