A person burdened with the baggage of salvation poses a question to Jesus, “Will only a few people be saved?” Jesus is free of the salvation burden. It forces on people a false identity as sinners who must be saved from their condition. Jesus knows each person’s saintliness, their godliness. He knows all of the good of which they are capable. Jesus thus shifts the focus of the conversation by responding, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” Jesus’ metaphor is freeing, especially when juxtaposed with the burdensome theology of salvation.
The theology of salvation weighs humanity down with a particularly angry deity. It then adds his righteous judgments. This means the addition of an entire system of justice bent on condemnation. It therefore adds hell – on earth and in a hereafter. Added as well is a victim/savior figure to be sacrificed – requiring the addition of sanctified weapons, suffering, and death. Salvation is weighty indeed; a truly debilitating burden. We are a bulked up mass barely able to enter through the widest of gates. Jesus frees us from it all. His way unburdens humanity. Meister Eckhart said it well, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.” Our life can be a process of unburdening ourselves from the theology of military justice that enslaves us. We can be unburdened of an institutional christianity that promotes it. We can subtract from our lives the image of an angry god. We can subtract this deity’s judgments. We can be unburdened of ideologies of justice. We can remove condemnation and hell from our concerns. We need no longer be weighted down with sanctified weapons, suffering, and death. We are thus unencumbered of the weight of military religiosity that has clothed us as a pall. In a sense, we stand naked. We are purely ourselves, stripped of the baggage that would prevent us from entering through the narrow gate.
Will we nurture in prayer, conscience, and experience such freedom, the beauty of who we are in our naked essence? We can encounter in our essence the soul of all that is divine. We can see ourselves in the eyes and the heart of the mystic.
Prayer: Spirit of Freedom, may we strive for nakedness in our beautiful souls.
Question: How am I changing direction from the broad gate of religiosity to the narrow gate of mysticism?
August 21, 2016 Gospel Luke 13:22-30 Twenty First Sunday in Ordinary Time