The narrow way: confession, the Cross, and the cost of the faith

1. The gate was always strait

The first consolation the tradition offers is the removal of a false expectation. Nowhere did the Lord promise that His faith would be the majority road, the comfortable and populous highway. He said the opposite: enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat; because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it (Matt. 7:13 to 14). He called His own a little flock and bid them not to fear (Luke 12:32). The believer who finds himself among the few, therefore, has not necessarily lost his way. He may, for that very reason, be on it. Numbers have never been the measure of truth in the Gospel, and the confessor who feels the loneliness of the narrow gate is feeling exactly what he was told to expect.

2. The road is the Cross

But the narrow way is narrow for a reason deeper than mere scarcity of company. It is narrow because it is the way of the Cross, and the Cross is a strait thing. If any man will come after me, said the Lord, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Matt. 16:24). Confession is one shape of that cross bearing. To hold the faith when holding it costs nothing is no cross at all; to hold it when it costs everything is to be conformed, in a small measure, to the One who held the truth before Pilate and was crucified for it. The confessor does not carry a cross of his own devising. He is handed the one the hour presses on him, and his only choice is whether to take it up or lay it down.

3. The world's hatred is the mark, not the exception

This is why the tradition treats the world's hostility not as a sign that something has gone wrong but as a sign that something has gone right. The Lord was explicit: if the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. The servant is not greater than his lord: if they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John 15:18, 20). St Paul made it a law of the spiritual life: all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution (2 Tim. 3:12); and St Peter forbade the faithful to be surprised by it, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings (1 Pet. 4:12 to 13). The confessor should not, then, wait for the applause of the age, or measure his fidelity by his acceptance. Rejection is not evidence against him. It is, on the tradition's own terms, one of the things he was promised.

4. The confessors bore it in their bodies

None of this is abstract in this library, for its saints paid it in flesh. St Maximus went to the severing of his tongue and his right hand rather than sign the imperial confession. The Graptoi brothers had verses branded into their faces for refusing a single act of communion with the iconoclasts. St Theodore was scourged and exiled again and again; St Martin of Rome died of his sufferings in a Crimean prison; St Polycarp was burned; St Paul the Confessor was strangled at his altar. Their crowns did not come instead of the Cross but through it. St Ignatius, carried to Rome to be killed, would not have the Christians prevent it, and named his martyrdom in an image the whole tradition has kept:

5. The Cross humbles the one who carries it

Here the study must turn its edge back on the confessor, for the Cross is the surest cure for the one danger this whole subject breeds. A man may bear real suffering for the faith and be corrupted by it, may let the Cross become a boast, a badge, a proof of his superiority to those who did not suffer. But the Cross, rightly carried, forbids exactly this. Its first word is deny himself, and self denial and self congratulation cannot share a heart. The one who truly bears the Cross is not looking at the crowd he has left behind to see whether they admire him; he is looking at the One he follows, who bore infinitely more and reviled no one from it. The confession that has become an occasion for pride has, in that instant, ceased to be a cross and become a trophy, and the study on love and truth has already named it for what it is. Suffering sanctifies only the humble; in the proud it merely hardens.

6. The Cross is answered by the resurrection

And yet the last word of the tradition is not the Cross but what follows it, and this is the deepest consolation of all. The Lord did not end His warning of tribulation in despair: in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world (John 16:33). St Paul made the promise symmetrical with the suffering: it is a faithful saying, for if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: if we suffer, we shall also reign with him (2 Tim. 2:11 to 12). The seed that is buried and seems lost is precisely the seed that bears fruit; Tertullian saw the pattern in the persecutions of his own day and stated it as a law, the oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. The diachronic vindication this library has traced, the confessor proved right at the next council in case after case, is only the historical shadow of that resurrection. The faith buried in an age of apostasy rises; it has always risen; the Church cannot fail. The confessor sows in tears what he trusts, on the promise of the Lord, another generation will reap in joy.

7. The Cross that is given, not the one that is seized

One caution completes the study, for the theology of the Cross has its own counterfeit. To glorify suffering is not to seek it; the tradition never praised the man who provoked persecution, courted martyrdom for its drama, or manufactured a cross to prove his zeal. The saints did not run toward the fire; they refused to run from it. The confession that matters is forced upon a soul by the hour and the faith, and carried in obedience and grief, not chosen as a spiritual adventure or a martyr's costume. Where a man goes looking for a cross to bear, he has usually found only his own will, and the counsel of the lesson on private judgment applies with full force. Carry the cross that is given. Do not seize one; do not lay the given one down.