Jesus said, "Enter by the narrow gate. Wide is the gate and broad the road that leads to destruction, and many enter that way; narrow is the gate and constricted the road that leads to life, and those who find them are few" (Matt. 7:13-14). The way is a common metaphor for the religious path in many traditions, and is mentioned also in Acts 9:2; 18:26, 24:14. It is also, as we have noted on page 18, one of the terms for the Law. The Law was given through Moses to the Israelites that they might live a decent life, but although they often carried out its ritual demands well enough, their hearts were usually far from obeying its moral precepts. Amos and his successors were all as one in condemning them for this higher breach of the Law. In fact only when love rules the heart can the moral law be effortlessly fulfilled, and Christians would see the ministry of Jesus as bringing this love into the hearts of his followers and through them to the world. But the process still continues until every dark thing is brought to light, confessed to God and healed by his love, a love revealed categorically in the passion of his Son. The psalms, all written long before the incarnation, can only grope in this direction, but nevertheless their prescriptions for the good life are very valuable.

Psalm 1 contrasts the ways of the righteous and the sinner very starkly:

Happy is the one
who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide,
or follow the paths that sinners tread . . .
His delight is in the law of the Lord;
it is his meditation day and night.

He is like a firmly planted tree beside water, its foliage never fades, and he likewise prospers. The wicked, by contrast, are like chaff blown by the wind. The analogy is made more substantial by Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:24-27). The psalm ends with the statement of faith in God's protection over the righteous while the way of the wicked is doomed.

In terms of everyday life this view is usually correct; if a person leads a life of moderation and remembers God in his daily work he is much more likely to escape disaster than his heedless, agnostic brother. The life of prayer marshals one's inner resources, and one's relationships are purified as one's health is strengthened. Amongst the prescriptions for the good life, which is also the fulfilled life, are sobriety, chastity and alms-giving. The Law encourages these without detracting from the joy of living. Puritanism on the other hand tends to reject the pleasures of life, which are replaced by a stern, often loveless, type of religion. In due course the repressed drives towards pleasure assert themselves either in being projected on to alien groups, who are then the subject of envy, or else by breaking through the barrier of the person's own unconscious and precipitating wild orgies of profligacy. It is to the credit of Old Testament religion that the earthy part of the personality was not denigrated but rather given its own due in happy family relationships, feasts as well as fasts, and a general rejoicing in the world's fecundity. In this context we remember Psalm 104.

A particularly fine exhortation on this theme is Psalm 34. First there is a general praise to God's presence and his justice:

I shall bless the Lord at all times;
his praise will be ever on my lips . . .
Glorify the Lord with me;
let us exalt his name together . . .
Taste and see that the Lord is good . . .
Princes may suffer want and go hungry,
but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

Then comes the admonition to do good in order to enjoy a long, prosperous life. The main requirements are a still, honest tongue, a turning away from evil and doing good, and living in peace with the world. There follows a typical assertion of God's imminent help to all who do good, while he sets his face against those who do wrong so that their memory is erased from the earth. God is especially close to the cry of the righteous and also to those whose courage is sorely tried and whose spirit is nearly crushed.

Though the misfortunes of one who is righteous be many,
the Lord delivers him out of them all.
He guards every bone of his body, and none of them
will be broken.

This verse was fulfilled in John 19:36 in respect of the death of Jesus: The psalm ends on a savage note of punishment for the evildoers while the good person escapes and seeks refuge in God. The particular feature of the psalm that makes it so satisfying is the intimate love of God, closer to us than our dearest friend. In this love we can take our misfortunes in our stride, looking forward confidently to the day of our deliverance and the downfall of our enemies. This last theme, though real enough to human nature if not to the divine love for all that is created, is the kernel of both Psalms 37 and 73. The first, called "a mirror of Providence" by Tertullian (according to a footnote in the Jerusalem Bible), compares the fate of the virtuous and the wicked:

Do not be vexed because of evildoers
or envy those who do wrong.
For like the grass they soon wither,
and like green pasture they fade away.

The verses of this rather long psalm repeat this basic theme with minor variations, but now and then a more practical note is struck:

Better is the little which the righteous person has
than all the wealth of the wicked;
for the power of the wicked will be broken,
but the Lord upholds the righteous.

One particular portion near the end merits special notice:

I have seen a wicked man inspiring terror,
flourishing as a spreading tree in its native soil.
But one day I passed by and he was gone;
for all that I searched for him, he was not to be found.

