Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 14, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
October 14, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.
• In the Gospel, Jesus continues to answer the objections of those chief priests and elders of the people who objected to his cleansing the temple. When they refused to answer Jesus’ question about whether John the Baptist’s work was of heavenly or human origin because they both didn’t want to heed his message of conversion or lose the respect of the crowds who knew John was a prophet, Jesus gave them three parables to try to bring them to conversion. The first was two weeks ago, in the Parable of the Two Sons, one who initially refuses his father’s entreaties to go to work in the vineyard but then goes, an image of the conversion of tax collectors, prostitutes and others; and the second, an image of the chief priests and elders, of those who say a verbal yes to the Father but never go, a sign that they follow God just with their lips. Last week we had the Parable of the Corrupt Tenants, in which those whom God had entrusted with the vineyard of the House of Israel, refused to give the produce to the Vineyard Owner and killed both his servants and his Son, another sign of how many of God’s people had slaughtered the prophets sent to them to solicit the good deeds of the covenant much as the chief priests and scribes were then plotting to kill God’s son Jesus.
• This Sunday is the third in a triptych of parables. Through it Jesus speaks to us about the kingdom of heaven, the invitation he has given us to join him there forever, and about how we need to respond to that invitation. He does so within the context of a parable about salvation history in which he illustrates for us, basically, how not to respond, in which he was clearly indicating the behavior of his present antagonists. Jesus concludes the parable by saying, “Many are invited, but few are chosen.” We obviously want to be numbered among the “chosen few.” The chosen ones are not those whom God somehow favors over others. They are those who respond fully to having been chosen by God. Therefore, it’s important for us to pay close attention to what Jesus tells us this Sunday so that we will respond to his invitation, choose him who has chosen us, and help the “many” we know also learn how to become among those who will celebrate with Jesus at the joyful wedding feast that will know no end!
• Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a wedding banquet a king is throwing for his son. This is a clear reference to heaven and illustrates how God wants all people to be saved and to come to this feast. There are three parts of this parable that we need to ponder:
• The first is the invitation. Jesus says that the King sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. It’s an unbelievable response. When there’s a royal wedding, like, for example, Charles and Diana or William and Kate, it becomes one of the hottest tickets of all time. People do everything they can to come. But not in the parable. The invitees refused. When they didn’t respond the first time, the hard-working King who wanted them there gave them a second chance. He sent other servants, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Behold, I have prepared my banquet, my calves and my fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the feast.’” But, again, they made light of it. Jesus says one went to his farm and another to his business, too busy to reprioritize their daily affairs for the once-in-a-lifetime royal wedding. They were too self-absorbed to care about the king. Other invitees, Jesus says, seized the king’s servants, mistreated them and killed them. They killed the king’s heralds who were doing nothing to them except inviting them to the royal banquet of the king, because not only did they not want to change their priorities, but they couldn’t handle even hearing the invitation, and so they extinguished the messenger. The servants that Jesus has been describing up until then are the prophets who had been sent by God to invite the Jews to this feast, but, as we talked about last week in the parable of the tenant farmers, all of the prophets were mistreated and killed by some of the religious leaders and people receiving the invitation to communion with God. Only some, like obviously the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, the Apostles and those women and men who became Jesus’ disciples, responded to Jesus’ invitation.
