Who will be saved?

Today’s readings: Isaiah 66, 18-21; Hebrews 12, 5-7.11-13; Luke 13, 22-30.

From a first glance at today’s readings, one may easily conclude that there is a contradiction between the first reading from Isaiah and the gospel of Luke. The universality of God’s salvation proclaimed in Isaiah is somewhat narrowed down and conditioned in Luke.

As it is, Luke’s text sounds problematic. It is not excluded that the initial question when someone asked, “Will there be only a few saved?”, could have been a later editorial insertion showing a later growing concern on the part of the early Christian community. The question put to Jesus concerns the relationship of historical Judaism to the people of God, but here it is cast in the language of ‘salvation’, which is distinctively Christian.

Today, many people prefer to speak of God’s love and infinite mercy, and find it difficult to acknowledge as part of Church doctrine the existence of hell or eternal punishment. Even in the early times of the Church there were similar ideas circulating. The early Christian scholar and theologian Origen Adamantius himself was condemned for such ideas.

Admittedly, the Gospel reading today is quite austere, speaking in terms of the “narrow door” and of the possibility of even being locked out. This contrasts with the tone of Isaiah who speaks of the holy mountain where the Lord will “gather the nations of every language”. But when the Gospel affirms, “Try your best to enter by the narrow door”, it is affirming that God’s offer of salvation and mercy always come at a price. This is the whole truth.

In the past decades, particularly after the openness and optimism of the Vatican Council II, Catholic theology and the Church’s traditional stance on the issue of the universality of salvation have gone through a cultural shock. In part it is the Church’s overhaul in the matter of religious pluralism that is to blame for this.

Traditionally, the Church had very clear positions on who could be saved, on the issue of the true religion, and on the pluralism of religions. After all, salvation is a very serious issue where religion is concerned.

But is it for us today? Do people really bother about who is going to be saved and who is not? Probably in the past we sounded very presumptuous about these issues, and this might have weakened the Church’s credibility in some sense.

As David Tracy writes in his essay On Naming the Present, “we turn to the other as if we still pretend to be the centre”. The words of the Gospel are mostly significant when Jesus says “men from east and west, from north and south, will come to take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God”. Jesus is warning how easily we can be misled.

Salvation and perdition are aspects of God’s mystery. We can only hope that all men be saved. What Jesus corrects in the Gospel is the attitude of the pious Jew who asks whether only few will be saved.

Jesus speaks of the “narrow door’ but also of those who pretend to be in but are left out, and those whom we consider as outsiders, coming from east and west, north and south, but who still experience God’s salvation. God’s universal will to save mankind is His prerogative and He works salvation through ways and means which are not like ours. His ways are not our ways.

The Church is meant only to be a sign and an instrument of God’s will and of His strategy. According to our logic we know what is required to be saved. But according to the logic of the Gospel, people from all cultures and civilisations even those we think are remote from God, can take our places in God’s Kingdom to our great delusion.