The Feast

Our first reading is one of the passages where Isaiah writes of future salvation. The image is of a banquet, of plenty of good food and wine. And, as often, Isaiah’s vision is one that includes all peoples.

Food and drink were frequent themes in Jesus’s public ministry too. There are many stories about him eating and drinking with friends (sometimes he was criticised for this). Sometimes the well-off and the socially prominent invited him to dine. Jesus used these occasions for teaching, sometimes to make points about forgiveness, sometimes about not presuming to claim the highest seat, and sometimes about repentance. More than once, the righteous complained that Jesus ate and drank with the wrong sort of people.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus uses the parable of the wedding feast to make a point that was central to his teaching: everyone is welcome. The problem is, those who were first invited were too busy with their affairs to respond, so the host threw the invitation open to all.

Matthew and Luke have the same story, but Matthew places the story in the last few days of Jesus’s life, perhaps the day after Palm Sunday. Matthew has five whole chapters from Palm Sunday to the preparations for the Last Supper. It seems to me that there is a great urgency in those few days; Jesus has a whole lot more he needs to say and a lot of it is about how we should treat each other. While this story is about God’s all-encompassing love (as Isaiah says, for ‘all peoples’) in these days Jesus also has some stern denunciations of the powerful and of those who neglect their neighbour.

What do we make of the last part of Matthew’s version – the man who wasn’t wearing the right sort of clothes and as a result was thrown out into the darkness? It seems to contradict the message of the rest of the story about everyone being welcome. Scripture scholars tell us that those verses are tacked on to the original story.

Perhaps this unfortunate man was ungrateful; perhaps he took the invitation as his due. The banquet is, clearly enough, an image of God’s great goodness. Such goodness invites a response of gratitude. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote that ingratitude was ‘the cause, beginning, and origin of all evils and sins’. Perhaps bearing in mind God’s goodness to us, we respond by generosity and care for others. As St Paul says (1 Corinthians 4:7), ‘what have you got that was not given to you?’.

Jim McAloon