A man came to Jesus and said, “Sir, will only a few be saved?” He obviously thought that heaven was a select club to which only members are admitted. The man was a Jew. As such he would have believed that only Jews would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. Gentiles had no hope of getting in. As for sinners – forget it! The idea of a chosen people is a dangerous idea. If God chooses a people, he doesn’t choose them to the exclusion of others, but to the service of others.
By the time the man had digested Jesus” answer, he was probably sorry he asked the question in the first place. Because Jesus blew his assumptions to smithereens. He turned everything upside down. He said, “The first will be last, and the last will be first.” It was a revolutionary statement that shocked and outraged the Pharisees. And Jesus didn’t leave it there. He befriended sinners and outcasts. The Pharisees saw this as a betrayal of virtuous people like themselves. But Jesus declared that it was to seek out and save people such as these that he had come.
The world is riddled with exclusive clubs, privilege, preference, and so on. We wouldn’t expect Jesus to go along with this. Nor did he. He announced the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God. To those Jews who thought they could enter the Kingdom as a matter of course he said: Produce the fruits of repentance, otherwise your privileged position would benefit you nothing.
Jesus said that conversion was a necessary disposition for entry into the Kingdom. And he succeeded in bringing it about in the most unlikely of people. Many sinners heeded his call to conversion, and made their way into the Kingdom. Whereas many religious people stubbornly resisted his call to conversion, and so excluded themselves from the Kingdom.
It’s not up to us to decide who gets into heaven. That is better left to the wisdom and mercy of God. We have to allow God to be God. At the end of the day, salvation is not something we can earn. It is a gift of God. But that doesn’t mean we ought not try to make ourselves worthy of it. Through our Baptism we are members of the new Chosen People. We are the “insiders”. But we must not rely on that fact alone. We must endeavor to produce the fruits of the kingdom, namely, goodness, right living and truth.