28th. Sunday, Year A
Isaiah 25:6-10;
Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14
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On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide
for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy rich food and pure
choice wines. On that day it will be said: “Behold our God, to Whom we
looked to save us! This is the LORD for Whom we looked; let us rejoice and be
glad that He has saved us!”
This
passage, indeed the whole of the first reading, is wonderfully suited to
picture the blessings of Christianity, and by that, I mean above all, the
Catholic religion, for those who, be they pagans or nominal Christians,
have felt the anguish of ignorance accompanied by a vaguely oppressive sense of
sinfulness and inadequacy, weakness and insignificance, those who have felt the
insufficiency of all merely human ideals to enable them to withstand the trials
and temptations of life – “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I
do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) -- and all who have suffered from
divisions within themselves, within family, society, and between nations.
All who have experienced and want to learn from such occasions of suffering and
sorrow, the Catholic faith is a most wonderful reconciliation with God, with
the world, and with one’s own self. It is a setting free, a restoration
of peace, meaning, beauty, and above all, of hope, to life.
Nevertheless,
all these wonderfully great blessings do not easily penetrate through to the
warm sensitive core of men as individuals. For men are formed by, and
live most fully in, their personal relationships with others. It is in
the deliberate and free gift and acceptance of whole-hearted personal love (not
the impulsive, driving passion of sexual encounters!) that a human being first
opens him- or her-self up for maturity. When a man or woman gives and
receives such love for the first time they are changed thereby, and life is no
longer the same as it was before that encounter and embrace… it is the initial
warrant and seal of one’s worth as a personal being.
Now
it is the Eucharist which brings that glow of personal, loving, encounter,
fully into prominence in the spiritual life of a Catholic Christian, for the
Eucharist is indeed the feast, the banquet, of rich food and pure, choice,
wines. For the most stupendous fact and meaning of the Eucharist is
that Jesus, the very Son of God made Man for us, there presents and renews (not
repeats!) His original and eternally enduring gift of Himself as man in
sacrifice for us all, and in Personal love to each one of us who
receive Him. Now that gift of total love by Jesus is unique and
absolutely inimitable: we human beings can only offer ourselves partially to
another, and can also only receive another’s gift partially, even though most
sincerely and committedly. Uniquely with Jesus, in the Eucharist, is total
gift and commitment to be found, and -- by the Spirit of Jesus -- to be
gradually and most carefully nourished in us who receive Him. As
foreshadowed on the human level, so here most sublimely, this union of love
(CHARITY) is indeed the ultimate fulfilment of one’s being, it is the total vindication
of one’s worth as a human-being now become a child of God the Father in
Jesus. For Christ is Truth, Love, and Life, and He comes to us that He
might give us a share – chosen for us by the Father – in His Own Life of Truth
and Love before the Father.
All
these blessings, which reach to and transfigure the core of our human being are
ours in Christ indeed, but we are only aware of them through faith,
and we have to pray that we might grow in faith precisely in order that we may
appreciate, esteem, value, and respond to these blessings to which our Father
invites us.
That
is not always easy for us since we, like children who seek all that glitters,
are very subject to the impressions of our external senses and our resultant
inner emotions, and these can easily drive us to over-involvement in worldly
activities; not that is wrong to be fully involved in all that we undertake --
indeed St. Paul warns us against half-heartedness – but that over-involvement
so easily leads us to over-esteem success in those worldly activities and
under-value those spiritual blessings which we can only perceive through faith,
to which our instinctive emotions do not immediately respond. And it is
here that we must turn to our Gospel reading.
The
invited guests in Our Lord’s parable were first of all,
self-regarding-righteous Jews, and the OT covenant with God was the first
invitation. Jesus Himself was the servant ultimately sent to announce
that the Messianic feast, long foretold, was now prepared. Because that
meant leaving aside the pursuit of power, profit, and success, the excuses came
back thick and fast from all sides with varying degrees of politeness: but they
all had the same fundamental meaning, ‘We have much more important things to do
just now than come to your feast.’
That
is the great danger for us today, People of God: we can come to value earthly,
visible, emotionally stirring, activities exclusively if we allow ourselves to
become too wrapped up in them … the traditional fault, indeed, of too many
husbands in their family life, and sadly the modern, and yet more unnatural
failing of some wives – I am writing as a Catholic priest for married
Catholics, not for legal ‘partners’ or pseudo-wives -- who find they have not
enough time, when money can be earned and personal success be gained, for
them to be true mothers. Of course, the surety which such sinners feel in
denying any significant value to religion is not so much a proof that religion
has nothing to offer, no meaning for them, no reality in itself, but rather an
indication of the extent to which they have been blinded by earthly
attractions, and deafened by the cares and solicitudes of life, to the
intimations of spiritual truths.
In
this parable Jesus teaches on the one hand that no one can enter the Kingdom of
Heaven by his own efforts without an invitation from God which has to be not
only heard but also recognized and accepted as being for our
compliance; and, on the other hand, that no one is condemned to remain
outside the Kingdom except as a result of their own deliberate rejection or
willful disdain of God’s offer.
People
of God, there is no automatic predestination or salvation, no impersonal
fate. A choice has to be made by all of us; it is a choice for
Jesus, a choice involving life or death, a choice to be made not
once by God judging for us or against us, but one to be made and re-affirmed by
ourselves many, many, times over the years of our life.
Lest
light-headed, and perhaps big-headed(!) youngsters, care-oppressed adults,
weary elders, are inclined to think of these things as of no modern importance,
let me quote some tragically beautiful and yet so sadly mixed-up thoughts of a
modern philosopher of renown, Bertrand Russell:
“The
centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain – a curious, wild pain – a
searching for something transfigured and infinite. The beatific
vision—God, I do not find it. I do not think it is to be found – but the
love of it is my life.”
The
only-begotten, most beloved, Son of the heavenly Father came as our Lord Jesus
to save those original likenesses of God still loved by His Father but cut off
from the benefits of that love by life preferences and practices adopted
through ignorance and weakness. Our Lord died and rose from death to save
those spoiled ‘likenesses’; and ascending back to His Father in heaven He
offered them the Gift of His Most Holy Spirit to enlighten their ignorance and
support their weakness, and, as living members of the Body of Christ on
earth, Mother Church (unknown or at least unappreciated by Bertrand
Russell looking for understanding and truth exclusively to his own powers of
human thought) to lead them to the fulness of earthly life and heavenly glory
as ‘other Christs’ in the beatific vision divinely revealed to us in Mother
Church, and so vaguely loved and doubted by Russell.
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