“Jesus went on his way through towns and villages teaching and journeying towards Jerusalem.” Journey describes a lot of things in our lives. The short journeys to the shops, to work or school; the longer journeys for things like business or holidays or family reunions; and then there are the metaphorical journeys of faith and love, of growth to maturity as well as the journey through life and through death itself. The journey of Jesus to Jerusalem began when He left the Father’s side to become man. Its purpose was to redeem mankind from being lost on its journey on this earth and set it on the return journey through Jesus to the Father. The means of redemption was the Cross on which He was crucified and died just outside Jerusalem, itself the means to the final journey of Resurrection and Ascension.

The journey of any human being who sincerely wants to receive the gift of redemption must, in the end, come to and through the Crucified Christ. He Himself is the narrow door through whom we must pass to glory. As we approach Him from afar, we must let Him form, reform and conform us to the shape of His crucified love. This is the aim of all the sacraments, of the Gospel and of the whole Christian life. We let Him do that by freely embracing the grace of conversion and repentance, throwing off anything which weighs us down or misshapes our hearts and souls, especially the poison of sin. For His part, He pours out on us the Holy Spirit of His dying breath to empower us to respond to the Gospel with courage and commitment every single day of our lives. The door to perdition is wide and spacious and appeals to our self-will and selfishness which loathe the Gospel of the Cross. For believers in Christ, a central part of our drama is that, yes, we can love to hear the sublime teachings of Christ yet, at the same time, we are bombarded with subtle and mesmerizing messages from the world. The oft competing voices of Christ and the world pull us in two opposing directions, and it is so much easier to resolve the tension in favour of the easier option. Tragically, to please yourself and feel good often drowns out the call to renounce yourself and please Christ. But it is self-renunciation for the love of Christ which alone fits us for the narrow door; self-gratification fits us for the wide and spacious one.

Choosing Christ’s way is what makes us truly human and also true sons and daughters of the Father. The pressure on us to conform to the priorities and values of society is immense. And there are forces in society which are openly, and increasingly, hostile towards Christ and to those who profess faith in Him. Human flourishing is rooted in Christ, not in the material and technological advances of human genius. In fact, true human genius lies in developing ways and means to live out the Gospel in all dimensions of human existence. To resist the appeal of the wide door and focus on the narrow one, we need, like good athletes and boxers, to embrace the discipline which the Father sends us to fit us for the Cross and for the Kingdom. The second reading today from the Letter to the Hebrews is encouraging those who suffer for their faith to remember that the “Lord disciplines the one he loves … He is treating you as sons” and daughters. While that Letter is referring mainly to the suffering believers undergo from a hostile environment, it applies equally to the suffering we willingly undergo to grow in self-discipline for the sake of Christ.

At root here lies the question of how real, and how realistic, is my personal surrender to Christ in faith. How real is Christ and His Gospel to me? What real difference does believing in Him make in the living of my life every day? What am I really prepared to renounce and suffer for Him? Were his bones to be identified in a tomb in Jerusalem, how would that really impact me? Jesus doesn’t mince His words when he says to those who once ate with Him and listened to His teaching: “I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil.” Their relationship to Him had only been superficial. They had not taken Him to heart or reorganised their lives around Him. They didn’t act on His teachings. If they had, they would not have been workers of evil but of good. Truly to believe in Christ means to do the good which Christ did: to live and love in total obedience to the Father no matter what the cost, including the Cross. For, in fact, a costless and a Cross-less Christ is an idol and any supposed faith in such a Christ is fraudulent. An easy Christianity and an easy Christ are loveless, heartless and meaningless. A Christ and a Christianity on our own convenient terms risk leading us to face a closed door into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Lord wants a real and realistic relationship of profound love with each one of us and with every human being on this earth. The prophet Isaiah in the first reading poetically describes how the heavenly Jerusalem will be the true final home for all the nations of the earth. Jesus echoes that in the Gospel, and the response to the Psalm quotes His words to the Apostles before He ascended into heaven: Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news. That’s the synodal journey outwards, the mission of evangelization. But the journey back to Him involves for each person a profound and personal decision of faith in Jesus on His terms and the living out of that faith in our personal, married, family, social and professional lives. So, to quote again from the Letter to the Hebrews, “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” Let us fight the good fight of faith and run the race to the finish, with Christ’s Cross on our foreheads, imprinted on our minds and in our hearts and, yes, even in our fragile bodies. For only through and beyond that narrow door will we find in Him the life, joy and peace for which our deepest heart sorely longs.