"For God's sake, forget the house and take the helicopter!"

Today’s gospel troubles me. And that’s not a bad thing, even if it still troubling, because I often need to be frightened into seeing life the way it really is. Maybe the same is true for you.

I’m troubled by the fact that not everyone is going to be saved. I am troubled by the fact that Herod wants to kill Jesus. I am troubled by the fact that Jerusalem will choose to keep God’s house for itself and reject and kill Jesus, the owner’s Son. I would like for life to be different. I would like for the world to be a nicer, safer place. Today’s gospel is a sober reminder that this is simply not the case. There are people who do not want to be saved or who see no reason to be rescued. There are people who are prepared to do whatever it takes to secure their place in the world, even murdering the very one through whom this world and everything and everyone in it was made.

The joke is told of the man who woke up one day to find that the first floor of his house was engulfed in a flash flood. He heard a man calling to him upstairs in his bedroom from a hook and ladder truck outside, offering to rescue him by extending his ladder up to his window. “No, that’s all right. God will save me.” An hour later, the flood has risen to the point that the man had to crawl out of his attic onto his roof. Just about that time a neighbor came by in his small fishing boat and offered him a ride to higher ground. “No thanks,” he replied. “God will save me.” An hour later the flood had risen so high that the man was now at the very top of the roof, surrounded by swift and treacherous waters. A helicopter pilot spotted him and, hovering overhead, called to him, offering to drop a rope ladder and rescue him. “No thanks,” he responded for the third time. “God will save me.” After the man drowned and went to heaven, he was angry with God. “Where were you when I needed you?! I thought you loved me. I had faith in you. How could you let me down?” And God replied, “I sent you a fire engine, a fishing boat and a helicopter. What more could I have done?”

If I understand the gospel this morning, Jesus may not only allow someone to drown if they refuse his help, but his Father will also get up and shut the door on those who reject his offer of salvation or who don’t think they need to be saved.

One of the most haunting endings I have ever watched in a film was the one entitled The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift. It is the story of a very shy young woman, played by Olivia de Havilland, who will one day inherit her father’s fortune. Montgomery Clift, a selfish and charming young man, meets her at a dance and begins to court her. Her father suspects that he is only interested in his daughter’s future wealth, and not in her, or her love for him. He even threatens to disinherit her if she is foolish enough to elope with him. When the young man learns of her possible disinheritance, he fails to show up for their elopement. Olivia is devastated and heart-broken. Her father dies a few months later, leaving her his entire estate. Several years later Montgomery Clift shows up again without a penny to his name, back from an adventure overseas in America and eager to renew their courtship. He explains that he had failed to show up the first time because he didn’t want her to suffer the loss of her inheritance, that his motives were actually unselfish, and not selfish as she had feared, an explanation he could have shared with her from the moment he learned of her father’s threat, a burden their love could have born together. But she doesn’t say anything. She acts as if she believes his excuse and encourages him to go and pack up his things so that they can elope that very night, but when he returns and knocks at her door, she calmly instructs the maid to bolt the door and turn out the lights as she ascends the stairs to her bedroom, with Montgomery Clift all the while continuing to knock and knock and knock, ever more desperately, pleading with her to open the door and let him in just one more time.

We see in that movie that her love is not to be trifled with, that at some point it becomes clear that the one to whom she had extended her love was, in fact, incapable of love.

That’s what makes today’s gospel so troubling: to recognize that there will be, in the end, those who are incapable of responding to God’s love in Christ. They will still think that Jesus dined in their homes and taught in their streets. They will never understand that he wasn’t just paying them a social visit. It will never dawn on them, even when the door is finally shut, that their home and their streets and their town were enemy-occupied territory that he had been sent by God to liberate. They’ll never see the point of his healings or his exorcisms as signs that the waters were rising and that he was offering everyone a ladder, a boat or a helicopter. They never thought God would ever abandon his residence in Jerusalem, that as long as they controlled his house, they could somehow control God, could force God to support and sustain them in their role as his lawful agents and representatives.

For those of us who do appreciate what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, we at least have some sense that his love is of infinite value, that it is everything, that whatever we might have to suffer in order to secure it is worth it, that the only thing we have to dread is the loss of the one who loves us and whose love has rescued us from the sin and death which are so much a part of this world and which we have contributed to ourselves.

Thomas Keating understands the narrow door, in the context of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and to his sacrificial death, to be his teaching and example. Jesus is teaching us that it is not enough to call oneself a Christian but actually to follow Jesus that counts. As Keating understands it, the basic teaching of Jesus is the unconditional acceptance of everyone. Although such a practice is extremely demanding, everyone has the capacity to do it because only two things are required – suffering and love. Everyone can suffer and everyone can love. This is what Jesus has done for you and me, accepting us even when we were rejecting his love.

As Jesus explains it to us, there will be some, tragically, who will choose not to make room for others in their lives, and all of us, even those who recognize that suffering and loving are the ways in which we make it possible to relate to more and more of our neighbors, thereby entering more fully into the kingdom of God, nonetheless also recognize that we have just begun, and that our striving to be more Christ-like will never end in this life. There will always be those who challenge and test our love in one way or another, but it is that very test which, following the example of our Lord and Savior, makes it possible for us to let go of whatever in our thoughts or words or actions that may be getting in the way of following Jesus and getting through that narrow door, trusting that so much more is waiting for us on the other side than we will ever have to surrender on this side.

Closing the door is God’s way of protecting the celebration that is going on on the other side of the narrow door. While God may patiently tolerate those in this world and in this life whose selfishness has the effect of hurting or even ruining life for the rest of us who are beginning to recognize our need to be rescued from our own selfishness as only Jesus can do it, God in his mercy will not let anyone disrupt the celebration of his love forever. In the end, it’s his party, and we are his guests, rescued by his Son for no other reason than his grace toward us, unearned and undeserved, called to be his children, to be gathered finally, no matter what the leaders in Jerusalem or any other worldly power may do, under the shadow of his wings.

May God give us the grace as we make our way toward Holy Week and Easter to grow in our capacity to love others as he has loved us, and in so doing, catch a glimpse of that abundant life that awaits us through that narrow door. AMEN.