A Homily for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a  Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20  Matthew 22:1-14

It is the end of the semester, and you did not realize that you had signed up for a college math course. Still, you think you could pass the final exam if you could only find the classroom. 

You did not know that you had been cast in a play, which has already begun. It is only a few lines, and they do not occur until the second act. You could still learn your lines if you could just find a copy of the script.

You are celebrating Mass in a new church, and you have never seen this edition of the sacramentary. You cannot find the right page, no matter how hard you search.

Psychology calls these “anxiety dreams.” At night, your subconscious symbolically spools out your under-acknowledged daytime anxieties. We all have them unless we are living extremely stressless lives (though maybe we don’t all have the one about an unknown altar book). 

After telling us that the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding feast and that we have all been invited, our Lord suddenly stokes our anxiety when he speaks of the guest who is culpably unprepared for the celebration. 

St. Ignatius Loyola suggested that we should enter Gospel passages by imagining ourselves to be each character in the scene, trying on each persona in sequence. 

Perhaps some shifting occurs naturally as we age. All my life I have presumed that the unprepared guest was someone else, but the older I grow, the more I worry that I am the one not dressed for the wedding.

Often when I give myself over to contemplative prayer, my past accuses me. I do not mean that I recall deeds that others would find titillating or even all that interesting. At this point in life, I finally realize that I am not that interesting. 

It is not the commandments that I have broken. Or rather, it is more than that. When I look back, I see someone all too centered in himself, someone always seeking to do things his way, presuming that he understood what others did not. I see someone who has always worked hard at whatever he perceived to be his duty, but I also see someone who seldom questioned his own take on those tasks. 

All too often, I have been bewitched by my sense of self, so far removed from, say, Dolly Parton, who could famously laugh at herself: “I am not offended by dumb blonde jokes, because I know I’m not dumb. I also know I’m not blonde.”

And sometimes in prayer I fearfully realize how little I believe. I confess that there is a God. I say that the Son of God died out of love for all, including me. So late in life, and so much of me still does not believe! I find myself seeking shelter in one of my favorite verses: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24). 

Am I alone in this? Again, I do not think I am that interesting. From what I hear in good confessions, this is the lot of those who have lived long enough to learn. The Lord gives us the grace to see how far we have yet to travel, how little we have scraped up to surrender.

The great St. Francis of Assisi used to say to his fellow friars, “Let us begin, for until now we have done nothing.” I think of those young men, the upper crust of Assisi society, now living down by the river in huts of branches, begging for their daily sustenance. How could Francis speak of their finally beginning to serve the Lord? They must have wanted to throw their sandals at him. That is, if he had not already convinced them to go barefoot!

The grace of God often enters our lives by showing us the tremendous gap between who we are and whom the Lord dreamt of us being. Not every grace is gracious. Some sting like an antiseptic. The Scriptures insist:

for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines;
he scourges every son he acknowledges (Heb 12:6, cf. Prov 3:11-12).

Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk and mystic, wrote a small prayer in his Thoughts in Solitude (1956). It is a great prayer for those who recognize the need to let go of presumption, to return to purification.

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. 
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Grace is not always gracious. Sometimes it stings. We should all pray for the grace to worry, at least a bit, that we are wandering into a great wedding feast still quite unprepared.

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Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.