Gate and Path (Matthew 7)
In Matthew 7, when Jesus talks about the narrow gate and the narrow way and about the wide gate and the broad way, how are the gate and the way related to each other?
Commentaries debate about this. Most often, it seems, they think the gate comes first, followed by the way. Jeffrey Gibbs, on the other hand, sees it the other way around: first you travel by the narrow path and then you go through the narrow gate into the kingdom.
The former approach, it seems to me, ends up with the narrow gate being virtually meaningless. After all, it’s not as though going through the narrow gate actually brings you into the kingdom, then. Instead, it puts you on the narrow way — but you still have to stay on the narrow way instead of the broad way, which means that the gate itself is irrelevant.
(This, it seems to me, is a problem in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Christian passes through the narrow door, but that simply leads to a path, with temptations galore to go off the path. But then what is that narrow door? What does it symbolize? Christian still has quite a distance to travel after going through it before he gets to the cross even. So what’s the point of this door?)
Gibbs’s suggestion makes much more sense to me: You need to seek and find the narrow gate (“Few are they who FIND it”), and the way there is the narrow way, which you need to find and stay on, in spite of all allurements toward the broad path or elsewhere.
Better yet, I submit, is Van Bruggen‘s approach: The gate and way aren’t part of one picture (a gate leading to a way, a way leading to a gate) but rather two images, side by side, the first — the gate — focusing on entering into the kingdom or not, and the second — the way — focusing on the process.