Worthiness for the Wedding Banquet
A woman decided that she was going to have a dinner party for a good number of her friends. So, she spent most of the week cleaning, baking, cooking, and preparing the table. And when everyone finally arrived and sat down to eat, she turned to her six year old daughter and said, “Honey, why don’t you say the blessing?” “Mommy,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.” “Just simply say what you hear Mommy say.” So the little girl bowed her head and said, “Dear Lord, why on earth did I invite all of these people to dinner?”
Like the woman in the story, you and I can occasionally have regrets about the invitations that we offer. But that is not the case with our God. For our God is a God of invitation. A God who is constantly inviting all people into relationship, inviting all to share in divine life and love.
Invitation as a Threat
The difficulty of understanding today’s parable of the wedding feast is the strange response of those who were invited. Some simply said, “No,” and went about their own business. But the parable tells us that the rest mistreated the messengers and killed them. So why would you kill someone who is inviting you to a wedding feast? The response seems absurd. In fact the only way I can make sense out of it is to imagine that those who responded in that way did not see the king’s offer as an invitation but somehow as an attack. They did not perceive the request to come as a gift but something that would do them harm.
How can we explain such a mistaken conclusion? To answer that question we need go no further than our own experience. As you and I make decisions and choices in our lives, denial, hurt, and pre-judgments can skew our perception so that what is a positive opportunity can appear as a threat. (Fr. George Smiga)