Current history certainly underlines this observation; the events in Eastern Europe have transcended the fondest imagination of the free world. But one has to admit that the sufferings of the oppressed may have to proceed for a long time before the wicked are finally routed. In the same vein the Psalmist finds descendants surviving the honest man, whereas the transgressor and his progeny are all wiped out; again this is a dictum that is generally true, though the modern examples of genocide in our civilized century deserve a respectful caveat.

Psalm 73 is, if anything, even more outspoken on the theme of divine retribution. The writer begins, somewhat ironically it would seem, to praise God for his goodness to the upright and the pure in heart. But then comes the wrench: the all too obvious prosperity of the wicked. While the good man suffers affliction and every morning brings new punishment, it would seem as if the advantage of life does lie with the transgressor. But the Psalmist remains true to God even when he cannot grasp the paradox intellectually. Then suddenly the mystery is explained:

Indeed you place them on slippery ground
and drive them headlong into utter ruin!
In a moment they are destroyed,
disasters making an end of them.

It was the embittered mind of the writer that occluded a deeper understanding, a situation that afflicted Jeremiah likewise in the course of his painful ministry to his ungrateful fellow countrymen: "Lord, even if I dispute with you, you remain in the right; yet I shall plead my case before you. Why do the wicked prosper and the treacherous all live at ease?" (Jer. 12:1). Yes indeed the wicked have due punishment to face, but does this help the suffering righteous person? Poor Jeremiah had to await posthumous recognition by his fellow Israelites. This brings us to the possibility of personal survival of death, vague and unsatisfactory in its formulation at the time the psalms were written:

You guide me by your counsel
and afterwards you will receive me with glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And having you, I desire nothing else on earth.

Psalm 16 indicates how the righteous way may be pursued. The Psalmist castigates his fellow-countrymen who believe they can combine the monotheism of the true faith with an observance of the local cults:

All my delight is in the noble ones,
the godly of the land.
Those who run after other gods find endless trouble;
I shall never offer libations of blood to such gods,
never take their names on my lips.

The praise of the true God is very fine, his gratitude for his daily providence touching in its sincerity. The psalm is very suitable for the night, and is sometimes used in the office of compline:

I shall bless the Lord who has given me counsel:
in the night he imparts wisdom to my inmost being.
I have set the Lord before me at all times:
with him at my right hand I cannot be shaken.

Nowadays the danger of religious syncretism is less than that: of simply worshipping worldly things as our god. It may require a sharp course of pain to bring us to our senses: material benefits have their limits, but, as Psalm 119 puts it, "I see that all things have an end, but your commandment has no limit" (verse 96). And so a way of life founded on constant awareness of the divine presence, which is the very practice of prayer, is the impetus by which the proper way of life is followed. There is no guarantee of good fortune, but at least one is aware of a presence of support, strength and also counsel. As in Psalm 73 there is an intimation, little more perhaps than a hope, of personal survival of death as the reward of good living:

Therefore my heart is glad
and my spirit rejoices,
my body too rests unafraid;
for you will not abandon me to Sheol
or suffer your faithful servant to see the pit.

Sheol, like the Greek Hades, was the land the shades, of ghostlike immaterial forms of once living people. It had no personal reality, and the meanest person alive in the flesh was infinitely more fortunate than the erstwhile mighty in the place of the dead. Even as great a prophet as Samuel was to be located there (1 Sam. 28:12-19). A more enlightened view of the afterlife had to await the Maccabaean revolt against the hellenizing policies of Antiochus Epiphanes with the roll of Jewish martyrs that accompanied it (Daniel 12:2 is an important text about the resurrection of the body, while the Book of Wisdom written some hundred years later affirms the immortality of the soul in the third chapter). Nevertheless it must be admitted that even today we have no direct proof of a personal survival, despite the tantalizingly suggestive evidence of near-death experiences and spontaneous apparitions of dead friends who have made the transition. Survival of death, like the existence of God, is something we have to learn through the toil of our own lives; while some people admittedly seem more sensitive to spiritual experience then others, we are all travellers on the way while we are working in our physical body. If we live according to the Law but interpreted by love, we shall know as much as is good for us each moment of our lives on earth. This is the deeper message of Psalm 131.

