It’s always a jolt to the emotional system to hear coming from the lips of the gentle Savior Jesus His warning about the terrible end in store for the damned. I suppose this is because we ourselves are anxious to be included among the saved and because we have no guarantee that we will make it to heaven. We are disturbed to be reminded about the eternal consequences of sin. But surely our Lord’s purpose was not to terrify us into belief. Rather, He was responding to one of the greatest of religious questions: "will only a few people be saved?"

The necessary means for happy arrival in the next life is fidelity to the commandments: to have lived and–most urgently–to have died in a state of grace. There’s an undeniable austerity about this program of life. Living in the state of grace has none of the excitement, let’s say, of idolatry; none of the thrill of self-exaltation; none of the daring indulgence into things forbidden. The way of living that our Lord commands for His own regulates all facets of human existence. For individuals, His plan is as follows: each one must subject his passions to his will; subject his will to right reason; subject his reason to faith; subject faith to charity: and it is charity that leads one to God. Man, following this course of life, becomes.....divine (a strong expression, but theologically accurate, if rightly understood). It’s because we have this capacity to become divine that salvation is open to us. Our Lord showed us that the way to salvation is through love. Salvation through love! When the devil tempted Eve in the garden, he did not deceive her when said that eating the forbidden fruit would make them become as gods. He deceived her only in hiding from her the supernatural way of becoming gods: namely, through supernatural love. Instead of that, he proposed another way: through disobedience. Yes! disobedience also makes us like gods! How so? When we sin, we are, in effect, insisting on being governed not by God but by our own wills. This is a twisted but valid kind of freedom, independence and sovereignty which are ways-of-being like God. When we abuse our human reason to create our own truth, making up for ourselves what we will believe (something we really can’t do, but only attempt), then we resemble God because He only is the creator of truth. Humanly created truth is, of course, an absurdity, a fiction. Man becomes his own false god when he proposes this bombastic and self-inflating truth. Whenever man departs from God’s doctrines, God’s commandments, the truths of the Catholic faith, and puts forth anything else in its stead, he effectively removes God and places himself in God’s position.

There are three stages in this process: first, there has to be a deception, either proposed by someone else apart from oneself, or by self-deception whereby one wishes that what is not-true to be true; the second step is that one is aware that this is a deception: that is, that he knows full well that what he wants to believe is not truth; and then there remains only the last stage: the revolt against God.

Once this has been successfully accomplished, once reality has been dismissed, once God has been set aside, then man can do anything he pleases. He may make sweeping claims, such as asserting that the commandments of God are slavery; or that the Church is an institution of tyranny; or that the God-given authority in the family and in the State is despotism; or that beauty is deformity and deformity is beautiful; that good is evil and evil is good; that to be free one must have the right to kill, abort, or to sin freely to satisfy base appetites, etc. These are the doctrines that the world approves and applauds. But what terrible consequences they have! There’s nothing is more vile and despicable than humanity that departs from God’s way for man to live. Man has successfully tried to fabricate ‘truth’ through inventing slogans to rule people, and the result has been the subjection of people by tyranny. Men created their own truth when they declined into paganism after their first days in paradise, and paganism became a yoke for many generations of people thereafter, as it does again today in popular forms of occultism, astrology and new age fantasies. When man tries to become God in this frightful, dishonest and false way, he becomes demonic instead, attempting to destroy both God and humanity at the same time.

After the deplorable slump of humanity into chaos, barbarism, idolatry, magic and falsehood, Christ and His Church offered again to the world the one and only way of truth: the Catholic faith, pure Christianity. Did the world then rejoice when truth finally came, when human error and its lies were exposed? Our Lord gave the answer to this when He made this complaint, "I have come in my Father’s name and you do not accept me; but if another will come in his own name, him you will accept." The human race will accept anything else–and most readily–anything except our Lord’s way of salvation. If you recall, when offered the choice, humanity chose to have Barabbas rather than Christ: the unleashing of thievery, deception, lust and lawlessness rather than truth and goodness, indeed, reality.

Jesus called all men to himself when He was raised upon the cross, promising them the triumph of good over evil and truth over error. He did not coerce men, but invited them to be saved through that kind of faith that imposes limitations on human the will and action.

I want to point out to you how perfectly suited faith is for our proud and error-prone human condition. Since we naturally tend to shun restraints on our freedom and to insist on our own will, God gave us faith. Now, faith appeals to us, in a way, because it lets us have our own part, our own will, in being saved. God’s part is to teach us the truth and give us His grace; our part is the freedom to accept his proposal: to give our consent. Now we can all feel that we’re in control–to some extent. God thus plays up to our weakness in saving us through offering us the invitation to making an act of free assent to faith.

"Lord, will only a few people be saved?" he answered them: "Strive to enter through the narrow gate; many will attempt to enter, but the Master will say to them: "Depart from me, all you evildoers."

God grant us to remain open to His truth, to accept this rule over us and, in the end, to be saved!