Donning the wedding garment of love (St. Augustine / Bishop Robert Barron)

God is always trying to give good things to us,
but our hands are too full to receive them.

--St. Augustine

    [Matthew’s] Gospel likens the kingdom of God to a king who gives a wedding feast for his son. The biblical authors couldn’t find a more apt metaphor for the coming together of divinity and humanity than a wedding banquet. God and humanity are married, and they are surrounded by joy, peace, celebration, and good food. 

    What was Jesus’ strategy? Open table-fellowship; outreach to all, to the righteous and the unrighteous, to the healthy and the sick, to the mainstream and the marginalized. Here comes everybody. You don’t have to be good to receive God’s grace; that’s why they call it “grace.” 

    But then something puzzling emerges. When the king comes to welcome his guests, he finds someone not properly dressed: “The king said to him, ‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’” It was customary at the time (as it still is) for people to come to a wedding dressed up. 

    The play here is between grace and works. We can refuse the invitation altogether, or we can refuse the transformation that should follow from grace. We have to cooperate with grace, donning the wedding garment of love, forgiveness, peace, and nonviolence. 

--Bishop Robert Barron 

Image source: https://sparkleinpink.com/products/red-sequin-hearts-dress?srsltid=AfmBOopU3xCkYf9vAKPpty0Xo0e79l69uuoboK_DwpCDQ5w3ltu0vEj3
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The hope of the Gospel is meant for all peoples (Pope Leo XIV)

   The hope of the Gospel is meant for all peoples, for such is the breadth of God’s heart and the abundance of his harvest. Indeed, God continues to work in the world so that all his children may experience his love and be saved. 

--Pope Leo XIV 

Image source: https://www.humandevelopment.va/en/eventi/2023/hope-for-the-earth-hope-for-humanity.html 
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No one is left out (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

How do you have a victory banquet
when everyone is invited?
 It’s a victory because everyone is invited.
 No one is left out.

--Fr. Patrick Michael,
Homily, December 6, 2023
(Funeral Mass for Mary Cosgrave)

    What is it we have to celebrate? 

    The people of Israel saw a victory over their enemies as something to celebrate. When they could see their enemies – who had threatened their way of life, threatened their peace, threatened their way of being – crushed, they were grateful to their God for having crushed them. 

    When Isaiah says that the web that is woven over all people, the veil that veils all people, would be removed, and then he says, He will destroy death forever, I’m not sure death is the veil. Fear of death is the veil. Fear is what keeps us from seeing the Lord’s hand at work in our everyday life, because it sends our focus somewhere else when we worry and we fret and we are disturbed by many things… 

    We may have lots of things to be worried about, lots of things to fret about. If you get the New York Times notifications on your phone, you will be sent all sorts of reasons to worry twenty or twenty-five times during the day. It’s not the handiest service from that standpoint, and you could focus on what the New York Times is concerned about, or you could focus here, on what you’re living, on what God is doing right now, what God is unfolding in our lives that will help remove the veil, help destroy the web that hangs over us, that blinds us. 

    We gather here to celebrate at a Eucharistic banquet. It foreshadows the banquet of eternity when we are one with him. Perhaps we just have to learn how to not use the veil or the web, but to see past it, and to find everything there is to celebrate in a day for what God is doing for us. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, December 4, 2024

Image source: Studio Tomás Saraeno (Berlin), spider web (one of the artist’s main sources of inspiration), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/t-magazine/tomas-saraceno-spiders-shed.html

Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 12, 2026: A feast of rich food and choice wines...

A feast of rich food and choice wines…
 God’s gifts are abundant and meant for all --
 do we come with the right disposition to receive them? 

    Jesus’ challenge of the chief priests and elders continues in Matthew’s Gospel this week with the parable of the wedding feast. When a king gives a wedding feast for his son and some ignore the invitation while others mistreat and even kill the king’s servants, the king says to his remaining servants, Go out into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find. God’s salvation, Jesus is suggesting, is for all, no matter their origin, so long as their wedding garment – that is, the depth of their investment in relationship with the Lord – is intact. 

    The universality of God’s gift of salvation can also be seen in Isaiah: On this mountain the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, the prophet announces. Isaiah is speaking of a victory banquet, but an unusual one: usually, a victory implies one victor, but here all will be drawn to God. Christians read this text as a prophecy of what God will do in salvation history. Jesus’ death on the cross will destroy death, the veil that veils all peoples, the web that is woven over all nations. Moreover, God’s banquet gives life, as both Isaiah and Psalm 23 affirm: You spread the table before me; my cup overflows. So let us be glad that he has saved us! 

    Paul knows the abundance of God’s gifts in his own life and therefore can reassure the Philippians that God will fully supply whatever you need. No matter the circumstances – poverty or abundance – all are invited to find glorious riches in Christ Jesus, whose kingdom is present here and now, waiting for us to enter and participate… so long as Christ remains the source of our union and our hope! 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Puffed up with self-importance (Bishop Robert Barron)

    Jesus offers to free us from the burden of our pride. 

    What is it that makes our lives heavy and weighed down? Precisely the burden of our own egos, the weight of one’s own self. When I am puffing myself up with my own self-importance, I’m laboring under all that weight. Jesus is saying, “Become a child. Take that weight off your shoulders and put on the weight of my yoke, the yoke of my obedience to the Father.” 

    Anthony de Mello proposed the following parable to describe us prideful souls. A group of people sit on a bus that is passing through the most glorious countryside, but they have the shades pulled down on all the windows and are bickering about who gets front seat on the bus. This is the burden of pride: preferring the narrow and stuffy confines of the bus to the beauty that is effortlessly available all around. This, of course, is why Jesus can say, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” What the Lord proposes is not a freedom from suffering but, what is much more important, a freedom from the self. 

--Bishop Robert Barron
 

Image source 1: https://www.facebook.com/WildBeyonds/posts/-the-bird-that-breathes-like-a-balloonthis-isnt-photoshopthis-is-the-english-pou/122236944704215393/
Image source 2: https://medium.com/the-observer-is-the-observed/youre-either-on-the-bus-or-off-the-bus-6054c3d457b5
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Seeking the path that is ours (St. Francis of Assisi / Pope Leo XIV)

There are beautiful wild forces within us.
Let them turn the mills inside
and fill sacks that feed even heaven.

--St. Francis of Assisi

   We are all pilgrims and we are always pilgrims, walking as we seek to follow the Lord, and as we seek the path that is truly ours in life. 

    That’s certainly not easy, but with the help of the Lord, the intercession of the saints, and by encouraging one another, you can be certain that, as long as you remain faithful, trusting always in God’s mercy, the experience of this pilgrimage will continue to bear fruit throughout your lives. 

--Pope Leo XIV 

Image source: David Frampton, St. Francis of Assisi, https://www.patmora.com/october-4-feast-st-francis-assisi/
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Openness to awe and wonder (Pope Francis)

     If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. 

    By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. 

--Pope Francis,
Laudato Si

Image source 1: Timothy Schmalz, St. Francis Embracing the World (2026), https://sfarch.org/sculpture-unveiled-on-cathedral-plaza-honors-special-year-of-saint-francis-of-assisi/  
Image source 2: St. Francis of Assisi, Stella Niagara Education and Retreat Center, https://www.facebook.com/groups/507562226004694/posts/1974466265980942/
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