TWENTY-EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2023)
Readings:
Isaiah 25:6-10
Psalms 23:1-6
Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20
Matthew 22:1-14
For three consecutive Sundays we have been treated to three parables about the kingdom of God, all of them pointedly aimed at the “chief priests and the elders.” The parables were not spoken by Jesus to merely chastise the religious leaders. They were spoken to prod them out of their ambivalence, if not outright hatred, for Jesus, and to get them to think more broadly, more openly, about who it was who was speaking to them. At the beginning of the month our gospel reading spoke of the two sons asked by the father to go into the vineyard – one went, one didn’t. The parable ends with the striking acclamation “even when you saw [others flocking to Jesus] you did not change your minds and believe in Him.”
Last week the parable was about the landowner with the perfect vineyard, who leased it to tenants, who then refused at harvest to give the landowner his share of the grapes. To the chief priests and the elders Jesus issues a stark warning: “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus is once again speaking in parable directly to the “chief priests and elders of the people.” This time the protagonist is a king [God], who is throwing “a wedding feast for his son.” All brides and mothers of a bride would surely testify to the complexity of planning a wedding celebration, and perhaps one of the most complex things, since it involves two different parties – a bride and a groom – is preparing a reasonable list of invites. One can only imagine how broad the list of a king would be, but when his invitation went out, with the banquet already fully prepared, “some ignored the invitation and went away”…. Some “laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.” Not the kind of response one would imagine, and, even in Jesus’ time, the insult of refusing an invitation from a king would be great. The king’s response is similar to what is being played out on the world’s stage, but rather than see the feast go to waste, he sent his servants out” into the main roads, gathering guests to fill the hall, “bad and good alike.”
It would be easy to be distracted by the king’s response to the man “without a wedding garment,” for the sudden invitation would suggest that there would be many there dressed ‘inappropriately.’ The king calls him “my friend,” and Jesus has already said “bad and good alike” ended up at the wedding. The garment surely has more to do with a “disposition.” The person was not ready to be there, not prepared to enjoy the feast that the king had made ready. Like all the gifts that come to us from above, we must be ready to receive them. The man without a “wedding garment” was not ready to “party.”
Jesus’ final message in today’s gospel is not dissimilar to those parables that preceded it: “Many are invited, but few are chosen.” The focus of today’s parable is not on sons, not on tenants, but on the very God that the “chief priests and elders” were proclaimed they worshipped. The message of today’s gospel is not the ‘fewness’ of God’s choices, for it is a benevolent God that shines through the parable. God is not just enraged with those who don’t show up to the party, he is extraordinarily generous in His distribution of invitations. Even his extreme disappointment at those who choose to ignore his initial invitation, his desire to celebrate his son’s wedding is undiminished, satisfied that complete strangers, both good and bad, will feast on his “calves and fattened cattle.”
As Christians we have been clothed with the necessary “garment” at our baptism, and we live our lives in such a way that at our deaths we will take our place at the banquet God has prepared for us. The Eucharist is the foretaste of that banquet, a banquet prophesied by Isaiah in our first reading, a “feast of rich foods and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.” Those first invited deliberately ignored, with great insult, the king’s invitation. It is more likely in our world that our refusal to come to the feast would be foolish oversight. The distractions of this world are numerous and weigh heavy, and we are more likely to never take the time or make the effort to hear the gentle voice of God beckoning us to the banquet that awaits us. Let us never allow ourselves to be so spiritually blind, so spiritually deaf, as to not receive with joy the invitation to eternal happiness that comes from a loving God.
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