The narrow gate

Bishop Scott Bullock
The Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 24, 2025

At the end of my first year of seminary, in May 1987, on the night that I was studying for my final exam for Latin, the phone rang in my room at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. It was the voice of my brother Bob telling me that my father had suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. We concluded the call with some discussion of when I could get home and then, stunned, I went to the chapel to talk to Jesus about the news. This was surprising news for my 53-year-old father, but not unfamiliar news, as his father had died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 55 some 19 years before. As is often the case, the attack was caused by blocked arteries in his heart, a combination of dietary and genetic factors conspiring to restrict the movement of blood through the vessels that spread blood in and out of his heart. This was the beginning of what turned out to be 45 years of living, until his death this last spring, with a very temperamental heart. Countless heart procedures have followed: angioplasty, stents, and triple-bypass surgery among them. In all cases, it is a matter of blocked vessels that do not permit the flow of life-giving blood.

Across the years, when I would speak to my dad after his annual check-up, he’d invariably say: “Well, I’m good for another year!” What he’d mean, of course, was that he had a good report at his annual meeting with his cardiologist. Blockages, places that are too narrow, or of course aneurysms, where the vessel gets too wide, both which happened to him across his years — neither would be good for his life, or for anyone’s. 

So, reflecting on the physical truth of the heart and the vascular system, we think about a long system of very narrow ways through which blood courses. Any of them blocked or with a breakout leads to imperiling of part or the entirety of one’s life. We need the narrow way — not blocked where the blood can’t get where it needs to go — or not too wide where the blood would spread out and disperse outside the vessels. We need that or our life ends. 

As with the heart and the body, so too with our lives in their entirety. It is fascinating, but not surprising, that Jesus speaks in similar terms when he says in today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.” 

The original Biblical words reveal fascinating nuances. When the Gospel words tell us to strive to enter through the narrow gate, the word used is ago-niz-omai — that was even harder than some of those words from that first reading — from which we get our word agony. Agony. The teaching of Jesus therefore tells us that it will take effort, maybe even agony, along the way of this Christian life, though always, the way is God-assisted, particularly by the strength of the bread of life that we receive at the Eucharist. But even more fascinating, the word used for the narrow way is stenos, from which we get our word stent, as the device that opens the narrowed vessel so it can deliver the life-giving blood.

It turns out Jesus is the stent. He’s that open, narrow way through which life flows to us, if we will but come to him. The good news is this: not that his way is unnecessarily narrow, but instead that he opens up the narrow way for life to flow to us. He is the stent, the opener to full life. His way is not wider because, like the hemorrhaging vessel, life never reaches its proper, full, and vital nature and its joyful destination unless it is single-minded in direction.

The workings of the heart teach us this truth: if life is to flow to the body, it will need to have a proper, though narrow, vessel through which to flow. Blocked, it cannot arrive at its destination. Too wide, it bursts, hemorrhages, and life is dissipated. So too for divine life. The good news is that Jesus is that perfectly narrow way that opens to us, that life may not be restricted, but rather, not hemorrhaging or dissipating, but rather perfectly arriving at its destination. The heart of our souls, filling us and restoring us with life. He is that sure and certain narrow through which life is given us. Let us come to him with confidence and receive life by following his direct, narrow way. For he is the way, the truth, and the life!