A Reflection for Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
‘Go out to the highways and hedgerows
and make people come in that my home may be filled.
For, I tell you, none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner.’ (Lk 14:23-24)
The Gospel message for today: Host a dinner party for a bunch of total strangers.
Well, maybe that’s not totally it. But in the reading for the day from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a man who planned a dinner and invited a large guest list. When it’s time for the party, his guests start dropping like flies. (Their excuses almost read like comedy. One man says he just got married and that’s why he can’t come; others just bought field or oxen and they need to go check out their new purchases.)
But since the table is set and the meal is ready, the host (angrily) decides it shouldn’t go to waste. He asks his servant to find a new crop of guests: “the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame.” Even after the servant gathers this group, there’s still more room at the table. The host then becomes even less exacting; he’ll welcome anyone his servant can find on the “highways and hedgerows.”
But the parable’s message isn’t quite as simple as “all are welcome in the Kingdom of God”—though, of course, that’s true. Even as he now fills his table, the host remembers the many who turned him down. “I tell you, none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner.”
Making excuses or canceling plans can be tempting, even too easy. When it comes to our relationships with God, we often have all the right intentions, but we also have a laundry list of reasons why time in prayer and reflection or time for taking the action God asks of us gets kicked down the road.
If we imagine ourselves in today’s Gospel reading, perhaps we are like those original guests. Has God invited us to be in his company, and have we found a reason to say no? Our reason is probably not that one from the Gospel, the immediate need to evaluate the five yoke of oxen we just purchased. It’s probably a chronic modern refrain: too busy, too tired, too distracted. But today’s Gospel challenges us to ask what we might miss out on if we push God’s invitation off until next time.
On a more timely note, today is a most important day in the United States; we cast our votes for our next president. It’s a good time to consider what God might be inviting us to do—not just in the voting booth but in the wake of this election as we grapple with its results. Is God inviting us to sit with him, to move through this aftermath in his company? If so, we better not say no.
