28th Sunday in Ordinary Time Matthew 22, 1-14 Imagine that you have organised a big feast for your daughter’s wedding and after thinking and debating on who will be on your guest list, with one week to go before the wedding, you learn that a lot of your guests who you are expecting to be there started begging off and offering cheap excuses and even worse some of them wouldn’t give a word why, they just said that they can’t turn up. So in your desperation, you offered the invitation to people that you know but you haven’t seen them for a long time and in the end you had a cracker of a wedding feast. In the gospel for today, you have the king is in that bind, he had prepared everything for his son’s wedding but the people whom he is expecting wouldn’t want to attend for one reason or another but most of them purposely did so. And to his shock and horror, his messengers got abused and killed them. So exacted revenge on those evil people. And when the wedding is drawing near, he decided to invite everybody and he got the wedding hall filled to his delight. And then he saw somebody who is not wearing a wedding garment then he has to throw this guy out of the hall. In Jewish culture, it is normal to make two invitations. First, one will make an initial invitation, then those who are invited will try to suss out who got invited and who will or will not come. Usually, these people will look at the guest list and see if there are VIPs there who will come. Because we have to understand weddings are social events. Normally, a person who is organising a wedding would invite people of his class more or less in society. In our world for today, it is also the same, just take a look at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine, their guests were not only their relatives but also fellow royalties from other countries like the Sultan of Brunei or the King and Queen of Denmark and more. Most probably, these invited people also had feelers to ascertain who would and would not attend. However, in the gospel, the king did something very different, instead of calling of the wedding as was the custom in that situation, he invited all the people in the town plaza who on normal circumstances wouldn’t be invited. What Jesus is telling us today in the gospel is that since the original “invitees” to the banquet refused to attend, the wedding banquet is now offered to everybody. Sadly, those who were invited may have accepted the invitation, however, since they learned that the wedding involves Jesus and sadly some of them particularly the Pharisees, scribes and the elders of the people have rejected him and we who have accepted Jesus are now the ones who get invited. However, this invitation is not necessarily a freebie. Remember that in the parable, the king saw one person who is not wearing a wedding garment and got kicked out in the process. For us Catholics, we believe that this wedding garment is actually our baptismal garment that we wore when we were baptised. In the ritual of baptism, the priest tells our parents and all present that the baptismal garment is being presented to us to wear always and keep it unstained until the coming of the kingdom. We have to realise that while we are invited, we have two questions to answer: first, do we want to accept this invitation even if we are not worthy of it? Second, have we done our best to wear our wedding garment and keep it unstained? God continues to invite everybody for the wedding feast, which is actually eternal life in heaven. All we have to do is to accept it and make sure that we are wearing our wedding garment. And with what God is offering, who is really stupid enough to refuse? Fr. Elmer I. Ibarra, SVD Alice Springs, Australia
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 05:17:38 +0000
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