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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.
If, while sitting at the banquet, they had been asked whether they wanted to go and deal with the field or the oxen they recently acquired, they probably would have replied that those things didn't seem urgent. They could wait. Even the one who had recently married might have thought to enjoy the feast together with his wife before heading home where the practical necessities of building a new life together waited. The situation at the banquet would have been so overwhelmingly enjoyable that the things they once found to be urgently important no longer seemed so. They would have been caught up in the experience of a new freedom and depth of relationship such as they had never known. If they had to eventually return to their mundane quotidian existence, they would not have been in any hurry. But in fact, this group never made it to the banquet. When they evaluated their options they chose less rewarding things. On the surface, that seems confusing to us. But no doubt they did so because of a sense of perceived necessity balanced against a failure of imagination. They gave greater urgency to their worldly concerns than was appropriate. And they were unable to imagine just how good and worthwhile the banquet would be. And in this, they are just like us. We treat our worldly concerns as if our immortal souls depend on them. Our ability to imagine the heaven is so limited that it doesn't provide much motivating force. It feels as distant to us as a king's banquet did to the invited guests. Nice for some undetermined future date, to be sure. But hardly important to us at any given moment of a normal day. Saint Teresa of Avila compared life to a night in a bad motel. But we spend our days trying to do a better job furnishing the room.
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 ones who would actually be sufficiently motivated to attend the banquet were those who didn't imagine that they had better things to do. They were people who were so in need that they could easily imagine a banquet that could fulfill their longings. No longer would poverty leave them hungry, or being crippled, blind, or lame, prevent them from enjoying the best that life had to offer. The banquet itself would so fulfill them as to heal them virtually, if not in fact, since none of their limitations were able to keep them from the fullness of joy for which they longed. The imagination of this group wasn't preoccupied with the false promises of the world. They saw those clearly for what they were. Their situations and conditions made them ready to look elsewhere for what they most desired. Can we learn from them, without ourselves being poor or infirm, how important it is to richly imagine how good heaven will be? We get a chance to practice during every mass, which is, as we know, the marriage banquet of the Lamb. We often approach mass as merely more thing on a lengthy to-do list. We tend to prioritize anything and everything else more than it. We think that, if heaven will be like the mass, well, we aren't in any hurry to see it. But this is because we are attending the mass more like people in the first group who would rather be elsewhere. When we instead attend as a people of faith, bringing with us the expectation that the mass contains and allows us to access that which will fulfill us most, we become more able to access the truth of that reality.
When the mass begins to define our reality more than the myriad lesser things, we will find ourselves filled with the strength we need to do what Paul commanded his audience in Rome:
Let love be sincere;
hate what is evil,
hold on to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
anticipate one another in showing honor.
Do not grow slack in zeal,
be fervent in spirit,
serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope,
endure in affliction,
persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the holy ones,
exercise hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you,
bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice,
weep with those who weep.
Have the same regard for one another;
do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.
Matt Maher - The End And The Beginning
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