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| Fr. Raymond |
Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 13:22-30.
"Sir, will there be only a few saved?" v. 30 ...
Sun 21 C 2013
“Sir, will there
be only a few saved?” Jesus’ answer to this awkward question more or less
amounted to: “That’s none of your business”.
We can presume
that the reason for this was that if the answer was ‘yes, only a very few will
be saved’ then we would all be very much discouraged and even perhaps
despairing, knowing that we could hardly call ourselves exceptionally
virtuous. On the other hand, if the
answer was ‘no, the vast majority of souls will be saved’ then we might become
presumptious and not bother trying to live a very good life since we could be
reasonably sure that we were in much the same boat as most people and therefore
sure of salvation.
But Jesus points
to ‘the narrow door’ and indicates that we must strive, we must try hard, to
enter there. Jesus sums it up in another
place where he says that ‘ the kingdom of God suffers violence and it is the
violent who conquer it’. The attitude to
the kingdom of heaven that Jesus wants us to adopt is not one of numbers; how
many will be saved? but one of striving; one of trying to love the Lord our God
with all our mind and heart and soul; one of longing and hope. Christian tradition depicts the virtue of Hope
as an anchor that the soul casts up into the clouds to catch a hold of heaven
for us so that we can haul ourselves up there by it.
The more we hope
for it the more surely do we attain it.
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