• But God kept inviting still. The king and his servants worked harder to invite the guests than it seems it took to run the banquet. Jesus says that other servants went out a third time and “gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” This refers to the proclamation of the Gospel to the Gentiles that helped to build the Church, which then became the ongoing mission of the Church. Like in the Parables of the Wheat and Weeds and of the Dragnet, there are good and bad invited into the banquet of the kingdom representing the Church. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that in the Church we find great saints and great sinners, that we find the faithful and the hypocrites. All are invited; the only ones excluded are those who exclude themselves. But the invitation is supposed to change us. If we’re invited and we’re good, the privilege should spur us to become better; if we’re invited and we’re bad, the honor should provide the occasion to become honorable. We see, however, that at least one responded to the invitation by showing up without conversion. We see this in the dialogue the king has with one of the guests. Jesus describes, “When the king came in to meet the guests, he noticed a man there who was not dressed in a wedding garment, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
• At first glance, it might seem that the King is both crazy and cruel: he commanded his servants to invite the man to the feast and then he’s picky about what he’s wearing? The truth is that in the ancient world, when kings would summon commoners to a feast, they, knowing that most would be too poor and not have proper vesture, would normally send out the royal tailors to make proper clothing for everyone invited or otherwise provided fitting clothing. It would be like a rich man today inviting homeless people to a black-tie dinner but then giving them free hotel rooms to shower and providing free tuxedos, shoes and gowns to wear. With this history, it’s not difficult to recognize why the king would be so upset about seeing this improperly attired man: this man deliberated refused to wear the clothing that was required and made available. The lesson for all of us is that it’s not enough just to show up. We, too, have to be properly dressed for the feast. But we have to ask: What clothing has been provided for us? What does God want us wearing? What apparel is fit for the banquet? God wants us to show up with the garment he himself gave us when we became his adopted children. As we were vested with our baptismal garment, the baptizing cleric said to us, “You have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ. May this white garment be a sign to you of your Christian dignity. With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring it unstained into eternal life.” Our baptismal garment is a sign that we have put on Christ. Christ himself is meant to be our garment! We are to be clothed in his risen life. As long as we live in him, vest ourselves in his virtues, then we will always be ready and unstained for eternal life. And God provides the dry-cleaning business for our baptismal garment in the Sacrament of Confession, where the blood of the Lamb is, paradoxically, the most powerful bleach ever known. To receive the invitation to eternal life but to respond without conversion, without change, without even wanting to show up with our baptismal garment, is to fail to acknowledge the dignity of the King, of the banquet and of the invitation. We’re ultimately not meant to be guests at the wedding feast, but the Bride. That’s why the King so much wants all of us there. To stand him up is for us to leave Christ the Bridegroom at the altar; to show up improperly dressed is like a bride showing up with sweatpants to her own wedding. God give us the clothing to wear and we have to have the humility, love and dignity to wear it.
• This parable obviously has an application to Jesus’ original listeners, to try to bring them to conversion and enter the banquet. But it also has a huge meaning for all of us listeners today. One clear application is to the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church taking place in the Vatican. As Pope Francis has emphasized, the Synodal Church he seeks must live what the Church has always sought to be, the continuation of Christ’s mission inviting everyone, including those on the peripheries of existence. The King of Kings wants to exclude no one and invite everyone. But it’s not meant to be a come-as-you-go affair. As the King seeks to welcome everyone to the banquet, those who up until that point were good and others who were bad, he wants all to convert, all to get dressed, all to welcome him in return at the depth he wants to be received. There are some who dream of a Church that welcomes everyone but converts no one, who rather than helping people become the saints to which their baptism summons them, just wants to bless their sinful relationships and ignore their sins. Because God loves each of us sinners, he wants to free us from our sins. But we’ve got to take off our dirty clothes and put on anew our dazzling baptismal garments, rejecting Satan, his empty promises and evil works, and living in communion with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who is holy, holy, holy. Let’s pray that the Synod helps the Church live out both lessons of this parable.
•  “Come to the Feast,” the King in the Parable tells us this Sunday. He says it first about the Mass on earth and second about what the Mass points to, heaven. About both we can say, “Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb.” If we put God first, respond to his invitation in life by coming to Church, arrive properly dressed in an unstained baptismal garment, and seek to invite others to join us, we can be confident that we will be ready to greet him whenever he comes to call us to the eternal wedding banquet. This will be the best means for us to be numbered among the “chosen few” who will say, in the words of King David from the psalm we’ll hear this Sunday, “I shall live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.”

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was: 

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