Main news for 11 October 2025

The Lord Jesus Christ spoke these words in answer to an unknown person's puzzled question about the number of those being saved. As far as one can judge, the logic of the conversation from which the evangelist Luke recorded only Christ's words is as follows. The Lord says more than once that salvation depends on a person's thoughts and deeds, on the state of his heart, on his relation to God. He calls people to repentance and to the correction of life; in the absence of all this, salvation is obviously impossible. Many Jews of that time, though not all, believed that with the coming of the Messiah, salvation would automatically be given to all "full" participants in the Old Covenant. In part this view was determined by an overly primitive understanding of the prophets' words, and in part it was a legacy of the formal religiosity of the post-exilic era. In one way or another, the thought that salvation from sin and death would not be given to everyone and not automatically caused bewilderment in many, and even strong protest. It is in this context that the question put to Christ apparently sounds: "Will those who are saved be few?".

"If there really are few who are saved, if not all Jews automatically fall into their number, then I may not be among them!" This is the emotional subtext of the question. It must be said that "assigning" whole categories of people to the saved regardless of their personal spiritual condition is a very common thing, characteristic not only of Jewish thinking, but of human thinking in general. In answering this, the Lord Jesus Christ shifts the conversation to an entirely different plane. He does not offer new criteria for selecting those who will or will not be saved. The Lord addresses the questioner personally, saying that salvation depends on the will and efforts of each concrete person. The path of salvation must be sought, and the entrance into the Kingdom is the narrow gate, through which one can pass only by applying effort. "Strive," says the Greek text of the Gospel; "labor in spiritual struggle," the Synodal text brilliantly translates this verb. The matter, then, is not how narrow the gate is, but what the will and effort of the person himself are like.