28^th Sunday of the Year

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son..." Matt 22:2

There is nothing perhaps more universal in human societies than the love of a great meal, what we would call a banquet feast. Here is one human event that virtually everyone enjoys, men and women, young and old, victors and even the vanquished who will use such a meal to drown their sadness. Victory banquets of course are more joyful and are found in virtually all cultures. And another kind of exceedingly joyful banquet found in all cultures is of course the wedding banquet. People love to celebrate their happy times, their triumphs, their great achievements, their great blessings received by means of the banquet. It is a human thing of great value and permanence, and God chose to make man with this festive spirit because what God has in mind for man's final happiness is itself a kind of feast, a kind of banquet not totally unlike, but far, far greater than even the greatest of what we call banquets in this world.

The truth is that all the naturally good things that we find in our world, in human life, are also pointers to our final goal of happiness, that final beatitude for which we were created by God. For God made all these good things in view of man's final destiny, to help us understand that destiny when God revealed it, and to point the way to that blessed end. So God made man to be festive, because the kingdom of God, says Jesus, is in fact to be understood as a kind of great, eternal banquet, indeed, a wedding feast like those kings give to their son who is to be the heir of the kingdom.

Isaiah already spoke in these terms hundreds of years before Jesus, speaking about the kingdom of the Messiah as itself being like a great feast, or banquet, A feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.[25:6] God's chosen people loved such feasts, and it was enticing that God was suggesting that the Messiah's reign would usher in just such a marvelous feasting for Israel, and not only Israel, for Isaiah adds that On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide [this feast] for all peoples, and thus the Messiah will be for all men the source of this rich fare that will characterize the Messianic Kingdom. All men love a great feast, and to the Messianic feast all will be invited.

The effects of the feast are tremendous, timeless, overwhelming, for this feast will remove the veil of sadness from mankind by removing the cause of man's deepest anguish and sadness, the opposite of the banquet of life, the tragedy of death. What is the veil that is spread over all nations if not the veil of death, and it is precisely death that Isaiah prophecies will be destroyed by the Messiah and by this banquet: He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and by means of this victory, this victory banquet, at last, the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the LORD has spoken. In the end, the triumph of God over death will vindicate the people he made his own, for at last Israel will be seen to have been the bearer of this blessing to all mankind.

But this passage is filled with even greater meaning for the Church, which is the beginning, the seed and symbol and instrument of the Messianic Kingdom in this world. She is the new Zion, the new mountain of God which is the place from which God is in fact fulfilling this promise to prepare a feast for His Son and to conquer the cause of man's veil of sadness, the fear of death, by putting to death death itself, precisely through the banquet he already serves his children in heaven and on earth.

So the Church is the mountain from which God invites all men to the banquet of life, the wedding feast of His Son, which is indeed the greatest feast, of the richest food and wine, for it is the feast in which Christ Himself is the food fed to God's true children, as they make their way to that heavenly celebration of the same feast, but where death is no more, and life is unalloyed with sadness or suffering or any such thing that we still experience while in this world. Christ is the food in the heavenly feast and in the earthly feast, the Eucharistic feast, though here He is consumed under the appearances of bread and wine (the universal signs of festivity) and there He is consumed solely by love. On earth, we draw life from his very body and blood that were sacrificed for us on the Cross, for we are still in the veil of tears and must fight off the cause of death which is sin. By communion with Him, in his life-giving flesh and blood, we are enabled to conquer death in its cause, by conquering sin which is the true cause of death for man, death of the soul, death of the body. In heaven, once sin has been forever conquered, we shall have need only of His life-giving love, and by our love we shall draw that blessed life from Him forever, that life which is the greatest of all banquets, for it is the very life of God.

Once you believe this, and live this truth at the banquet of the Eucharist, you begin to understand why for Paul nothing is really necessary for happiness except Christ. Sure we need food and clothing because we are not spirits without bodies, but if we have the basics of our human needs, that's really all we need to be happy, and whatever extra we have is just that, extra, a blessing, but nothing in comparison to the blessing we have received in Christ, nothing compared to our faith which enables us to receive Christ in our hearts, and in our very bodies through the Eucharist.

The only thing that we should fear would be the fate of the man at the end of today's Gospel, to arrive at the Heavenly feast unprepared, indifferent, care-less, as if the simple fact of our being invited is enough to make us acceptable to the Lord, that we do not have to "dress up" to show our gratitude and thankfulness by the way we live our lives in this world, by the priorities we set in our lives, knowing what really matters, and what is good but nonessential, and what is sin and to be avoided. The man without the wedding garment is like the man today who says that God will let me into heaven regardless of how I live, how I show up at the judgement, so long as I am not like Hitler or some mass murderer. The banquet sets the bar of a good life a lot higher for those who are privileged to enjoy it already in this world. Its value is infinite because the giver and the gift are one: God, and to show up for that feast in any condition less than that of a true child of God is intolerable.

An atheist once said that we are what we eat, and nothing more. It's meant to say that man is only an animal and nothing more. I would partially agree with that statement, but what we Christians eat is something so much more than such unbelievers understand. What we eat in truth, through the sacraments in this world, and directly in the next through love and vision, is nothing else than God, and so how true it is that we are in fact what we eat. We are God's children now, says St. John, what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. [1 John 3:2]