And I – I took the [road] less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. You poetry buffs will know those words as the end to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” But it’s not just the road less traveled by that makes the difference; it’s whether that was a road worth taking.
The grandmother, her son Bailey and his wife, three children and a cat, set out on a road trip to Florida from their Georgia home in Flannery O’Connor’s memorable story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Along the wide and paved road to Florida, the self-righteous and self-absorbed grandmother thinks she remembers a dirt-road turn-off to a mystery house with a secret panel. The kids get all excited. The father gives in to the pressure. From experience I can tell you that pressure is the only way a father will take a side road like that, don’t you know?! It turns out to be a road not worth taking.
Along that road the family cat gets loose, the father gets spooked at the wheel, and he ends up rolling the car into a ditch. The first car down the road stops to help … they think. Three men get out—all of them recent escapees from the federal penitentiary, as it turns out. One calls himself The Misfit, because he can’t remember his crimes and figures his punishments misfit his deeds. The bad guys see a chance to steal some money and clothes; they take the family into the woods and execute them. The grandmother alone is left to talk to The Misfit. She suddenly gets religion and begins to treat him as a misfortunate human being, appealing to his better angels. When he appears to crack for a moment in a show of emotion, the woman reacts in a way so that we can’t determine whether it is pity or ploy. She looks The Misfit straight in his twisted face and says, Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children! He springs back as if bitten by a snake and shoots her three times in the chest. When one of his murdering cohorts comments that the grandmother was a real talker, The Misfit says, She would have been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.[i]
Pretty harsh, huh? O’Connor used violence in her stories, she said, in order to write sin large enough for us to recognize it and then search for grace because of it. We don’t come to church to be in polite company; we come here to get straight about whether the road we take is a road worth taking, a road that leads to the God of Jesus Christ.
Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount that we must enter by the narrow gate and take a hard road that few travel by. He tells us this as a warning toward the end of his sermon in order that we understand the consequences of his words. He has been telling us about the life that really is life. About how the poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of heaven. About how the meek and the mournful and the hungry and merciful and the pure in heart and peacemakers and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake will be rewarded by God for living in ways that expose the ways of the world as empty. He points us toward a life of fidelity and integrity and loving of enemies. He wants disciples to develop holy habits of prayer and generosity that become hallmarks of our life in the world and point to the God who rules the world with grace. He promises that this way brings us a life that few find as they follow the crowd and take the easy way instead.
Jesus lays down a gauntlet. He calls for decision. He leaves no room for indecision. Not to decide to take up his way of life is costly in itself.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded us of the cost of discipleship. The German pastor and theologian was hanged by the Nazis after he joined a plot to have Adolph Hitler assassinated. He accepted his fate as a consequence of following Jesus. Anyone who follows Jesus will pay a price, he said. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. Sometimes that will be a literal death, as for Bonhoeffer. Always it will mean dying to an easy way of life, a way most choose to walk, a road most traveled by.
Jesus’ image of two gates and two roads is almost lost upon us in our day. The image is ancient and urban. The main road into a city was broad and smooth, and the gate by which a traveler might enter was wide. The road led to the palace and key places the city leaders would want visitors to visit. Most followed that road. Most went with the crowd, thinking it safer. As long as you were with the crowd, you weren’t singled out, and people would leave you alone. That wasn’t the only gate, however, or the only road in and out.
A typical city was well walled for protection. At night the gates were closed, and no one who came after dark would be able to enter with an entourage, camels, or other baggage. But there were other ways into the town after dark, or even in the daytime for those who didn’t follow the easy way of the crowd. Small openings in the walls—and sometimes in the main gates themselves—would allow individuals to pass through one by one. These were often so small that a person would have to get down on hands and knees to pass through. Sometimes the gates were camouflaged and used by thieves to pass through undetected.
