Homily: 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Friends, in this reading that we have
just heard, Jesus is once again using a parable to demonstrate an important
point; and we remember that these parables are really allegories: symbolic
stories using familiar images to reveal a hidden reality. In this particular allegory, Jesus is
attempting to teach the Jewish religious elite that they are about to lose the
favor they had with God because of their failure to respond to his call. Let’s take a closer look at this parable.
The king who prepares the wedding
feast is obviously God and his son is obviously Jesus, the Second Person of the
Holy Trinity: God’s “only begotten Son”.
The wedding feast is obviously the banquet of the Eucharist (although
the Jewish religious elite of the time would not have known that as we know it:
they would have only thought of a great, continual feast that would be
celebrated when the Messiah would come and conquer all of their enemies; still
they would have understood the wedding feast/banquet imagery). The invited guests are God’s chosen people,
the descendants of the ancient Israelites: the Jews. The king’s servants who go to call the invited
guests are the prophets; and the “bad and the good” who were then invited in
the place of God’s chosen people are the Gentiles: that is, the people of all
the nations that weren’t part of the ancient Israelite ancestry.
The parable, of course, is a warning
to the Jewish religious elite that their pride in their religious authority,
which led them to ignore, at best, and mistreat, at worst, God’s prophets,
would soon be their downfall. Not only
would their enemies come and destroy them and burn their city (which really
happened, by the way, in 70 AD when the Romans sacked Jerusalem), but their
status as a chosen people would no longer be exclusive; rather, it would be
extended to the Gentiles: peoples who would gratefully receive it.
While it certainly would be easy for
us to sit back after hearing this parable again and say “Haha, those guys sure
messed up didn’t they?” I think that it would be foolish for us not to take it
as a warning for ourselves, here and now.
Yes, we, who are sitting here, are the “Church of the Gentiles”, who are
the beneficiaries of the complacency of the ancient Jews, but I wonder if we
haven’t become complacent, ourselves.
One of the most disturbing statistics about Catholics in recent years
has been that less than 25% of those who declare themselves Catholic attend
Mass on a regular basis. Notice that we’re
not talking about all baptized Catholics, because many baptized Catholics no
longer declare themselves to be
Catholic. Rather we’re talking about
those who still consider themselves to be Catholic and that 75% of these
persons are so complacent about what it means to be Catholic that they no
longer consider it a necessary part of their Catholicism to attend Mass. Not to mention the fact that many Catholics
who do attend Mass with some regularity feel little remorse for having missed
Mass on any given occasion (I sit in that confessional, so I know). Couple this with the fact that I’ve already
discussed—that the wedding feast described in Jesus’ parable is an image of the
Eucharist that we, as Catholics—the Gentile Church—celebrate—and all of a
sudden this parable looks like it might be aimed squarely at us.
My friends, the Eucharist—the wedding
feast that God, our king, has prepared for his Son, Jesus, and to which we have
been invited—is the greatest and most generous gift God has (and will) ever
offer to us. It is both the source of
our entire Christian life (that is, the “spring of living water” from which all
Christianity flows) and it is its summit of that life (that is, the end to
which all Christianity leads). To deny
this is to deny the Christian faith. And,
thus, to disregard the Eucharist as something “disposable” in the Christian
faith is to offend God at the level that the king in Jesus’ parable was offended
when his invited guests all greatly disrespected his son by finding excuses for
not attending his wedding feast. Please
tell me, who among you would not exclude from your friendship a so-called “friend”
who offended you in such a great way?
My brothers and sisters, if we, in any
way, hold this attitude (that is, that the Eucharist is a “disposable” part of
our faith), then we must purge that idea from our minds and our hearts we must
and ask God for the grace to receive this gift of the Eucharist as the most
precious gift we have ever received in our lives. And if we know someone—especially someone who
still considers themselves to be Catholic—who has so discarded this gift that
he / she doesn’t attend Mass, then we must find ways to express to that person
what a great gift the Eucharist is, and, thus, invite them back to this source and
summit of their Christian faith. And
why? So that God does not decide to
treat us like he treated those ancient Jews and turn from us in order to invite
those who will truly be grateful for the gift he is offering.
My friends, if we need any evidence that
the Eucharist is the greatest gift that God has (and will) ever offer to us, we
should look no further than to those who have converted to the faith. While the desire for the Eucharist may not
have been the thing that brought them to the Church, I have found that, once
they understand it, it becomes the thing that keeps them in the Church. They are signs to us that God continues to “send
his servants out into the streets” to invite the “Gentiles” and reminders to us
that God will not tolerate our complacency when it comes to his
generosity. Therefore, as we welcome our
sister Patty to share in this Great Wedding Feast for the first time, let us
renew in our own hearts our gratitude for being among the invited so that we
might give worthy thanks to God, our Father: both here in this Mass and by our
lives of faithful discipleship in the world.
Given
at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – October 15th, 2017
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