Psalm 15, which has been called the gentleman's psalm, gives an account of the person who is eligible for divine fellowship. There should be blameless conduct, righteous dealing with others, and truthfulness. There should be no malice lurking in the heart or tale-bearing on the lips. The concern for his fellows should move beyond mere harmlessness to a generosity sufficient to reject any interest on money lent as well as any bribe against the weak and innocent. Such a person shows his scorn for those rejected by God but honours those who fear him. It seems unlikely that a God of love would reject any of his creatures no matter how sinful they were, and it would be preferable to interpret the sentence in terms of the sinful individual rejecting God. The scorn shown should be softened by compassion, lest the righteous person assumes some of the complacent judgementalism of the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14. This is indeed the limitation of this type of morality, as is seen even more clearly in Psalm 101. Here it is the person in charge who speaks, expounding the qualities of an ideally virtuous householder or ruler, according to how one interprets the words. There is first the customary undertaking to lead a wise and blameless life far removed from any shameful thing. Apostasy is reviled as are crooked thoughts. Then comes a more judgemental part:

I shall silence those who whisper slanders:
I cannot endure the proud and the arrogant.
I shall choose for my companions the faithful in the land;
my servants will be those whose lives are blameless . . .
Morning after morning I shall reduce all the wicked to silence,
ridding the Lord's city of all evildoers.

The problem of the evil corrupting the innocent is a perennial one. The downfall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah started with King Solomon's syncretistic worship of the one true God and the Canaanite deities of his various wives and concubines. After a bedraggled army of survivors returned some 400 years later from Babylonian captivity to repopulate Palestine and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, they were chastened and wise enough to heed the injunction of Ezra, some seventy years later, to dissolve all foreign marriages so as to keep a pure, undefiled Judaism. The end of that purity was the person of Jesus, under whose protection it became possible once more to mix freely with all sorts of people. The early Christian community had to learn that God has no favourites, and that gentiles were as acceptable as the Jews who formed the first Christian band. But now the gentiles were no threat to the integrity of the faith in which, as St Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, there is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for all are one person in Christ Jesus. Nevertheless St Paul does warn his Corinthian disciples of the danger of teaming up with unbelievers, and asks what partnership righteousness can have with wickedness. Can light associate with darkness? (2 Cor. 6:14).

One can only comment that it takes a long time for a Christian to assume even a little of the love of his Lord, though in our ravaged century, where all sorts of people who would previously have kept tightly to themselves have been brought very close through adversity (as well as the media of mass-communication), there is a great concern for the welfare of all under-privileged groups as well as the natural environment. We are of necessity all drawing closer together, and provided we hold fast to God in prayer and righteous conduct we need fear the contamination of no one. On the contrary our work, following that of Jesus, is to bring light to the dark areas of the world. In this way Isaiah's glorious prophecy may be fulfilled, "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who lived in a land as dark as death a light has dawned" (Isa. 9:2). Admittedly the incarnation of Christ was the herald of that light, but we ourselves have to complete its illuminating clarity before Christ comes again.

To return to Psalm 101, there can be no working relationship between decency and sin, for the latter would be sure to conquer. But there should be no absolute break in relationship either, lest the wicked faded away in their own perfidy and a part of God's creation lay in ruins. On the other hand the decent folk could easily become complacent and uncompassionate if left to their own devices. Holiness is what we should aspire towards, for in it the presence of God is revealed in all his love. That love brings the decent and the wicked together again in a new relationship, "For all alike have sinned, and are deprived of the divine glory" (Rom. 3:23).

The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14, mentioned already, shows us the true way of life. Though the publican (a venal Jewish tax-gatherer in the pay of the hated Roman occupying army) has nothing to recommend him to mankind, he remains acceptable to God because of his divine creation and his subsequent existence. Once he throws himself without reservation on the divine compassion he is immediately received, and we may assume that he then starts to live a righteous life, for who can know God and remain unregenerate? The virtuous Pharisee, by no means a hypocrite and honest in his religion, is so full of his own excellence that he has no place in it for the wretched publican. In other words his virtue lacks the one needful ingredient of holiness, which is love. St Paul spoke profoundly when he said, "I may give all I possess to the needy, I may give my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I gain nothing by it" (1 Cor. 13:3).

It is this love that does not come out in the Psalmist. Like the Law written before him and which he loves so dearly, what he writes is often excellent, but it lacks the driving force that alone will ensure its fulfilment. This is love, which comes from God whose nature is loving. It is much easier to love the Law than to love people; the first is immutable and sound, the second fickle, weak and usually destructive, especially when they are most needed. The passion of Jesus illustrates this theme as does no written commentary: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me" (John 14:6). When we consider these well-known words in the light of what has been written, their truth is obvious without the necessity of any Christian triumphalism.