The great and wise persons, says Carl Jung, are those who do not merely talk about the meaning of life and the world, but really possess it. Salvation is a major theme in today's Gospel. Surprisingly enough, Jesus who sat at table with public sinners and who seemed all condoning with the worst of people he came across, is the same Jesus who today speaks of the narrow door, of doors locked and people left outside. Choices are made all the time in life and salvation is about the meaning of life. Indeed, the broader context of the words of Jesus today is that he is on his way to Jerusalem, to his 'exodus'.

For so long we have always believed that few are going to be saved. There are even today fundamentalists who take the Scriptures as literally indicating the numbers of those who will eventually be saved. But nothing can be farther than the truth. The one asking Jesus "Will there be only a few saved?" was a Jew and the Jews were convinced that all non-Jews were excluded from salvation. Up to some time ago that is what we ourselves believed. We were always experts in demarcation lines, in pointing out convincingly where God dwells and where not. But Jesus is not at all bothered with numbers, with the few or many who will be saved, but rather with the 'how' of salvation, with the choices we make.

Salvation is never automatic, just for the simple reason that you are Jew or baptised or whatever. Isaiah today in the first reading says the Lord is coming "to gather the nations of every language". There are indeed so many languages that speak of God. The language of the heart is always universal, with no boundaries. Even Jesus sounds universal when he says "men from East and West, from North and South, will come to take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God". It is not language, race, religion, or colour that automatically includes or excludes from this feast. What includes or excludes is rather and precisely the language our heart speaks.

But there are people who actually exclude themselves. In a passage on sin, Pope Benedict XVI wrote of the temptation to "think that bargaining a little with evil, reserving some freedom against God, is good, perhaps even necessary. But if we look at the world, it is not so. Evil always poisons". Evil corrupts our heart. It distances us from the God of our heart. That is why Jesus speaks also of those left outside, to whom the Lord will say: "I do not know where you come from". It's a terrible choice we make. It's not God's arbitrariness, in a sort of predestination mode, that decides who will be saved and who will not. As individuals we remain free to make our choices against God. Even if many today feel that it offends modern man's sensibility to believe in hell. "With a God such as this", writes Pope Benedict in his Letter God is Love, "you may have the strength to live as if God exists, even if you do not have the strength to believe". God's imprint can change our perspective on life and its meaning. Salvation is a very serious issue even for our culture.

Contemporary culture shows a surprising openness to religion, but only on a purely horizontal level. Culture itself has become the real religion of our time. It offers some of the emotional benefits of religion, without exacting the high price faith demands (Louis Duprè). But the problem with this culture is that salvation is sought in man-made yogas, not in God-made revelations; it is sought through therapy, not prophecy. And we continue to confuse God's definitive road down with man's many non-definitive roads up.