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 against His followers and, more generally, about resisting the evil in which the world lies. Meanwhile, this image also has a wider semantic context. Indeed, any road, whether a multilane highway or a narrow path, always and by definition involves 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 of a physical way, but also, and even more, of a spiritual way. Choosing a certain spiritual path and stepping onto it, we thereby cut ourselves off from the possibility of taking some other path at the same time. It is impossible to walk two paths at once. And the path becomes narrower the more clearly its spiritual quality is defined.

Here the matter is not so much external as internal. The quality of a person's life, of that person's existence, becomes more and more definite; in other words, the quality of the person's soul in the biblical sense of the word. The soul is that 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 will be our will following God's commandments, and how much will be chance and automatism, inevitable where there is no awareness of one's own intentions, decisions, and actions, and 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 that person's soul becomes more and more spiritually defined.

And along with this, the way becomes narrower and narrower. For in gaining definiteness and form, it inevitably gains clear boundaries. Inner quality is unthinkable without form, and form does not exist without limits. The absence of boundaries and form also means the absence of quality, and without it life in the Kingdom is impossible, for there everything is utterly clear and distinct, just as God's will is clear and distinct. And everything is present in fullness, in the same fullness in which the breath of God abides, penetrating the Kingdom.