Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ironically, as I was preparing for the homily this past week, I received an invitation in the mail for a wedding that is being celebrated in July. Talk about the Word of God being active and alive!
With Facebook, there are more and more events to which we can be invited. Sometimes there are still the paper invitations, especially with weddings, but I have seen more and more people go to online invitations for open houses, parties, and we use it on our parish Facebook page for different events happening in our parish.
An invitation is, firstly, a sign that we are important to the person doing the inviting. I remember when I was helping to plan my ordination reception with my parents. There were all the considerations about whom to invite. Because you can’t only invite one second cousin. If you invite one, you have to invite them all. But sometimes you’re closer with some family members than with others. So if we’re invited, it is a sign that we are important enough to get the invite. And I think that’s one of the takeaways from the Gospel reading today: God considers each of us important enough to invite to His wedding feast. That’s no small thing. God wants each of us to share eternal life with him.
Isaiah describes that wedding feast using the image of the mountain of the Lord. There will be the best of foods and the best of wines. The quality of the food and wine is so good that Isaiah does something common when something is too good for words: he repeats himself. But beyond the food and wine, on the mountain of the Lord there is no more death, no more tears, and no more reproach (which is a word we don’t hear that much and means “the expression of disapproval or disappointment”). The day of the mountain of the Lord is a day of rejoicing, because God has saved us. And this reading is one of the suggested readings for funerals, because the mountain of the Lord should be the goal of our life, and it’s where we hope our loved ones go after death.
But, another takeaway from the Gospel is that not everyone RSVPs to the invitation in the affirmative. There are people who decline the invite for things of lesser importance: farming, business, or even just ignoring the invite altogether. Even though invited, they don’t give much weight to the relationship with the person who is inviting them to rejoice with him and his family. And when there is more room for guests, because so many people have not accepted the invitation, the king invites others, some who are good, but even some who are bad. Just because we are invited does not mean we go. We have to choose to go to the wedding; simply having the invitation is not enough.
And lastly, Jesus talks about one of the guests not having the proper garments for a wedding. Even though the king was glad to invite the good and bad alike, there were expectations about proper dress for the wedding. And the one who did not have the proper garment was thrown out into the darkness, in the place of “wailing and grinding of teeth.” When I hear those words about a garment, I immediately think of the words that I tell a child or adult at baptism: “you have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ. See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity. With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.” We are told at our baptism, when we receive our invitation, that on the mountain of the Lord, at the Lord’s wedding feast, there is a proper clothing requirement, and that requirement is supposed to white to represent our purity from sin. Reconciliation is, as it were, bleach, that, by God’s grace, washes clean our baptismal garment that we have soiled by our disobedience to God.
So often, evangelicals will ask the question, “Are you saved?”, and our Gospel helps us answer that question with a Catholic answer. We were saved when we were baptized, when we accepted the invitation from Jesus to attend His wedding feast in heaven as we died with Christ in the waters of baptism that freed us from sin and made us children of God and members of the Church. We are being saved as we, by the grace of God, try to keep our baptismal garment clean and daily act in such a way as to show that we want to attend the wedding at the end of time. And we hope to be saved when we are invited to the banquet hall, with the proper wedding garment, and are able to rejoice with Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven forever.
Being baptized isn’t enough. Baptism is the invitation to the wedding feast. We have to respond to the invitation that Jesus extends to us each day of our life. Because Jesus also says at the end of our Gospel, that, “‘Many are invited, but few are chosen.’” Let’s not ignore this invitation, or act in such a way that shows that we have better things to do than to go attend the wedding feast of the Lamb. Let us make our own the words that we hear at each Mass: “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”
