A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus began to address address the chief priests and the elders of the people, once more using parables. The reign of God, he said, may be likened to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the wedding, but they refused to come. So a second time, he sent other servants saying, tell those who are invited, look, I have my dinner all prepared.
My bollocks and corn fed cattle are killed. Everything is ready. Come to the feast. Some of the invited guests ignored the invitation invitation and went their way, one to his farm, another to his business. The rest laid hold of the servants, insulted them, and killed them.
At this, the king grew furious and sent his army to destroy those murderers and burn their city. Then he said to his servants again, the banquet is ready, but those who were invited were unfit to come. That is why you must go out into the byroads and invite to the wedding anyone you come upon. So the servants went out into the byroads and rounded up everybody they met, the good as well as the bad. They filled the wedding hall with banqueters.
Then the king came in to greet his guests, and when he did it however, he caught sight of a man not properly dressed for a wedding feast. He said to the man, my friend, how is it you came in here not properly dressed? The man had nothing to say. So the king then said to the attendants, bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the night to wail and grind his teeth. Four, the invited are many, the elect are few.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Here is another text of our blessed notice, this is Christ speaking.
Direct. Now it's there's a he's talking in parables, but his conclusion is in a parable. He draws he draws the the conclusion he wants his parable to illustrate. So there's no guesswork about it. And as far as I'm concerned, no matter how you look at this, it's pretty harsh stuff.
There's nothing soft about this reading we had to have this morning. It's very contradictory of the attitude which is abounds all around us today. You know, attitude that God is good, God will understand, he knows the secret of my heart, and all that kind of stuff and nonsense. Because it is nonsense. That's like saying, God, know you'll understand, so I just do what I want to do.
I will go out and fulfill myself. I only have one life to live. This I will give. To whom? To me.
Think of the number of marriages that broken up today with children, and the people in many of will try to take its best for the children. You really have to stand on your head several times to come to that conclusion, from what I've experienced in life. What are they seeking? They're seeking themselves. There's no question about it.
And because when you talk about self fulfillment, whose fulfillment are you talking about? And what kind of fulfillment are you talking about? See, this is the important point. The fact that you have a container, what is it what meaning has it for what you put in it? You can have a golden goblet adorned with diamonds and you could put slop in it.
Or you could fill it with gold. The fact that you have a golden goblet doesn't indicate whatsoever what you're putting in it. Now, connect this morning's parables as harsh as They're harsh. Notice the punishment this guy gets for not coming in with a properly dressed. A couple years ago I came back from a cruise, had a young high school boy on board.
We decided I think I mentioned it. We decided to go Well, not decided. We planned to go to Mass in St. Mary's Church, Annapolis. So the time comes for us to go over to the church, and he looks like I was gonna say like a bum.
No decent bum would have looked like he like he as he did. I said, is that the way you're going to church? He says, yes. What's wrong with it? I said, it doesn't look very decent to me.
He said, well, God doesn't care how I dress. It's He sees my heart. This is the almost his exact words. What do you mean by seeing a heart? I ask you, what does that mean?
Of course we know the importance or the lack of importance to dress. But who in who can live in this world that we're living in and say the kind of dress I wear is unimportant? It is blatant ignorance. But we're leaving that aside. Just look look at this parable of Christ.
The man who is in who comes to the wedding as an invited guest. In a sense, he's doing the man a favor. We don't understand all the ins and outs of this. But the fact that all these other bums that were picked up on the road came in properly dressed, shows that this one man who wasn't, it must have been because of some kind of negligence. But consider the severity of the punishment.
Christ doesn't play games. Giving these para he knows. He's talking to the priests and the elders of the people. That's what it says. Christ invites us.
What do we do about it? Now you'll say, I'm doing the best I can. Well, whenever I hear that phrase, I'm reminded of the of a of a sign. Never I've used this so much, I guess I repeated it many times here. But during the second world war, in a butcher shop in England, there was a sign on the man's door, Our best is none too good.
That's the attitude we have to have before God Almighty. We can't as we cannot excuse ourselves by saying, oh, I'll do this because God will understand that I love him, but even so, it doesn't make any difference what I do with my life, how I live it, what I do with my responsibilities, and all of this. He'll understand that my orientation is towards him. You know, this is crazy. But this is the way we many of us act.
And we forget that besides the virtue of generosity and love and benevolence and magnanimity, there is a virtue called justice. And if God is good, if God is loving, if God is all beautiful, he is also all justice. And if we are creatures, that by definition means we are his slaves, if you want to call it that. With one big difference. We are not slaves.
We are sons and daughters of God. How about that? And we are invited to the banquet feast. What do we make of it? We are not picked up along the roadside.
Even if we were picked up along the roadside, as indeed we are before baptism, it transforms us. It transforms us. And there I bring in the the the oration of this mass this morning, that we may so use the things of this world, that we may be happy, that we won't won't that we won't lose God because of his creatures. That's not the exact words, but that's the meaning. That we are destined for heaven.
Don't don't downgrade that. We are called to the banquet feast of God. We need this hope on the horizon sometimes. I think of Colby in that dungeon with absolutely no hope of rescue, starving day by day, hour by hour, seeing his friends all dying around him. And he he was the last.
He he didn't die. They had to they had to kill him. What did he have there in the way of hope? Except the grand hope that had dominated his whole life. Remember, that man was a consumptive almost from the time he was born.
He was a sick man all his life. That didn't stop him. Remember, before Oskis, Colby was a well known character for what he had achieved as a Franciscan. And despite a lot of not just his own personal health, but nothing is accomplished without opposition. But he had accomplished it.
So when he went down into that dungeon, when he went into Auschwitz, he was a marked man from the beginning. Beginning. What was his hope? Why was he doing this? What kept kept him going?
What keeps us going? Don't ever forget it. You're destined for heaven. Why did God make you? Well, we used to say, you can't ask the kids this anymore because they don't even they they don't they don't even see a decent catechism.
God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. Don't ever forget that last, to be happy with him in the next. We absolutely need this. I have spent a long time trying to recover a text from Cardinal Newman. I remember the gist of it very well, but I've never been able to find it.
Where he describes now remember, this is, you might say, the height of the industrial revolution in England. When to be a girl working in the factory was well well, it was even worse than slavery. And he pictures this girl walking along a London street, the fog, the rain, the heavy smoke, and she comes to a church all lighted. And she goes in, and they're having benediction of the blessed sacrament as we used to have it. Then he describes her emotions, what her life is, and what the dream of the future is for her.
Heaven. Heaven. And this church is about as close as she'll ever get to it in this life. But this is the promise. So we've got to hold this all together.
We are invited to the banquet. But the banquet is designed on God's plan, not on mine. The best I can do is to say, God, show me the way, but keep that keep that lamp of hope alight. You didn't make me just a sufferer or to be happy in this life, you made me for yourself in heaven. Let us keep that joyful vision alive.
We all need it. Even in with success remember success can can destroy you just as well as failure, however you interpret it. Even more so, we need that vision. We are only travelers in this world. Our destiny is not this world.
It's not the things of this world. It is God and our heaven in the next. Keep that joyous hope before your eyes, eyes. Luminous. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit.
Amen.