28th Sunday Year A
28th Sunday Year A – A Banquet For All
Our readings this week are centred on the subject of food and feasts, in fact banquets and on the invitation that we have all received to attend the banquet of God’s holy table. Isaiah speaks to us and emphasises that this invitation to participate at God’s table is, “..for all people’. It is an opportunity to come together in celebration and rejoice in a banquet of rich and juicy food, of fine strained wines. It will be such a great time that we will forget any and all mourning and any and all sadness and feelings of loss and rejoice; be glad and happy, ecstatic in the Lord. How badly do we need such a banquet in these direst of times!
Jesus also speaks to us in Matthew’s gospel about this idea of being invited openly, fully and warmly to attend a King’s feast or banquet to celebrate his son’s wedding. Just as the Israelites were the chosen people of the Old Testament invited to this first-mentioned -feast on the mountain-top, so we too are the invitees to this second feast. We have been given full notice of when this feast will take place and what it is all about. We have been asked to come along and to share in this celebration, to share our time, our energies with the King to demonstrate our role, participation in and commitment to the celebrations and to him and his son. Our invitation is given to us at our baptisms. I wonder what we did with it?
For us to celebrate in a modern-day feast, we need only to look at our participation in the daily Holy Eucharist, our “day’s food for the day’s journey”: the food with which we source and support our spiritual growth. I wonder how many of you, of us, felt bereft, lost and maybe even a little scattered by the closure of the churches during the pandemic and the cessation of services in particular that of Holy Communion. I certainly did. I felt at a loss. I felt under-nourished and yes, to a degree, I felt that my church-leaders had shut my church’s doors on me and prevented me from feeding as and when I wanted or felt that I needed to. The whole episode made me question my understanding of my faith practice and how, when and where I would ever receive the rich food and wine that I desperately needed. It also made me consider the feeding needs of those others within our parish who have been unable to access Holy Communion, readily or timely and realise that there are those amongst us who cannot respond to their invitation to the celebration through no fault of their own.
We as a parish need to do much more to seek out the sick, the lonely, the housebound or hospitalised, the grief-stricken, the lost and the broken and all of those on the edges of our society and show them, remind them of the God’s invitation to all, to come and eat: to come and celebrate; to come and participate in the feast of His Body and Blood, if not daily, then weekly or as often as we can fulfil their needs
It is particularly easy at these current times to become wrapped up in trying to meet every dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’ of the many and varying guidelines set for us by local and central governments and then to forget the people who are impacted by the changes and applications. Our people; our parishioners; our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Our newsletter speaks to us of the ‘first course’ of this banquet being the Holy Eucharist. We should avail ourselves of this ‘first-course’ as often as we possibly can. We must also do all that we can to make it available to any and all others by whatever creative means that we can. We must prepare for our full celebration with God at the final and most glorious banquet by how we listen to his Word and live it out in our lives every day.
Our newsletter also reminds us that, “We join our voices with choirs of angels and saints of all time in our hymn of praise.” So let us sing. Let us sing heartily, joyfully, noisily and with great gusto. Let us sing as if we mean it and as if we have not sung in such a way for a long time.
We can still show our individual and collective positive response to God and Christ our King to their invitation to come and feast with them. We know that this feast is a feast and banquet of eternal food for eternal life: food that we cannot survive without; food that we must have and have in plenty to grow and become ever closer to our Father in Heaven.
Let us respond to the invitation, “Here I am Lord. I come to do your will. Let me feast and rejoice with you and your Son. Amen