Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Glory to you, O Lord Jesus. Again in reply, spoke to the chief priests and elders of the people in parables, saying, 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 feasts, but they refused to come a second time. He sent other servants, saying, tell those invited, behold, I have prepared my banquet.
My calves and fattened cattle are killed, and everything is ready.
Come to the feast.
Some ignored the invitation and went away, one to his farm, another to his business.
The rest laid hold of the servants, mistreated them and killed them.
The king was enraged and sent his troops, destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
Then he said to his servants, the feast is ready. But those who were invited were not worthy to come.
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.
But when the king came in to meet the guests, he saw a man there, not dressed in a wedding garment.
The king said to him, my friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?
But he was reduced to silence.
Then the king said to his attendants, bind his hands and feet and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
Many are invited, but few are chosen.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
It is not uncommon to come across certain passages in scripture that are really difficult to understand, ones that we're not sure exactly what Jesus is trying to tell us.
And we can look to commentaries from experts to try to gain some insight, but sometimes even those insights really don't kind of ring true to our hearts.
So what I've always done is I try to look at what is the overarching thing that Jesus has been trying to tell us in the Scriptures right before and sometimes right after.
Is there something he's trying to hammer home?
And at this particular part of Matthew's Gospel, he is forever trying to point out the faulty thinking in those people that were in authority.
The temple leaders, the scribes, the people who thought they had their faith lived out perfectly.
The ones who stopped seeing faith as something that was meant to transform their hearts and instead started to see faith as simply a list of rules to be followed to appease God.
So he gives this particular story as a way to illustrate that those people who think they're the righteous ones, the initial guests that are invited to the wedding were the ones that didn't quite get it. They were invited to something that was powerful, that was life changing, and they failed to come.
They didn't come to the feast. They didn't start living out that transformative existence that should have been written in their hearts.
But the confusing part actually comes with that guest that came in off the street that wasn't in a wedding garment. What does he mean by this?
Well, I think it's a way to remind us that that transformation is always meant to be there.
And the wedding guest went there thinking they were going to partake of something really special.
But once again, they got trapped in their own ways of doing things and didn't make that conversion to living out the faith. An example I could give you was imagine showing up for a hockey game, and it's on a pond somewhere out in the woods, and you're used to playing boot hockey, which I don't know if any of you ever did that. We used to do that a lot as kids. You'd go out on icy piece of ground wearing your winter boots, and you'd slide around and do your best, but you weren't on skates.
Be like going to a hockey game with boots on when everybody else is wearing the newest skates.
You can't quite do it. You're not getting anywhere. You're falling down more than you're scoring.
And that's what I think he's trying to tell us with this wedding garment thing.
It's not good enough simply to show up.
We got to be transformed.
And it's that transformation that allows us to truly make his presence known in the world by recognizing that we are simply stewards of everything we've been given and that a good steward shares those gifts with one another.
