Jesus was asked a lot of questions as he walked from town to town during his life, and he answered all of them, but he answered them in his own way. At first, it might seem like he always avoided the questions, because he rarely answered the question people thought they wanted answered. But he had his own way of doing this. He wasn’t like a politician who says “I’m glad you asked that question” and then proceeds to answer a totally different one. What Jesus does is answer the real question, the important life or death question, not the nitpicky religious question that frankly are usually the ones that he was asked.
Today, for example, the question put to him is: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” Now this is the kind of question where I really wonder what kind of answer this person was hoping for. Was he hoping that Jesus would say, “Unfortunately, I’d say 5% of people at best”? Frankly, I think this person who asked the question, I think he was one of those people who were secretly hoping for that kind of a number, since it would reinforce their feeling that most people they see in the world are not nearly qualified for salvation. Or maybe I’m wrong, and instead he was hoping that Jesus would say, “Really, to be honest, 95%+ of people are saved in the end, maybe everyone.” There are people who want to hear that kind of a number, too, and maybe that includes us, since that would take a lot of pressure off us Christians; it means God will always cut us some slack, maybe we don’t even have to be that Christian, and whatever our flaws, surely we’re not in the bottom 5%.
Jesus, of course, doesn’t answer the question about how many, because he doesn’t want us playing this mental game of calculating our odds or anyone else’s. Today’s gospel is about salvation, and eternal life with God forever, but it’s not about how many. It’s about how we’re supposed to feel about the prospect of that salvation, and really, how much we want it.
We don’t learn everything today about what salvation is, or what it’s going to feel like once we make it. But today we do learn two things that help us understand what Jesus is offering us.
First, whatever salvation is, God wants us to have it. People are going to come from the four corners of the earth for this feast with God, Jesus says, all types of people, and that’s the way God wants it. The way God also wants it is that the system by which people are invited to this banquet is completely up to God, and the system God uses will really frustrate those who want there to be a system the way humans would invent a system. What we’d do if salvation were up to us as humans is make it like a selective university of some sort, and we’d have some competitive system of religious observances and duties where over time you’d complete all the tasks you’re supposed to, pass some knowledge tests, and avoid points off for making a mistake. Your score would be your salvation. But instead, Jesus is suggesting that while religious observance and staying on the rails helps us a great deal, and I for one am all for it, it will not be how God’s system always works. People we assumed had no chance of salvation are going to be there before us, people who maybe did one great thing in their life, or maybe people who got everything wrong. The system isn’t about points and errors. The system is about desire. God’s desire for us, and our desire for God.
That’s the second thing we learn today about salvation, it’s not to be taken for granted, we don’t necessarily get it so easily. And the only sure way to get it, what it all comes down to, is actually to want to know Jesus. Our hope is a desire to be close to God, close to this Jesus who is saying today, and this is hard to accept, who says today that eating and drinking with him is not the same thing as really knowing him, and that’s what he wants from us, he wants that desire to be with him, and listen to him, and understand him, he wants us to have that desire to go where he’s sending us, wherever that takes us.
Fear used to be a good way to get people to want salvation, at least it seems to have worked better for Catholics in the old days than it does now. We get a little of the flavor of that fear from this reading, where we don’t want to be the ones who find ourselves locked out at the end. There is such a thing as showing up too late. But really the fear of losing may not be as great a motivator as what it must be like to be close to God, to say we know Jesus. That is what God wants us to have, and wants us to want. Jesus wants us to be people who say to him, I want what you’re offering me, show me what to do, help me to see the next step, help me to do the hard thing, help me to stop rejecting others, help me to stick with the commitments I’ve made, point me in a new direction if I need one. I can’t do this alone. I need your help.
Those are the words that will help us see what it is to know Jesus, we’ll hear an answer, they are a taste of salvation now, they are what it means to embrace someone we don’t always deserve but who saves our lives now, not off in the future, but now. And back to that first question in the gospel. God does not want us to imagine that kind of a relationship with him, actually knowing him, is somehow reserved for a few who have special skills. People are coming from all over into this banquet. All Jesus wants is for us to stop wanting it halfway, and ask him to show us who he really is.