Luke 13: 22-30  “Strive to Enter By The Narrow Door”

In the Gospel this week, someone asks Jesus: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” His reply is both challenging and liberating: “Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”

The narrow door is not about numbers—who gets in and who doesn’t. It is about the way of life that leads us into God’s Kingdom. Jesus is saying: it is not enough to know Him from a distance or to say “We ate and drank in your company.” What matters is that His words and His mercy shape our hearts and our lives.

And here is where it becomes difficult for many of us: forgiveness.

Forgiveness is perhaps one of the most difficult “narrow doors” of discipleship. To forgive someone who has hurt us—deeply, unfairly, even repeatedly—feels impossible. The wound lingers. The anger resurfaces. We might say, “I can’t forget what they did.” But Jesus calls us not to forget, but to forgive.

Pope Francis has often reminded us that forgiveness is not weakness, but strength. He said: “Forgiveness is the caress of God”—it heals, it liberates, it makes us new. He insists that if we close our hearts to mercy, we also close the door to receiving God’s mercy. The narrow door, then, is the door of mercy—difficult to enter, because it requires us to let go of pride, resentment, and the desire for revenge.

Think of the Our Father, which we pray during every mass: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Those are not just words—they are the measure of our discipleship. To walk through the narrow door is to allow God’s mercy to pass through us, not only to us.

Perhaps some of us carry a grudge. Maybe it is within our families, friendships, or even within the parish. The narrow door is open—but we cannot pass through it if we are carrying the heavy baggage of resentment. Only when we lay it down can we fit through.

Jesus is not trying to frighten us with the words of today’s Gospel but to free us. He wants us to know the joy of His Kingdom—where people will come from east and west, north and south, and recline at the table of God’s mercy. But to enter, we must let mercy guide us.

Pope Francis often spoke about this. He said that forgiveness is the very oxygen of the Christian life. Without forgiveness, our souls suffocate. He once remarked: “If we do not learn to forgive one another, we will always be slaves of our own resentments.” In other words, forgiveness is not just a gift we give to others—it is liberation for our own hearts.

So let us pray for the courage to forgive. Forgiveness does not mean pretending nothing happened, but it means entrusting justice to God, and allowing His mercy to heal us. Pope Francis said it beautifully: “God never tires of forgiving; it is we who tire of asking.”

May we never tire of forgiving, never tire of trying; never tire of walking through that narrow door that leads to life.