As I know you know, there are different approaches to the study of the Scriptures. There are different textual approaches, historical, cultural, ethical interpretations. There are different translations of the bible to work from. And that’s something that we often forget. The words we read every Sunday in our worship are translated from the Greek and Hebrew – and translation is hard get right, especially when dealing with ancient texts written in languages that have changed significantly over the centuries.
The questions that arise out of our study of the Scripture are rich and interesting and I believe, it’s important to engage them. The questions themselves can be a boon to our spiritual lives and can deepen our understanding and can strengthen our faith.
But some folks would like us to not ask questions about the Scripture at all –- they’d like us to accept what it says, all of what it says, at face value, in its plainest sense, and believe it unequivocally and pattern our lives according to what it says.
The history of the church is full of examples of the excesses that come of this particular approach. One of my favorites has to do with the Anabaptists in the 16th century in what is now Germany. The Anabaptists are the predecessors of the Mennonites, and they were one of the more radical groups in the early days of the Reformation. One particularly radical sect of Anabaptists was seeking to follow every stricture they could find in the New Testament in ordering their common life. There is that passage in the Acts of the Apostles that describes how all the goods of the members of the early church were held in common and shared equally. Well, our radical Anabaptists friends decided that that should extend to wives as well, so they engaged in what they considered Biblically sanctioned wife-swapping! Let me be quick to add that, as far as I know, the Mennonites are not up to wife-swapping today. I’m pretty sure about that. But you get my point.
Actually, there are two points to be made here. One has to do with interpreting the scripture, and the other has to do with what happens when you leave the well-being of the church exclusively in the hands of the menfolk! Then you get all sorts of shenanigans and goings-on because, “It says it in the Bible!”Those mislead Anabaptists made the mistake of confusing descriptive texts in the Bible with prescriptive texts. Scripture scholars often look at passages in the Bible and try to discern whether they were meant to be prescriptive or descriptive. That is to say, is a particular passage or chapter or book of the Bible meant to describe what happened or what was believed to have happened -- or is it meant to prescribe certain behavior to those it was written for? And what about the intended audience? Should the Galatians have to do all that Paul tells the Corinthians to do? After all, he wrote separate letters to both communities. Were they even supposed to be reading each other’s mail? Should we be reading their mail? And what about those of us who read Scripture now? We live thousands of years after the Scriptures were written. Is everything in it applicable to our lives?
Our gospel reading today from Luke has been seen by some as descriptive. It talks about some being allowed into the kingdom of heaven, and others being shut out. It describes foreigners welcomed at the heavenly banquet while the locals go hungry. Some who have seen this passage as descriptive have interpreted it to say that Gentiles will be welcomed into heaven and that our ancestors in the faith, the Jews, will be shut out.
That’s a particularly ignominious and nasty road to go down. That kind of biblical interpretation has led to all sorts of Christian super-secessionism and Christian anti-Semitism. By their fruits you shall know them, and what I know of that kind of interpretation and the actions it has led to tell me that such is not the real meaning, the true teaching of Jesus.But if we look at the passage prescriptively, the meaning changes. And this is clearly a prescriptive passage. In it Jesus tells us to do something quite specific. Jesus says that we should all make an effort to ‘enter through the narrow door’. The outcome of the eschatological questions is up in the air. Those who seem to enjoy great privilege and prestige may find themselves bereft of those advantages and those with much less may find themselves with much, much more in the kingdom of God. In fact, the entire passage seems to tell us that there is a peril in thinking of ourselves or anyone else as being more favored or above others. What we should be more concerned with is striving to enter through the narrow door. But in this passage, Jesus doesn’t say specifically what it takes to get through that narrow door.
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Denton and I recently returned from a long drive that stretched almost the entire length of our country. And during our drive, I noticed a billboard along a highway in Alabama. It was huge, and stark, a white background with very large black letters; and it said, “Where will you spend..” and then in even larger letters, all capitals, it read, “Eternity”!
Clearly, for some folks, this is a chief concern. Lots of preaching and lots of proselytizing goes into who will be in heaven and who will not, lots of Biblical interpretation -- some of it scurrilous – is built around this question, as we have seen. But it’s not just a concern of our time and place, it was a concern in Jesus’ day as well. It is the chief concern for the questioner in our gospel reading today. Jesus’ admonition to “strive to enter through the narrow door” is given in response to someone who asks, “Lord, will only a few be saved?”
But when I saw that billboard along the side of the highway, it occurred to me that for many the question is not where will they spend eternity, but rather where will they spend the night. For the homeless in our city, this is a more pressing question. For the survivors of the floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti, where will they spend tonight is a more pressing, more immediate matter, than where they will spend eternity.
Should we really be so preoccupied with whether seats are reserved for us at the heavenly banquet in eternity when so many people, some far away, and others close at
Maybe the narrow door is not just the door to heaven, but it is the door to our hearts, the door to our consciences. Maybe it’s the door to our churches and our institutions, the door to our country. Maybe it’s the door that leads to a new home for a homeless family, or the door to college through which the first generation of an immigrant family passes. Maybe it’s the door to the marriage license bureau, maybe it’s the door to the real estate that abuts the site of the World Trade Center.
And maybe we make the narrow door to heaven a little wider for ourselves when we make those other doors wider – when we make the narrow doors to equal opportunity, the narrow doors to justice, the narrow doors to equality, the narrow doors to healthcare, a bit wider.Maybe we make the narrow door that leads to the heavenly banquet a bit wider when we make sure that the narrow door to our Undercroft where Mary Cooper distributes our Brown Bag lunches each day is never closed to those who so desperately need what we offer there.
Who’s on the other side of the narrow door to heaven is a mystery, one that is known only to God. It’s who is having the doors of this world slammed in their faces that should be our concern as Christians. I think when we do what we can to open and to widen those doors in our nation, in our world, in our own time, then we’ll find the door to eternity isn’t quite so narrow after all. Amen+
(c) The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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