The Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who gave a wedding feast for his son.
He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the feast,
but they refused to come.
When the guests refused to come at first he tried to appeal to them, explaining that the feast he had prepared was extremely desirable. The ones whom he sent to persuade them were messengers like Ezekiel who conveyed the overwhelming goodness of his plan.
I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you,
taking from your bodies your stony hearts
and giving you natural hearts.
Some simply ignored this second invitation, preferring the mundane tedium of their farms and businesses to a transformative celebration. But others responded with unexpectedly intense intense hostility, laying hold of his servants, mistreating them, and killing them. These were people who found the message of the prophets to be intolerable. They didn't want new hearts because they were convinced the ones they had were fine, and took offense at the suggestion that there was anything wrong. They were so attached to the current state of affairs in their lives that they found the invitation to the banquet to be threatening. The responded violently in an attempt to silence that invitation, trying to mute the voice of their conscience which resonated with its urgency.
Go out, therefore, into the main roads
and invite to the feast whomever you find.’
The servants went out into the streets
and gathered all they found, bad and good alike,
and the hall was filled with guests.
Not everyone responded negatively to the invitation to the banquet. Those who were not already living lifestyles of smug self-satisfaction saw the invitation for the amazingly generous offer that it was. They knew that they had done nothing to deserve it. It had come to them entirely unexpectedly, as sheer grace. Yet even among this group not everyone could be bothered to make an appropriately complete response.
He said to him, ‘My friend, how is it
that you came in here without a wedding garment?’
But he was reduced to silence.
One person thought he could enter the feast unchanged from his daily life in the world. He couldn't be bothered to avoid soiling his garments with sin en route. He seemed to assume that this sort of worldly contamination would not be a problem, even though a wedding was cause to wear the one's best and finest. He didn't realize the necessity of being robed in holiness and clothed with good works. He was like a Christian who failed to bring his baptismal robe unstained into God's Kingdom. The point, of course, is that it was within the realm of possibility for him to keep his clothing clean or to have it cleaned if necessary. And so too for us. Grace makes it possible for us to be cleansed from all of our impurities, as Ezekiel said. What we cannot do is attempt to proceed to the banquet of the Lamb while ignoring the gradually thickening accretion of sin on our spirits. The individual particles of dirt may seem minor. But the indifference that leads us to ignore them shows contempt for the host of the feast.
We may not be among those who are hostile to God's messengers (though it sometimes depends on what and how they preach to us). But many of us are tainted by lukewarm indifference. We take our daily life of farm and business to be primary and God's invitation to be something to be slotted in eventually, when it fits. But the opposite should be true. Even when we do initially recognize the importance of the invitation we still tend to overlook our own need for transformation, preferring to ignore the stains on our souls rather than to address them. Perhaps we do this because the cleaning process seems difficult. But we don't have to do the scrubbing ourselves. Rather we are meant to come to the living water we find in the sacraments to be washed clean therein. Then we use the grace we have received to make our lives correspond to our stated repentence by living in a way that befits guests invited to the heavenly banquet.
A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
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