 |
| Wedding Feast -- Brueghel the Elder (1568) |
‘A banquet’ is one of a relatively small stock of images that recur with great regularity in Christian thought and art. The reason is simple. Religion is about life, and food is essential to life. The need for food is the new born baby’s first orientation to the world, and by tradition, an offer of food is the last humane act extended to those condemned to death. Nor is food simply a necessity. Special food and drink in abundance is the universal mark of human celebration – at births, weddings, religious holidays and communal festivals.
So it is natural for human beings to think of spiritual gifts and blessings as ‘heavenly food’ and to conceive of God’s promise of salvation as a ‘heavenly banquet’. Jesus uses precisely this image in the parable that forms this Sunday’s Gospel. He invites his audience to think of the Kingdom of Heaven by means of an image could not fail to resonate with them, thanks to their familiarity with the passage from Isaiah that provides the Old Testament lesson: “the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines”.
Jesus, however, gives the image a special twist. In the first part of the parable the phrase “for all peoples” suggests a wonderfully inclusive occasion, and this seems to be confirmed when the king tells his slaves to go out into the streets and gather “all whom they found, both good and bad”. Yet things are not quite so simple. To begin with, the guests on the original list, who treated the invitation lightly, are excluded. And, it turns out, even the people gathered up from the streets and brought in without asking are not assured of a permanent place at the banquet. The hapless man who did not bother to dress properly for the occasion, is promptly thrown out.
The message seems clear. God has in store for us unutterable joys that pass our understanding, and longs for us to share them with him. Good news indeed -- provided we don’t allow willfulness or carelessness to let us lose them.
http://gordon-graham.weebly.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment