NOTES for Mat 7:13-14

Most Christians usually understand the question of the narrow and broad way in the context of everything Jesus said about persecutions of His followers and, in general, about resisting the evil in which the world lies. Meanwhile, this image also has a broader semantic context. In fact, any road, whether a multilane highway or a narrow path, always and by definition implies limitation. The absence of "narrowness," and therefore of boundaries, can mean only one thing: complete tracklessness. The absence of a way. And this is true not only for a physical way, but also, and to an even greater degree, for a spiritual way. Choosing a certain spiritual path and setting out on it, we thereby cut off for ourselves the possibility of going at the same time by some other path. It is impossible to walk two paths at once. And the path itself turns out to be all the more narrow the more its spiritual quality is defined.

Here the matter is no longer so much external as internal. The quality of a person's life becomes more and more defined. The quality of his existence. Or, in other words, the quality of his soul, in the biblical sense of that word. The soul as the stream of life that flows through us and in which we ourselves abide. The quality of this stream determines what our life will be.

How much of it will be spiritual, and how much natural. How much of our will follows God's commandments, and how much is chance and automatism, inevitable where there is no awareness of one's own intentions, decisions, and actions, no relating of them to the commandments given by God. And if a person walks the way of the Kingdom, sharing more and more in its life, then the quality of his soul becomes more and more spiritually defined.

And with this the path becomes narrower and narrower. For the definiteness, the shaped character of the path, outlines its boundaries more and more clearly. Quality presupposes form, and form is impossible without boundaries. The absence of boundaries and form means the absence of quality as well. Without this, life in the Kingdom is impossible. There everything is utterly clear and distinct. As clear and distinct as God's will. And everything is in fullness, in the same fullness in which God's breath, permeating the Kingdom, abides.