Jesus tells us that we have to enter a life with God this way. We have to come one by one. We must break from the crowd and make up our own minds about what we believe and how we will live. We have to get down on our knees and humbly follow Christ through the gate that leads to life. We can’t travel both roads; we can’t enter the kingdom of God by both gates. What’s more, we have to drop our baggage, all those things that we use to prop up our lives and define us apart from our complete reliance on Christ. Our possessions, our prestige, our pride: all these can keep us from trusting the only one who can give us life eternal in return for our lives.
One of the hardest things to do for those who seek to become Christians is this. The world encourages us to be in charge of our own lives, to keep our options open, to become a success by learning the ways of the world and getting good at them. We are taught to distinguish ourselves among the crowd, not from the crowd.
So I’m not sure if you know it yet—how much your life will change now, I mean—I mean now that Becks has arrived. David Beckham and his Posh Spice wife, Victoria, and their predictably gorgeous children are now on the continent. The English soccer star, at the tail end of a career known as much for style as substance will earn a quarter of a billion dollars from the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club. The Beckhams are already settling into a $25 million dollar Bel-Air mansion near their good friends, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Lovely. The Beckhams epitomize those that have come to distinguish themselves in the crowd, not from the crowd. They have fully adopted the values of the world and are adored and envied for their success. Even Jorge Del Toro is impressed. At a reception for the new star, he said: I’m a pastor; I always preach about idolatry. I have qualms about being here, but he’s David Beckham.[ii]
The Misfit said the grandmother would have been a good woman if someone had held a gun to her at every minute. Well, that’s not how virtue is achieved. It has to be put on from within, slowly but surely, over time and ahead of time, by entering through the narrow gate. This allows us not to miss out on the gifts of God that come from shedding the values and addictions of the crowd.
Dallas Willard, a University of Southern California professor of philosophy and a teacher of the disciplined spiritual life, looks at the other side of the cost of discipleship: Nondiscipleship, he says, costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life that Jesus said He came to bring.[iii]
The training groups have started at WhiteRockLake now. Several mornings a week you see them. On Saturdays you can barely get by them. Run On and Luke’s Locker have training programs for those who want to run the marathon this December. People of all shapes and sizes are out there: some of them trying to reclaim their youth, some trying to reclaim their shape, all trying to claim a dream of some kind. Having been out there myself for the past couple of years now, I know what they’re after for all the pain and effort of running those paths. They are choosing a road worth taking, a hard road that will pay off in the euphoria of achievement. But it will pay off only if you wake up each morning ready to take that road and not the bed most others choose instead. And then, as I am learning, you have to change things like your eating habits, too.
The same is true spiritually. We begin by waking up to life with God and making a decision humbly to follow Christ. We enter that life by deliberate decision to drop everything for the sake of Christ. Then we walk the road of Christ by intentionally arranging our affairs to be worthy disciples.
The great nineteenth-century Boston preacher, Phillips Brooks, said: Only when a man tries to live the divine life can the divine Christ manifest Himself to him. Therefore, the true way for you to find Christ is not to go groping in a thousand books. It is not for you to try evidences about a thousand things that people have believed of Him, but it is for you to undertake so great a life, so devoted a life, so pure a life, so serviceable a life, that you cannot do it except by Christ, and then see whether Christ helps you. See then whether there comes to you the certainty that you are a child of God, and the manifestation of the child of God becomes the most credible, the most certain thing to you in all of history.[iv]
If being a child of God is not the most certain thing to you in all of history, the problem might not be that you cannot know it; it might be that you have not undertaken the only path that leads you to know. To paraphrase Robert Frost’s poem again, Jesus invites us to follow him on the road worth taking. It is a hard road but a good one. It is the road to life. Few may find it, as Jesus says. What about you? Will you be one of the few, the humble, the disciples?
[i] A Good Man Is Hard to Find: And Other Stories (Harvest/HBJ Books, 1955), p. 29.
[ii] NYTimes.com (July 14, 2007): quotation of the day.
[iii] The Spirit of the Disciplines (Harper: San Francisco, 1991).
[iv] From The Law of Growth, quoted by Robert McAnally Adams in Christian Quote of the Day, an online subscription service.
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