Imagine that you have organised a big feast for your daughter’s wedding and after thinking and debating on who will be on your guest list, with one week to go before the wedding, you learn that a lot of your guests who you were expecting to be there started begging off and offering cheap excuses and even worse, some of them wouldn’t even give a reason why, they just said that they couldn’t turn up. So in your desperation, you offered the invitation to people that you know but haven’t seen for a long time and in the end you had a cracker of a wedding feast.
In the Gospel for today, you have the King in that bind, he had prepared everything for his son’s wedding but the people whom he was expecting didn’t want to attend for one reason or another but most of them purposely did so. And to his shock and horror, his messengers got abused and killed. So the King exacted revenge on those evil people. When the wedding was drawing near, he decided to invite everybody and the wedding hall was filled to his delight. Then he saw somebody who was not wearing a wedding garment so he had to throw this guy out of the hall.
In Jewish culture, it is normal to make two invitations. First, one will make an initial invitation, then those who are invited will try to suss out who got invited and who will or will not attend. Usually, these people will look at the guest list and see if there are VIPs there who will come. Because we have to understand weddings are social events. Normally, a person who is organising a wedding would invite people of his class more or less in society. In our world of today, it is also the same, just take a look at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine, a few years ago, their guests were not only their relatives but also fellow royalties from other countries like the Sultan of Brunei or the King and Queen of Denmark and more. Most probably, these invited people also had feelers to ascertain who would and would not attend.
However, in the gospel, the King did something very different, instead of calling off the wedding as was the custom in that situation, he invited all the people in the town plaza who in normal circumstances would not be invited.
What Jesus is telling us today in the gospel is that since the original “invitees” to the banquet refused to attend, the wedding banquet is now offered to everybody. Sadly, those who were invited may have accepted the invitation, however, since they learned that the wedding involved Jesus and sadly some of them particularly the Pharisees, scribes and the elders of the people had rejected him, we who have accepted Jesus are now the ones who get invited.
However, this invitation is not necessarily a freebie. Remember that in the parable, the king saw one person who was not wearing a wedding garment and got kicked out in the process. For us Catholics, we believe that this wedding garment is actually our baptismal garment that we wore when we were baptised. In the ritual of baptism, the priest tells our parents and all present that the baptismal garment is being presented to us to wear always and keep it unstained until the coming of the kingdom.
We have to realise that while we are invited, we have two questions to answer: first, do we want to accept this invitation even if we are not worthy of it? Second, have we done our best to wear our wedding garment and keep it unstained?
God continues to invite everybody for the wedding feast, which is actually eternal life in heaven. All we have to do is to accept it and make sure that we are wearing our wedding garment. And with what God is offering, who is really stupid enough to refuse?