The Invitation to the Feast

In the ancient world, gods were often thought of as belonging to particular peoples and places. A nation had its gods, and those gods watched over that nation.

But Isaiah gives us a radically different vision.

He tells us that the Lord will prepare a feast of rich food and choice wine, not merely for Israel, but “for all peoples.” God will destroy the veil that covers all nations. Even more remarkably, Isaiah says that God will “destroy death forever.” He will wipe away the tears from every face, and the whole world will come to know the God who saves.

It is an extraordinary promise.

And yet, when we look around us, it is obvious that this promise has not yet reached its fulfillment.

People still suffer. People are hungry. People become sick. People die. Families are divided. Wars continue. There are certainly still plenty of tears to be wiped away.

St. Paul knew that very well.

When he tells the Philippians that he can do all things through Christ who strengthens him, he is not saying that Christ will prevent him from suffering. In fact, Paul says almost exactly the opposite.

He knows how to live with abundance, but he also knows how to live in need. He knows what it means to be well fed, but he also knows what it means to go hungry.

Christ does not make every difficulty disappear. He gives Paul the strength to remain faithful in the midst of them.

Paul has learned something that is easy for us to forget. His deepest need is not comfort, wealth, success, or freedom from suffering. His deepest need is God.

That does not mean those other things are unimportant. Hunger is real. Suffering is real. Paul is grateful for the help the Philippians have given him. But he has learned that none of those circumstances can separate him from the God who sustains him.

And so Paul can trust that, just as God has supplied what he truly needs, God will supply what the Philippians need “in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

That brings us back to the feast.

Jesus tells us about a king who prepares a wedding banquet for his son.

Everything is ready.

The feast has been prepared.

The invitations have gone out.

But the invited guests refuse to come.

Some simply ignore the invitation and go back to their farms and businesses. Others react violently against the king’s servants.

The problem is not that there is no room at the feast.

The problem is that the invited guests do not want what the king is offering.

And perhaps the most frightening part of the parable is that some of them do not reject the king dramatically. They are simply too busy. They have other things to do. The feast is there, the invitation has been given, but something else seems more important.

The chief priests and Pharisees listening to Jesus would have understood the warning.

God had been preparing his people for this feast for centuries. He had given them the covenant. He had sent the prophets. He had called Israel again and again to return to him.

And now the Son himself was standing before them.

Yet many were refusing the invitation.

So the king sends his servants out into the streets. They gather everyone they can find, “bad and good alike,” until the hall is filled with guests.

Here we begin to see Isaiah’s prophecy coming to fulfillment.

The invitation goes beyond those who first received it. The Good News goes out to the nations. The feast that God promised “for all peoples” is opened to the whole world.

The God of Israel is revealed as the God who desires to gather all peoples to himself.

But Jesus does not end the parable there.

That would make the lesson too easy.

One of the guests has entered the feast without a wedding garment. When the king confronts him, the man has nothing to say. He has come into the banquet hall, but something is still wrong.

The invitation was freely given, but the invitation also called for a response.

The wedding garment has been understood in several related ways throughout the Christian tradition: as the new life of grace, as charity, as the holiness that should mark those who belong to Christ. However we express the image, the basic warning is clear.

It is possible to receive the invitation outwardly without allowing God's grace to transform us inwardly.

And that is an important warning for us.

It is easy to hear this parable only as a condemnation of the people who rejected Jesus two thousand years ago.

But the invitation has now been given to us.

And receiving an invitation is not the same thing as responding faithfully to it.

This is the mystery of grace.

God freely offers us what we could never earn for ourselves. He calls us before we deserve to be called. He forgives sins we could never erase by our own efforts. He draws us into communion with himself. He gives us the grace to believe, to repent, to love, to become holy, and ultimately to share in his own life.

Everything begins with his gift.

But grace is not coercion.

God can invite us to the feast without forcing us to love him. He can offer forgiveness without forcing us to repent. He can call us to holiness without making our cooperation meaningless.

Grace does not destroy our freedom. Grace heals it and makes possible the response that God asks of us.

And grace does not merely invite us to enter the room and remain exactly as we were.

It changes us.

It calls the sinner to repentance. It teaches us to forgive. It loosens our grip on pride, resentment, selfishness, and sin. It makes us capable, little by little, of loving as Christ loves.

That was true for Israel, and it remains true for us.

The suffering we see around us is part of a world still wounded by sin.

Sin has damaged our relationship with God. It has damaged our relationships with one another. Even our relationship with creation bears the wounds of the Fall.

This does not mean that every person who suffers is being punished for some particular sin. Jesus explicitly rejects that kind of simplistic reasoning. Rather, it means that we live in a creation that has not yet been completely restored.

The tears are still here.

But they will not be here forever.

That is where Christian hope differs from mere optimism.

Our hope is not that human beings will eventually solve every problem. It is not that suffering does not really matter. It is not that death is somehow natural and we simply need to become comfortable with it.

Scripture calls death an enemy.

And in Jesus Christ, God has already begun to fulfill Isaiah’s promise.

Christ entered into suffering. He entered into death. And in the Resurrection, death did not have the final word.

The victory has already begun.

But its fulfillment is still ahead of us.

We live in that tension. Christ is risen, but we still bury the people we love. Grace is already at work, but sin still wounds us. The Kingdom of God has broken into the world, but we still pray, “Thy kingdom come.”

We live between the invitation and the fulfillment.

The feast has been prepared.

The invitation has gone out.

And we are being asked how we will respond.

We can ignore the invitation. We can become so occupied with the things of this world that we have no interest in the feast. We can spend our lives saying that we will respond to God eventually, when we are less busy, when things settle down, when it is more convenient.

We can even enter the banquet outwardly while resisting inwardly the grace that seeks to transform us.

Or we can receive what God offers.

We can repent when we sin.

We can forgive when resentment would be easier.

We can love when selfishness would be easier.

We can allow the grace of God to make us, slowly and sometimes painfully, into the people he created us to be.

And when we fail, as we certainly will, we can return again to the God who invited us in the first place.

Because the hope of this Gospel does not rest primarily on our strength.

Paul knew better than that.

Our hope rests on Christ who strengthens us.

And for those who receive his grace and persevere with him, Isaiah’s promise still stands.

Death will not have the final word.

Sin will not have the final word.

Suffering will not have the final word.

Our failures will not have the final word.

God will.

And when his work is complete, the veil will finally be destroyed, death will be swallowed up forever, and the tears that remain today will finally be wiped away from every face.