Homily for Thursday, 18 August 2016– Ferial

Thursday of the 20th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 36:23-38; Psalm 51:12-13, 14-15, 18-19; Matthew 22:1-14

This homily was given at the chapel of Kateri House Women's Residence of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Our Gospel reading today raises many questions for me: Why do the first slaves “invited to the wedding banquet” of the king decline the king’s invitation? Why do they not simply decline politely, but instead “make light of” the invitation, while some go so far as to mistreat and kill the king’s other slaves? Why is the king so harsh toward the unfortunate man who shows up at the wedding banquet without his “wedding robe,” casting this man “into the outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth”?

These questions are difficult to answer with only the information that Matthew’s Gospel gives us. Maybe the first slaves thought their master, the king, to be harsh, and so they had planned a way of opting out of attending his wedding banquet. And maybe they mistreated his other slaves out of added spite. The king’s slaves would seem to have been right about his harshness and short temper, if the king’s treatment of the man without a wedding robe is any indication of this.

Then again, maybe we are asking the wrong questions if we are wondering why the slaves behaved the way they did or why the king in Jesus’ parable is so harsh. After all, the king is meant to be understood as God. And God would not be unduly harsh toward his people, would he? Perhaps we interpret God incorrectly as harsh for destroying the slaves and their city after they had mistreated and killed other slaves. Perhaps God, the king, has reason to cast the man without his wedding robe “into the outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

But maybe we are being invited to focus less on the apparently harsh actions of God; of the king, and more on our own choices before God and one another. Now, I am in favour of the belief in a loving and merciful God who gives sinners and even serious evildoers almost infinite chances to turn from sin. And yet all of us are created with complete freedom, which includes the freedom to accept or to reject God’s mercy; God’s gift of salvation; God’s invitation to the wedding feast, the Kingdom of Heaven definitively, as it were.

And so might we direct these questions not toward God but toward ourselves: If we are given an invitation to the wedding feast, will we choose to accept God’s invitation? Will we go “into the main streets” and invite still others, without partiality, to the wedding feast? Will we wear the wedding robe of salvation given us by the king, God, at our baptism, when we were first invited to “bring” the “dignity” of this garment “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven”?

Will we pray with the humility and penance of the Psalmist: “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord,” even if our creation and re-creation by God entails breaking down our sin; our acts against God; against love; against one another, in order to rebuild dignity with which we were first created? Will we listen to prophets, of our time or of old, who call us to accountability; to repentance when necessary?

These choices are ours to make, with the freedom God has given us to make them.