15 October 2023 – 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

by Fr Fabian Dicom

Big Ed comes to church every Sunday and he is sleeping during the Sunday Sermon. So his wife was really fed up and she said she needed to do something about it. So one day, she was so embarrassed, anyway, the same thing happened and she had in her handbag some pungent smelly cheese in a zip-locked bag. So she took it out as he was sleeping and put it under his nose. And suddenly Big Ed kind of woke up, groggy, in a blur. He said: “No, No, Helen. Don’t kiss me now!”

This has nothing to do with the homily this morning. It is dedicated to all of you who think you want to go to sleep right now.

Now, I’ve noticed in the parish many gatherings these days, starting with Andrew’s lunch, feasting, dancing. We even have a dancing Deacon, you know. I see many people coming together. We have got all the BEC Masses followed by feasting. And I think it is a very nice experience for all of us. I noticed that all of you have a good time at these gatherings and that’s a very good spirit. We miss all these things and we appreciate it even more because we missed it during the times of isolation, during the pandemic.

Now speaking of gatherings. The First Reading from the Prophet Isaiah depicts a wonderful gathering which the Lord brings about. It is no ordinary gathering. It is a gathering of all nations at the feast of rich food and fine wines. A truly international gathering. At the victory banquet on Mount Zion. Yahweh Himself will play host, not only to Israel. And this is very important: To all peoples and all nations. It will be a communal meal which celebrates not only Israel’s triumph but also the unity of all peoples in the worship of Yahweh.

This is one of the most universalistic ecumenical passages in the Old Testament. This gathering has a quality about it which seems to take it beyond these earthly world. It is a feast of life where death has been destroyed forever and the mourning and sadness associated with death has been removed. At this feast, people’s deepest hungers and thirsts, their deepest hopes will all be satisfied. Those present will say: See, this is our God, in whom we hope for salvation.

We would all want to belong to such a gathering. And this is a lovely, lovely image of God. And this is the image of God that we need to embrace. It empowers us, it gives us hope.

The image of God that stands behind that First Reading is that of a generous and hospitable host. It is there again in our Responsorial Psalm that we just prayed which is one of the most, of the best-loved Psalms in the Bible. In that Psalm, the Lord is portrayed as both a Shepherd who leads us to fresh and green pastures for food and brings us to restful waters to quench our thirst and to revive our drooping spirits. And as a Host who prepares a banquet for us with cups that overflow. This beautiful imagery of who God is.

And when Jesus spoke about life in the Kingdom of Heaven, He picked up on these images of an abundant banquet of life that He found in His own scriptures. In one occasion in Luke 13:29, He said:
The people will come from east and west, from north and south and will eat in the Kingdom of Heaven.

And in today’s Second Reading, Saint Paul says that God will fulfill all your needs in Christ Jesus as lavishly as only God can. With these kind of assurance, what will be our response?

Let’s look at the Gospel today. Drawing the inspiration from Isaiah 25, the First Reading that we had and among other passages, the contemporaries during Jesus’ time envisaged the arrival of God’s reign in terms of a banquet. That God will come and this whole gathering will be in a banquet, what we call an eschatological celebration or celebration of end times.

Now Jesus addresses His Parable of the Wedding Feast to those people who had this image of how things would be at the end of time. And in the context, His context, the chief priests and the elders of the people who considered that by belonging to Israel, they have no need to reply to the invitation in order to enter the banquet of the kingdom. That they had reserved places. The Gospel’s emphasis today is on the invitation and its acceptance or rejection.

Like the vineyard, that you’ve heard in the past weeks, the banquet is a metaphor, it is symbolic. And let me explain this whole metaphor and the symbols in the Gospel today.

Now if the former image of the vineyard brings out the fruit-bearing aspect of the kingdom, the banquet image emphasises its joy and the need to respond to God’s call when He invites people to enter.

Now in response to rejection of His invitation, we are told in the Gospel, the king sent his troops who destroyed most of those murderers and burnt their cities. Just to take you back to the context of why Matthew wrote this and when he wrote this. The reference here is the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. Now Matthew echoes an early Christian interpretation of that event. Now the Christians believed that it happened, this destruction happened, because some in Israel rejected the invitation to the kingdom and abused the messengers, especially Jesus. 

The servants that we hear in verses 8-10 in today’s Gospel referred to the Apostles whose preaching gathers together all and sundry. Everyone.

The wedding hall here is the church and we are not talking about the building. The community of those who have hearkened to the Good News. The wedding hall is not our Sunday gathering. It is greater than this morning. It is to do with that ever-inclusive church that goes beyond the confines of this building. Let us not call for inclusivity, our call for inclusivity to be purely rhetorical. This call is greater and goes beyond us.

So Matthew’s final scene is really a separate parable added to the first. This explains. You know when you hear that the absurdity that people are dragged off to the streets, are blamed for not properly dressed for the wedding. It does not make sense! You just drag someone out and then accusing for not being dressed for the wedding.

But it is Matthew’s warning to the church. The church is held together neither by family ties nor small cartels, not by any external structure. Neither of all these external things hold together the church. The church is held together by active personal and continual response to God’s word. The church which is to help inaugurate the kingdom of God here and now is the community of those who respond to God’s word and their response is a work of a lifetime. Our work is the work of a lifetime.

The wedding robe is a symbol of their response. This is the level of personal commitment required in order to accept our place at the wedding feast. I would like to think that this refers primarily, wearing the wedding robe refers to community spirit, the ability to share our well-being with other people in the presence of God. I think the wedding garment requires us to embrace a spirit of solidarity that begins with honouring the divine presence in each human being. That every one is beautiful, every one is created by God, every one is sacred.

A Salvadorean refugee, Ernesto Martell, says this:
I believe that God gave us the greatest example of solidarity when God sent His son, Jesus to live with us.

He continues by saying:
God gave us the dignity of living with Jesus among us.

This is one of the pillars of a Christian spirituality, of solidarity, and a principal of the Catholic Social Teaching: 
Believe in a God who became human like us and in so doing revealed the true dignity of each human being.

What this means is that, my dear brothers and sisters, we must first of all be able to see the other, the human being next to us as a person with value equal to our own. Very important.

My life is no more valuable and worthy, of no greater or lesser significance than that of this other human being, whether in the church or outside. I am talking about the church building.

I am no more or less than deserving. My rights are no more important than those of this person.

This kind of spirituality starts in a painful place, with an acceptance of the fact that the world is broken, as we know it. And that we are broken as well. In this we find our deep bonds with the wounded ones of this world. In that vulnerable place, we find the heart of solidarity. We find compassion. That is the way of the Lord.

Our wedding garment is therefore being woven daily, every day, by the quality of our interaction with one another.

Let us pray for this grace during this Mass.

Click below to listen to homily and watch video:

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