Trinity 2 (St Peter’s Day) – The Invitation

1 St John 3:13-24       St Luke 14:16-24

A man once gave a great banquet and invited many.
St Luke 14:16

These first few Sundays are an introduction to the rest of the Trinity season, which is about our spiritual ascent into the life of God – from immaturity to full maturity in Christ.

It makes sense that our Gospel today is about Jesus inviting us to a great banquet.

I’m not a very imaginative person when it comes to playing games with my daughter Eva.  I hope that my imagination can be cultivated as I’m challenged by her.  She has a lot of little people from different games and they all ended up on the top of a garage (one that many of us grew up with – this one is from a friend of Daniëlle’s when she was a child).  We also had some duplo blocks and I made with her a small building which I call a castle.  And I started one day with the idea of an invitation to the castle for a great banquet offered by one of the little characters (not consciously but no doubt inspired by today’s Gospel).  And so the game is that they all make their way to the castle (inside or on the roof) and feast together and then go home.

This has become one of her favourite games with me – almost every day she says, Daddy, can we play “invitation”?  And I’m trying to make some variations on the theme.

I’m not sure why it is such a favourite for her, but I can’t help thinking it is touching on an archetype that our Lord has set up for us.  Somehow deep in our soul we want to be invited to a great feast, and that is precisely what heaven itself is like.  And all the types we know on earth - invited to a family gathering or with friends or for a birthday or for a wedding - participate in this archetype.  Jesus uses this imagery of an invitation to a great feast or to a wedding feast in different parables, and in Trinity season we will hear of three examples (this Sunday and near the end, as we think more on heaven, in Trinity 17 and 20).

The invitation is always God’s initiative.  The super abundance of God’s love, overflows in a call to communion with Him and with one another.  [Benedict XVI]  It strikes something deep in our souls because we have been made for this.

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What is the great banquet, the party, to which we are being invited by God?  What are the elements of it that make it so compelling?

A great banquet promises joy.

God promises us this.  The Psalmist says,  You will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. [Ps 16:11] And we know that our joy is more full when others also have that joy.  St John begins his first letter, that he writes it, “so that you may have fellowship with us…[and] we are writing these things that our joy may be complete.” [1:4]  So joy is one element.

The banquet is also not work, it is rest, it is play!

It is entering into that rest that we are promised from all our business.

In Hebrews St Paul speaks of this.  He gives a lengthy exposition of this theme in Psalm 95, which warns us to be obedient or we will not enter into that rest which God promises.  It is the reason for the call to observe a sabbath day of rest, a gift to begin to experience now the life of heaven, and a continual reminder of what is our ultimate aim.  Heaven is not work as we experience it now.

Probable the greatest experience of this on earth is the wedding feast of friends getting married.  You don’t have to prepare anything, it is all prepared for you, you just enjoy the feast – fine food and music to dance to.

Another essential element of the banquet involves seeing others and being seen.

We all want communion.  As Pope Benedict XVI said, “The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: only love makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and be loved.” [Trinity Sunday address]  Even for the most extreme introverts, of which I count myself one, and Daniëlle can attest, we can agree with the phrase of the developmental psychologist Winnicott, “it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.”

Jesus prays to the Father that we may be one with Him as He and the Father are one:  The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one.  [John 17:22-23]

Jesus tells us, strangely, that we may need to be able to leave family and friends to follow him, foremost, but that is not to diminish our communion with others but will mean a much larger family and more friendships… To St Peter’s question to Jesus [it is also the Feast of St Peter today], “See, we have left everything and followed you.  What will we then have?”  Jesus says, Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. [St Matthew 19:29]  Jesus is appealing to our desire for connection with not just a few but with a great multitude.

I remember vividly the moment of my own wedding feast, of entering with Daniëlle into the room full of people, family and friends I have known from different times and places in my life, all smiling and enjoying our joy – a real taste of heaven.

And we know a taste of that Great Banquet when we come together for the worship of God with others, as we have today, don’t we?

Do these things that I say stir up in you a desire?  Do you feel a kind of burning in your heart for deeper communion with one another?  Do you want to heed this invitation to heaven that is being offered today?

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How do we come to experience it?

In the Gospel today we are encouraged by Jesus – simply to heed that call that is continually being made to us and come to the feast that is prepared for us!  The banquet is no work at all on our part.  “Come, for everything is now ready,” says God!  We just need to heed the command to leave what we were busy with and come.

And in the Epistle today, St John describes it as simply following the command to believe in Jesus and to love one another (I say, simply, but it is by no means easy!).  In this way we abide in God and He in us – that is what it is to dwell with Him and in Him and in that dwelling and being indwelt by Him, we are tasting the great banquet.

We can’t understand so well at first how to love God whom we cannot see, but it is easier for us to understand what it means to love those whom we can see.  So we start this journey of faith and entering into the life of God, the invitation to the heavenly banquet, by attending to our communion with one another.  We have passed out of death into life, [if] we love our brothers and sisters. [1 St John 3:13]

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Why would we hesitate?  Why would we not want to feast, to rest in God?

In both of our readings today, there are strong warnings to us.

One of the principle points of the Gospel parable is to warn us against loving lesser things more than the highest things.

At the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.  But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please excuse me.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to examine them. Please excuse me.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’

All these things are goods in themselves, but they become a sin, a snare, if they are loved more than the highest good, God.  Jesus warns us in the starkest way, “I tell you, none of those men who were invited [and refused] shall taste my banquet.” We must get our loves correct.

One of the points of the Epistle is to warn us against hating others.

Whoever does not love abides in death.  Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.  [1 John 3:14-15]

John warns us we are not to be surprised that the world will hate us, for the very things that are of God—our innocence, our simple trust, our righteousness, our hope, our faith, our love (however feeble these are in us)—they are hated by some, and so we will all no doubt have been hurt by someone, even in our families and by our friends.  But we cannot stay there and hate in return or we will lose eternal life, we will not be able to taste or partake of the heavenly banquet.

Trinity season, the coming Sundays for the next several months, will be about unveiling in our souls of our hesitations to more fully enter into the party that God is calling us to.  We will look at all the passions of our soul, our desires, our thoughts, our fears and seek to uncover our hesitations to join the heavenly banquet.

But this morning, maybe the Holy Spirit has or will show each one of us what is our hesitation or a hesitation to more fully give up all and follow Jesus, as did St Peter.

The Liturgy of Holy Communion is ordered in a way to help in the removing of the barriers that we find in ourselves to accepting the invitation to the great banquet.  We now have opportunity to repent of our hesitations, our excuses, then to have presented Christ crucified before our eyes, to know His mercy and love towards each one of us, and then to partake of the feast.

Come, for everything is now ready!

Amen +