08/24/25
Luke 13:22-30
0091
One day, a hare was making fun of a tortoise for being so slow. “Do you ever get anywhere?” he asked with a mocking laugh. “Yes,” replied the Tortoise, “and I get there sooner than you think. I'll run you a race and prove it.” The Hare was very amused at the idea of running a race with the Tortoise, but for the fun of the thing, he agreed. The Hare was soon far out of sight, and to make the Tortoise feel very deeply how ridiculous it was for him to try a race with a Hare, he lay down beside the course to take a nap until the Tortoise should catch up. The Tortoise, meanwhile, kept going slowly but steadily, and, after a time, passed the place where the Hare was sleeping. But the Hare slept on very peacefully, and when at last he did wake up, the Tortoise was near the goal. The Hare now ran his swiftest, but he could not overtake the Tortoise in time.
This well-known fable by Aesop teaches us about the danger of being overconfident. The hare thought that simply because he was a hare, he would win the race. He didn’t put any effort into the race, and because of this, he lost. The tortoise knew that he wasn’t as fast as the hare, but he was willing to keep on striving to finish the race. The story illustrates the same point that Jesus was making in our Gospel reading this morning.
As Jesus was continuing on his journey to Jerusalem, a certain man asked him, “Lord, are only a few going to be saved?” Like any good teacher, Jesus doesn’t directly answer the man’s question. Instead, he redirects the conversation to make a far more important point. Instead of wondering about what heaven is like or how many people are going to be in heaven, Jesus wants us to focus on whether we are going to be in heaven. Jesus says, “Strive to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.”
As Christians, there is a very real danger for us to be like Aesop’s hare. We can be tempted to believe that because of our efforts or because of our association with Jesus, we will be saved. The entrance to heaven is through a very narrow door. The door is standing open, but only for a time. Nothing should hinder us from entering through that door while it is still open. But how shall we enter when it is so difficult for many to get through? There is only one way, and that is through Jesus Christ. He said, “I am the gate.” The only way to enter heaven is through Jesus Christ. Faith in him as our Savior gets us through the door to heaven. Every other effort is sure to fail. Many seek other ways to get through that narrow door to heaven. They refuse to accept Jesus Christ, and they try to enter heaven by their own efforts. They may even put forth what seems like a good struggle. But all these efforts are in vain. Attempts to get through on one’s own are useless.
This truth of Scripture runs completely contrary to the way we want to think. Nothing in this life comes for free. We must work hard for everything (the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the money we use to buy those things), and so we wrongly assume that this applies to our spiritual lives as well. Satan wants us to doubt the promises of God and believe that we need to do something to save ourselves. But God is clear. We can’t save ourselves. No amount of our works or efforts can make up for a single sin. Everything we do is tainted by sin and is unacceptable in God’s sight.
This is why Jesus calls himself the narrow door. Our works can’t get us into heaven. Only faith in Jesus saves us. This is why Paul says, “For we conclude that a person is justified by faith without the works of the law.” We can’t keep God’s law perfectly, and so our feeble efforts fall far short of the perfection that God demands. Only Christ, who kept God’s law perfectly in our place, has paid the price that we could never pay. We must set aside all our works and efforts and cling to the promise that Christ has paid for our sins by his death on the cross. Through faith in him, we can enter the narrow door.
It is bad enough that Satan tries to get us to rely on our own efforts to enter heaven, but often he switches to another tactic where he tries to use the very promise of the Gospel to rob us of its joy. Like the hare, Satan wants us to become complacent in our struggle. He wants us to think, “Since Christ has done it all for me and my sins have been paid in full, this means I can take it easy. I can do what I want and not worry about the consequences because after all, my sins have been forgiven.”
But what happened to the hare? He slept through the entire race, and by the time he woke up, it was too late. This is the warning that Jesus gives us as well. The door into heaven isn’t open forever. Eventually, that
door will close either at the moment of our death or when our Lord comes again on the Last Day. Once the master of the house gets up and shuts the door, you will begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open for us!’ He will tell you in reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’
Can you imagine a more horrible pronouncement of judgment than that our Lord doesn’t know us? But this is exactly what will happen if we become complacent in our faith and give up our struggle against sin. This is a danger that believers have struggled with since the Fall into sin. Satan wants us to believe that we don’t need to struggle and instead just trust that our association with Jesus is enough to save us. It is tempting to believe that just because we were baptized and belong to a Christian church, and go through the motions, this is enough. The people of Israel thought the same thing, and John the Baptist preached this message against them. So John kept saying to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, “You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, produce fruits in keeping with repentance! Do not even think of saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ because I tell you that God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones. Even now, the ax is ready to strike the root of the trees. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is going to be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
So how do we resolve what seems to be an incredible paradox? On the one hand, Jesus tells us that we are not saved by our good works and need to enter through the narrow door, but on the other hand, he says that we need to strive and struggle to enter through that door. This is the tension that exists in our Christian life. We are not saved by our works, and yet Scripture also teaches that faith without works is dead.
This is where the example of the tortoise is helpful. The tortoise understood that to win the race against the hare, he needed to be slow, steady, and diligent in his efforts. He needed to keep on striving, putting one foot in front of the other. This is like the picture of our faith that the Apostle Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 9: “Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable victor’s wreath, but we do it for an imperishable one. That is why there is nothing aimless about the way I run. There is no pummeling of the air in the way I box. Instead, I hit my body hard and make it my slave so that, after preaching to others, I myself will not be rejected.”
The Christian life is not easy. Christianity asks for many things that are not easy for man: repentance, self-denial, denial of the world, sanctification, resistance to the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh. To be sure, one does not earn salvation by striving and fighting, but one may certainly lose the salvation one has by faith by not striving and fighting. Only too many look for an easy road to heaven, realizing too late that no such road exists.
Jesus wants us to keep on striving towards the narrow door. He wants us to be like the tortoise and keep on striving slowly and steadily on the narrow way to heaven. We know that this striving does not earn us entrance into heaven, because our entrance into heaven was paid for by the blood of our Savior as he offered his perfect life on the cross to pay for our sins. But Jesus wants us to continue our struggle. He wants us to resist the attacks of Satan and live our lives according to God’s will. He wants us to live a life of repentance. We will fail in our struggle; we are sinners and can’t help but fail. When we fail, we cling to the promise of the cross and know that Jesus paid for our failure with his holy, innocent blood. So little us continue our race just like the tortoise. Let us keep striving, knowing that our Savior will help us finish our race.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us get rid of every burden and the sin that so easily ensnares us, and let us run with patient endurance the race that is laid out for us. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who is the author of our faith and the one who brings it to its goal.