Invited to the feast

 This is my homily for Sunday, the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.  The readings for Sunday are here.  I had recently written that the parables for the past few Sundays can be perilous for a preacher, because of what I view as Matthew's polemical intent toward Jews with whom his community probably was in conflict.  I tried to steer well clear of the polemics and attempted instead to "accentuate the positive" to be found in this parable.   Here is the text of the homily:

The temperature that night in Chicago was brutally cold, with single-digit or even negative temperatures, the kind of night in which nobody would choose to leave their warm homes if they didn’t have to.  Or - unless they were football fans, because the Chicago Bears were playing a night game at home that evening.  Even in the extreme temperatures, the Bears fans didn’t desert their team: they sat there in the cold and the wind, bundled up in multiple layers of coats, hats, scarves, gloves, mittens and blankets.  I was no dummy: I stayed home and watched the game on television. 

During the telecast, when the camera panned across some of those bundled-up fans in the stands, John Madden, who was broadcasting the game that evening, and who is nothing if not a man of the people, praised those fans on national television – he said something along the lines of, “Look at those Bears fans!  I love Chicago fans – those are real football fans.  They’re not going to let the cold weather stop them from rooting for the Bears.”  Then the camera panned the stadium’s luxury skyboxes.  The skyboxes presumably are well heated, because nobody in the skyboxes had a jacket on.  They were dressed for indoors, in their stylish sweaters and designer jeans and what-not.   And there must have been television sets in the skyboxes, because when the occupants of the skyboxes realized that they were being shown on television, many of them waved through the skybox windows to the camera.  And Madden, bless his heart, boo’d them on national TV.  He said, “Booo!  Booo!  Those aren’t real fans!”  I love that about John Madden.

The fact is, the world is divided into people who sit in the bleachers and people who have access to the luxury suites.  People who sit in the bleachers buy their overpriced hot dogs and beer from vendors.  People who watch the game from a skybox have a well-stocked fridge and a sumptuous buffet and help themselves to as much as they want to eat or drink.  Oh, and at some point during the game, the dessert cart shows up.  People in the bleachers get scorched by the sun and soaked by the rain or frostbitten by the cold.  But every skybox is snug and dry and perfectly temperature controlled.  People in the bleachers have to put up with drunks, loudmouths and all manner of obnoxious strangers around them.  People in the skyboxes put up only with people like themselves: the select and fortunate people who are with them. 

We can be certain that the guests whom the king first invited to his son’s wedding feast in today’s/tonight’s parable were the skybox types, not the riffraff from the bleachers or the grandstand.  The invitees would have been those who were likely to be in a king’s social circle: the courtiers and flatterers and hangers-on; the wealthy and powerful and beautiful and the connected.  

So when the king was snubbed by his so-called friends, and sent his servants out into the streets and main roads to invite whomever they found, chances are that mostly they found riffraff.  The bleacher types.  Regular, poor people with their normal, poor people lives and problems.  And that’s how we should imagine ourselves in this parable: as the riffraff.  We’re the ones who were invited second to the feast. In those days, kings didn’t consort with the riffraff, period.  The idea that a member of the riffraff like us would ever get a glimpse inside the king’s palace would have been unimaginable.  That we could actually be inside the king’s great hall, with a servant coming by to refill our wine glass, and us welcome to help ourselves to food from the tables that would have been piled high with the choicest fare – none of us would have had any conception that we would ever get within a mile of that sort of a scene, any more than most of us ever will even be allowed onto the staircase that leads to the luxury suites at Wrigley or Guaranteed Rate Field.

We couldn’t imagine such a thing – and yet it’s happened.  It’s happened to us.  Our king, God, has sent his servants to fetch us, and has opened the mighty gates of his palace to us, and has rolled out the welcome mat for us.  By rights, our place is outside the gates, far outside, but he wants us to come in, where he can be our gracious host and tend to our every need.  And if we are being rational about all this, we should have zero expectation that this amazing bit of luck is anything that we deserve, or that we’ve earned, or to which we have a right.  Because it isn’t, and we haven’t, and we don’t.  If we’re invited inside the palace, it’s sheer kindness, sheer generosity, on the part of our King. 

In fact, it’s sheer love on his part.  Our King is good, and he has all these good things, and rather than horde them to himself like earthly kings do, he wants to share them with us.  He wants to share his grace, and his joy, and his peace with us.  He wants to heal all our wounds and fill us with juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.  He wants to share new life in his Son with us.

By rights, we should count ourselves lucky indeed to be invited to such a feast.  We should fully appreciate what good fortune has been visited upon us.

But it’s an interesting thing about human nature that we can’t sustain our attitude of gratitude for very long.  The fact is, most of us aren’t very good at it, and we reach the point of gratitude exhaustion after a while.  And ingrates that we are, we begin to take for granted the very great and undeserved gifts we’ve been given.  Sometimes we even start to complain and become demanding.  “Oh no, not the Chardonnay again!  I wanted Sauvignon Blanc!”   “I think the roasted lamb is a little under-seasoned tonight.”  It’s easy to lose sight that, by all that is right, we shouldn’t be there at all, and we should consider ourselves extremely fortunate to be able to eat and drink at the king’s board.

Most of us, I believe, were baptized when we were infants, so early in our lives that we didn’t understand at the time what was happening to us, and we have no memory now of that great event in our lives.  And while it’s a blessing that the graces of the sacrament were made available to us so early in our lives, it’s also a shame, in a way, that we have so little appreciation of the wonderful gift we’ve been given in baptism.  Because on that day of baptism, everything changed for us, for the better.  On the day of our baptism, the gates were opened to us, the welcome mat was rolled out, and we were ushered into the king’s hall.  And he has been feeding us ever since.

Once in a while, it’s good to be reminded of all this.  Because whatever is good in our lives, is not because of us, it’s because of God.   We’ve been plucked from the grandstand and invited into the skybox.  Once we’ve become accustomed to skybox living, it’s easy to start to think that we deserve to be in a skybox, and that it’s normal for everyone to watch the game that way.  God knows the truth, though: that what is normal and just is for us to be out shivering in the subzero temperatures.  God has invited us into the skybox – into his home.  Now is as good time as any to offer thanks for that good fortune.