November 3
The Great Banquet
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Today’s Gospel: Luke
14:15-24
(The Great Banquet)
One of his fellow guests on hearing this said to him, “Blessed is the one who will dine in the kingdom of God.” He replied to him, “A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many. When the time for the dinner came, he dispatched his servant to say to those invited, ‘Come, everything is now ready.’ But one by one, they all began to excuse themselves. The first said to him, ‘I have purchased a field and must go to examine it; I ask you, consider me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have purchased five yoke of oxen and am on my way to evaluate them; I ask you, consider me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have just married a woman, and therefore I cannot come.’ The servant went and reported this to his master. Then the master of the house in a rage commanded his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame.’ The servant reported, ‘Sir, your orders have been carried out and still there is room.’ The master then ordered the servant, “Go out to the highways and hedgerows and make people come in that my home may be filled. For, I tell you, none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner.’”
Reflection:
In today’s
parable, a man prepares a great feast and sends his servant to tell the invited
guests that everything is ready, only to hear one excuse after another: a field
that needed looking at, five yoke of oxen to try out, a new wife to stay home
with, and what stings about those excuses is that none of them is wicked, since
they are all perfectly ordinary things that slowly fill up an ordinary life
until there is no room left for the invitation that matters most. Jesus is
describing us as much as anyone, because most of us would never say no to God
out loud, and yet we say it quietly every day by being too busy, too tired, or
too wrapped up in our own plans to show up at the table He has set for us.
The part of the story I find most encouraging is what the master does next,
because he does not cancel the banquet or make it smaller, but sends his
servant out into the streets and alleys to bring in the poor, the crippled, the
blind, and the lame, and then out again to the highways and hedgerows until the
house is full. God’s invitation does not expire just because we ignored it the
first time, and it does not belong only to the people who looked like the best
candidates, so there is a seat waiting for you no matter how long it has been
since you last came, and there is one for the person you have given up on as
well. The feast is real, and it begins here, at every Mass where we are fed
with the Lord Himself, and the only thing that can keep us from it is deciding
that something else matters more.
Saint Martin de Porres, the Dominican lay brother from Lima whom the Church
remembers today, spent his life doing exactly what that servant was sent to do,
because he was the son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed woman of African
descent, was looked down on by many because of his birth, and was welcomed into
his Dominican community only as a humble helper, yet he made himself the one
who went out and gathered in everyone the world had overlooked. He tended the
sick, fed the hungry who came to the priory door, and treated the poorest of
the poor as honored guests, and his humility was so great that in the end the
whole city came to love him, which shows us that the people who bring others to
the Lord’s table are often the very ones who never expected to be seated near
the head of it.
Mary received an invitation far greater than any dinner, and when the angel
asked for her yes, she did not ask for time to finish her own plans or put her
affairs in order, but gave herself to God on the spot, and because she did, the
whole banquet of salvation was opened to every one of us. It is Beneath the
Standard of Mary that we learn to set down whatever is in our hands and
answer the Lord’s invitation the way she did, right away and without excuses.
What excuse do you find yourself giving most often when the Lord invites
you to spend time with Him? Is there someone in your life you have stopped
inviting to the table because you assumed they would never come? And what is
one thing you can set down today so that you arrive at the feast on time?
Rosary Man Jim 🌹
Freely given. Freely shared.
