The Narrow Gate

At the end of his great sermon the Lord sets before us a map of two roads, and there are only two. There is a wide gate opening onto a broad way, and the road is crowded, for many there be which go in thereat, and it leads to destruction. And there is a strait gate opening onto a narrow way, and the road is nearly empty, for few there be that find it, and it leads to life. That is the whole geography of the soul’s journey as the Lord draws it. Two gates, two ways, two crowds, two ends. And he does not leave us to wander between them undecided. Enter ye in, he commands, at the strait gate.

We should be clear about the word, for it is easily misheard. The gate is not merely straight, as a line is straight. It is strait, which is to say constricted, tight, pressed narrow, the same word from which we get the straits between two lands where the sea is squeezed to a channel. It is a gate you cannot stroll through carrying everything you own. It is low and tight, and to pass it a man must stoop, and must leave outside whatever will not fit. This is the first thing the narrow gate asks of us, that we come to it stripped, for it will not admit us and our baggage both.

THE COST OF THE GATE

What must be left at the gate is precisely what we are least willing to set down. The load of our self-importance will not fit through. The bundle of possessions we have made our security will not fit. The reputation we guard, the sins we have grown fond of, the whole heavy pack of a life lived for itself, none of it passes the strait gate. A man once came to Jesus with much of this, a good and earnest man who had kept the commandments from his youth, and he could not enter, because he had great possessions and would not lay them down at the gate. It is easier, the Lord said watching him go, for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Not because wealth is uniquely wicked, but because it is heavy, and the gate is narrow, and we will not let go.

And the gate is not drifted through. One does not wander onto the narrow way by accident, as one so easily wanders onto the broad. Strive to enter in at the strait gate, the Lord said on another day, and the word he chose means to agonize, to struggle as in a contest, to strain every nerve. The broad way requires nothing. You need only follow the crowd and drift with the current of your own desires, and it will carry you along without effort. The narrow gate must be striven for, entered against the current, chosen again and again over the easier road. Everything in us and around us leans toward the broad way. Only a deliberate, straining choice takes the strait one.

NARROW IS NOT GRIM

Yet we must not let the word narrow deceive us into thinking the way is joyless, for it leads to life, and the broad way, for all its ease and company, leads to destruction. Narrow does not mean miserable. It means undivided. It means single, focused, the one road held to when a thousand others branch off. Think of a river. What gives a river its power is not the breadth of its banks but their narrowness. Spread a river wide and it becomes a sluggish marsh, going nowhere. Press it into a narrow channel and it runs deep and strong and reaches the sea. The narrow way is the channeled life, the life not dissipated across every desire but pressed into one direction, and it is not the poorer for the pressing. It is the stronger, and it arrives.

The freedom of the broad way is a false freedom, and this is the great lie of it. It looks like liberty, the open gate, the room to carry everything, the crowd all going the same easy direction. But a road is not good because it is wide, and a way is not to be trusted because it is easy. The only question that finally matters about any road is where it ends, and the broad and pleasant way ends in destruction, all its breadth and ease notwithstanding. The narrow way is harder every step, and it ends in life. A wise traveler does not choose his road by the comfort of the first mile.

FEW THERE BE

And then the Lord says a thing that ought to sober every one of us. Few there be that find it. Not many. Few. This is no boast for a spiritual elite to preen over, for the moment it becomes a boast it has been misheard. It is a warning against the deep human instinct to measure our road by the number of feet upon it, to assume that where the crowd goes must be safe, that so many cannot be wrong. But the crowd is on the broad way. The majority is not the map. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil, the old law had said, and the principle stands over this whole choice. Do not take your bearings from how many walk beside you. The solitary way has always been, by its very nature, the less traveled one, and the one who would keep it must make his peace early with walking where few walk.

THE GATE IS A PERSON

We have spoken of the gate as if it were only a hard requirement, and so it is, but we must not stop there, for the Lord who told us to enter the strait gate said elsewhere a thing that transfigures the whole picture. I am the door, he said. By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved. The narrow gate is not finally a set of conditions to be met but a Person to be entered by. It is strait because he is the only way, one door and not many, and it is narrow because it is the shape of him, of his humility, his poverty, his cross. To enter the strait gate is to go in by Christ, and by no other, and this is why it will admit no baggage, for it admits us only as we come to him, stripped and empty-handed and clinging to him alone.

This turns the whole difficulty into good news. The narrow way is hard, but we are not asked to hack it out by ourselves or to squeeze through by our own strength. We are asked to enter by a door that stands open, to come to a Person who receives all who come. Him that cometh to me, he said, I will in no wise cast out. The gate is strait, but it is not shut. It is narrow, but it is not barred. The striving the Lord commands is not the striving to force an unwilling entrance, but the striving to let go of everything that will not fit, so that we may come to the open door as we must come, with nothing in our hands but need.

THE ONE WHO WALKED IT FIRST

And we do not walk the narrow way after a Lord who only pointed to it from the broad. He walked it himself, first and to the end. His whole life was the strait gate, the emptying, the poverty, the setting of his face toward Jerusalem when every voice urged the easier road. He chose the narrow way in the wilderness against the tempter, and in the garden against his own dread, and on the way to the cross against the pleading of his friends, and he did not once turn aside to the broad. The road we are called to walk is wet with his own footprints. There is no stretch of its hardness he has not gone before us and made passable.

Let this steady you when the way is steep and the walkers few. You are not the first down this road, nor are you alone on it, for though few find it, those few are the whole company of the faithful of every age, the prophets and apostles and martyrs and quiet unknown saints who chose the narrow way before you and are gathered now at its end. We are compassed about, the Scripture says, with so great a cloud of witnesses. The broad way has the crowd, but the narrow way has the communion of all who ever loved God, and at its head the Lord himself, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross.

So do not be dismayed that the gate is strait, or the way narrow, or the company thin. These are the marks of the right road, not the wrong one. Count the wide way’s crowds and comforts as nothing against the end they run to. Fix your eyes on the Lord who is himself the door and himself the way, who walked it first and waits at its end, and enter in by him, stripped of all that will not pass, and keep the narrow way with joy.

So enter in. Come to the gate stripped of what will not fit, and be willing to leave it there, the possessions, the reputation, the fond sins, the heavy self, counting them, as Paul learned to count them, but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ. Lay aside every weight, and choose the narrow way not once but at every fork, striving to enter, unmoved by the breadth of the popular road or the thinness of the company on your own. The gate is tight and the way is hard and the walkers are few, but the Lord who drew this map walked the narrow way before you, all the way to a cross, and it is the only road that comes out into life. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and blessed, past all the crowded ease of the broad way, are the few that find it.