Reflection on the Sunday Readings for 10/12/08 by Dawn

You can find all the readings for this Sunday at: http://www.usccb.org/nab/101208.shtml

Then he said to his servants,
'The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come.
Go out, therefore, into the main roads
and invite to the feast whomever you find.’
The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found,
bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests.
(Matthew 22:8-10)

I love this part of this week's Gospel parable. Jesus is telling the crowd about a king who had a son who was getting married. The king invited a bunch of guests, but they didn't show up. So he sends his servants out into the streets to invite anyone they find - "the bad and good alike" - and they all show up for this wedding reception. I like this passage because it's not just the really good people that are invited - it was everyone. The wedding feast that Jesus is talking about here is really Heaven. It's not just the really, really good people who are invited to go to Heaven, we're all invited to go - the good and the bad.

Lots of the time people think that they don't deserve to come to church because they've done something so horrible that God could never forgive them. Nothing could be further from the truth - there is nothing that God does not want to or can not forgive. That reminds me of a homily Fr Mark Brewer once gave in which he said if there were sin detectors at the doors of church, only letting the sin-free inside, the church would be empty. It's just like this parable - the good and the bad alike were invited to come, and the good and bad showed up - just like Sunday morning.

So often I feel I just don't have it all together. That God won't love me until I'm a better person. But that's not true. God could not possibly love me (and you) any more than He does at this precise moment in time. Now this doesn't give me a "get out of jail free" card. If I want to be at the banquet feast in Heaven, I need to be striving to live in right-relationship with God, but that doesn't mean I have to be perfect. We all sin, but thankfully we have a forgiving God who welcomes us back every time we ask for forgiveness.



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