Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we get Jesus giving advice in the art of making a guest list. Anyone who has thrown a party or planned an event of some sort or another has surely done this with an eye toward the details. We think about who will get along. Who will be amusing? Who will be annoying but we have to invite them anyway? Who will make the party come together? Who will badger everyone about their latest project or tell us about his new investment opportunity?

These lists take some careful crafting. Yet Jesus is asking us to take our lists and make them his. This lesson is, of course, more than a sort of divinely inspired Emily Post essay. It is not about our etiquette but about our ethics. it is about how we exercise a preferential option - a first care - for the poor. Even that makes it too narrow because that would make it seem like we are simply called to more charity. We are called to a deeper sense of justice.

We are being challenged to see that banquet as a metaphor for our whole lives. Where are we giving others the dignity of invitation? Where are we bringing into our hearts those who suffer? How are we bridging the divides we too often make? How are we seeing in those who are sorrowing our own sorrows, in those who mourn our own grief, in those who hunger our own starvation. It is too easy to say, “I see someone who hungers so I will give bread.”

It is harder to imagine a table at which our own invitation is only handed to us because of the mercy of a God who sees our hunger, our brokenness, our failures, and welcomes us to his feast. Jesus is calling us to live with the generosity he has shown us because none of us has earned a place at the table and yet here we are, invitation in hand, with nothing to pay for it with but our pride. May we lay aside our pride as we come to the table and know ourselves as welcomed and loved that we might welcome and love.

Y