14 / Whit Thursday, 2025
the middle way
When Jesus said,
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Matthew 7:13-14
I think I always picked up so much on the contrasts in His word-picture that I naturally categorized each “gate” as living on an extreme end of a spectrum. Far on the lefthand side, the wide gate; far to the right—as far as it could get—the narrow gate.
The problem with my perception of the image is that it sets up the wide gate and the narrow gate to be opposites in more than just their dimensions.
That is, Jesus’s only point is that one is wide, easy to find, and easy to go through; the other is narrow, difficult to find and to navigate. By placing them on equal and opposite ends of a spectrum, I made them both easy to find and enter, leaving only their course to differentiate them. No matter what direction it takes, an extreme is always easier to find and maintain than a middle way.
Extreme hedonism is easy. Extreme legalism is easy, too. True freedom in Christ? That’s hard to find and hard to keep.
Likewise, extreme complementarianism is easy: just restrict women from everything that could potentially place them over men in any way, even teaching teenage boys in Sunday school. And egalitarianism is easy; just let women do everything men do, no restrictions whatsoever.
A mutualist understanding of the sexes that sees them as counterparts, not opposites, with slightly different sacramental tasks but zero difference in their capacity and responsibility to reflect the image of God is a walk on a tightrope.
One of the values of Anglicanism that I’ve come to appreciate is the via media—the middle way. This often refers to the compromise Anglicans try to strike between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation, but in my experience, it has been so much more than that. For example, within the ACNA there is open disagreement about whether women should be in the priesthood, and instead of splitting, the denomination holds space for both sides based on the convictions of different dioceses and bishops. I find it oddly helpful to know that the organization as a whole is just as uncertain on the issue as I am, and is finding a way through.
A narrow, difficult, middle way.
It reminds me of the hiking trails around Mt. Rainier—some mostly flat, wide, and well-paved, providing a nice view of the mountain with little effort; others punishingly difficult, some even going all the way to the top of the mountain. Both are well-worn and well-mapped thanks to thousands upon thousands of annual visitors.
Cutting a brand-new trail through the woods in hopes of reaching a mountain view along the way would be a different story entirely, requiring far more intention, wits, study, and directional awareness than either of the options above. Some of the terrain might be easy and some of it might be hard, but half the battle is simply staying on course when you don’t have a well-worn course to follow.
The narrow gate isn’t something we find by running as far away from the wide one as we can—because over there, on the other end of the extreme, is just another wide gate. The narrow way is embodied in Jesus: compassionate and righteous, self-sacrificing and boundaried, God and human, servant and king.