“Lord, will those who are saved be few?” The
question asked in the Gospel this Sunday is probably inevitable. The
minute you talk about salvation someone is going to ask who gets saved and who
doesn’t. And there have always been around Christians who will tell you
precisely who gets saved and who doesn’t.
But the question arises out anxiety and
calculation, when the proper Christian attitude towards salvation is
faith and hope.
Should we conclude from the Gospel that Jesus
himself taught on the Judgement Day the lost will greatly outnumber the saved?
Actually what Jesus effectively does, as he so often does, is refuse to answer
the question. He goes out of his way not to satisfy the curiosity of the
questioner. He says, on the one hand, "Strive to enter by the
narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able”. On
the other hand,” men will come from east and west, and from north and south,
and sit at table in the kingdom of God.”
The group that Jesus has in mind are those in
Israel who will not accept the inclusion of the gentiles in the chosen people,
the men who will come from east and west and from north and south and sit at
table with the patriarchs of Israel. So hard is this to take that they will
weep and gnash their teeth. The first will become last. Yet even being last is
not being without hope: for, as St. Paul reminds us, all Israel will be saved.
Pope Francis recently made the news once again:
“Pope Francis rocked some religious and atheist minds today when he declared
that everyone was redeemed through Jesus, including atheists.” In fact he was
only saying what St. Paul said:
“God desires all men to be saved and to come to
the knowledge of the truth. . . there is one mediator between God and man,
Jesus Christ who gave himself as a ransom for all . . . The grace of God has
appeared for the salvation of all men.”
Pope Francis was only saying what the Church has
always taught. The viewpoint that Christ did not die for all men was the view of John Calvin: Christ died not for
all men but only for the predestined few.
To say that Jesus redeemed the world is not to
say that everyone will be saved because there is a big difference between the
universal redemption in the Cross of the Jesus Christ and the acceptance of
that salvation. It is not to say that anyone can be saved apart from Jesus
Christ. Nor is it to say that folks get saved who do not want to be saved. What
it is to say is that atheists just like Christians are called to do the
good; they are held to the same standard as everyone else.
In essence, Jesus is telling the questioner: “Do
not worry about abstract questions like the exact number or percentage of
people who will end up being saved. Such
knowledge will not be revealed to you, and in any event would do you know good,
one way or the other. Your concern
should be for your own salvation,
because the path of salvation is not easy.”
It would be very surprising if he said anything
else because Jesus more than all of us knows the cost of human salvation: the
cross. For us it is not just a matter of saying one day “I accept Jesus Christ as
my Lord and Savior” because Jesus himself corrects sharply Peter after his confession:
‘you are on the side of men, not of God” We must take up our cross and follow
him and if you think that is easy then you have never tried it.
One of the reasons that people like to imagine
that everyone automatically gets saved is because that completely lets everyone
off the hook or maybe we should say off the cross.
Which is what the Gospel today is really all
about. We do not need to be brooding all the time about the prospects of our
own salvation, far less the salvation of others. Never mind what God has in
store for those outside the Church. We should develop a habit of mistrusting
the soft option. Our gift for self-deception will see to it that the more
attractive looks like the more-important. To do, always, the most difficult thing
that lies open to us—that is the path of heroic sanctity; a rugged short-cut
which attenuates and abbreviates the Narrow Way itself. But, if we cannot rise
to that, we can still beware of the soft option when a choice between two
courses is forced upon us. Here is an interval of leisure; here are two
rival duties clamoring to be fitted in; which of them has the preference?
Probably, though not certainly, the more distasteful.
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