Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

There is a story of a mother who lived with her young son in an apartment in a large city. She would take him to PreK in the morning and pick him up again on her way home from work in the evening.

A week before her son's fifth birthday, she decided to have a party for him. She invited five of his friends from PreK to be his guests. Not one of the five children showed up when the time came for his party. The mother was saddened because she knew how much this party meant to her little son; he had never had a party in his honor before.

The mother hurried across the hallway and asked the elderly couple who lived there to come to the party. She then called a co-worker and asked her to come to the party. And so, she did have a party for her son.

At first, the little boy cried when he learned that his friends were not coming. Soon, however, he began to have fun and enjoy the company of those who did come to the party.

That story resembles today's Parable. It also concerns guests who did not show up for a party and had to be replaced at the last minute. Like all of Jesus' Parables, today's Parable has three levels of meaning.

First, there is the literal meaning. It's simply the story Jesus tells: A king holds a wedding feast for his son. When the invited guests don't show up, the king replaces them with substitute guests.

The second level is the intended lesson Jesus wanted the people to learn from the story. The wedding feast stands for the kingdom of heaven. The invited guests were the Chosen People who made a covenant with God. The substitute guests were the sinners and Gentiles of Jesus' time. They were the people who accepted Jesus after God's Chosen People rejected him. Jesus wanted the people to understand that the kingdom of God is now open to all people, not just the Chosen People. No one is excluded, not even the Gentiles. This was a very revolutionary idea at the time of Jesus.

This brings us to the third level: What this Parable is supposed to say to us today, in our contemporary world. For us, the ending of the Parable is what is most surprising. It describes a substitute guest expelled from the feast because he came to it without a wedding garment or clothing considered worthy of a formal gathering. He wore the same clothes he might have worn to clean out his stables.

On the surface, this seems rather rude on the part of the king. After all, he invited the man at the last minute. But there is, of course, a deeper meaning to this. The man responded to the king's invitation — but on his own terms. He refused to conform to the etiquette standard in ancient times when people entered the king's presence.

Right here, we find the Parable's meaning in our contemporary lives. We are among the substitute guests whom God has invited to the feast in the kingdom of heaven. We have been asked to sit at the banquet of eternal life with His Son, Jesus. But God is clear that if we accept this invitation, we must do it on God's terms and not our own. We must surrender ourselves to the will of God and be transformed by God's power. The wedding garment is symbolic of our openness to the will and the grace of God. It means that we have prepared ourselves, that is, our lives and our souls, for the feast of heaven.

Concretely, this means that in our lives, we have positively answered God's call to love all people, especially the poor and the needy, and that our answering of this call shows up in our actions and attitudes. It shows up in our service of God and others. It means we have prepared our hearts and souls by participating in the Church's work of spreading the Gospel message of peace, love, and justice. It means bringing these ideals to reality in some way so that others may not just know of God's love but may experience it through the work of our hands.