Hearing the call

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 15-24) relates one of the great parables of the Kingdom of God which Jesus likens to a great banquet. Finally, the host sends out a message to the guests: Come, everything is ready! And yet it was not true: not everything was ready, for the guests themselves were not ready. Then, we begin to hear the procession of excuses; one has bought a field, one has acquired five yoke of oxen (i.e. ten in total), and a third has taken a wife. The guests are no longer available. Angry, the host of the banquet then sends his servants out to bring everybody they can to the feast, the desirable guests and the undesirable ones. The essence of the invitation now is not how good and worthy the guests are but how willing they are to put all else aside and come to share in the feast. They will henceforth be welcome, but the original guests will be excluded.

In a sense, this parable is profoundly about the process of vocation. The call of the Lord goes out. He gives it to whom He will. His pleasure is to be with the children of men. We tend to think of the host of the banquet as generous only when He invites all and sundry, but the original invitation is itself an expression of His goodness which He desires to share. And this is where vocation is at play.

We so often tend to think that vocation is about me, but that is too simplistic, not to say too inward-looking. Vocation has two dimensions to it: the call and the response. The call we receive from God: the vocation is literally a voice of God spoken to us in the circumstances that surround us, in the inspirations that come to us, or perhaps for some, as for Samuel, in a still small voice that calls our name. The second dimension of vocation is our reply, our response to love received: We love Him, says St John in his first epistle, because He first loved us. What more need we say to such a call, other than yes and thank you, Lord, as Mary our model did? But then there come the responses of the unworthy guests.

The first has bought a field and, therefore, cannot respond to the call. We may read this action in several ways but what if it simply means the guest intends to make his home elsewhere? Everyone needs a home. But if we have listened carefully to the Lord, we know that we here have no abiding city. If we pitch our tents, they are only bivouacs. We journey on; we can purchase a field so as to have the treasure there, but not so as to build our home there. And yet we do try to build our home other than in the Kingdom. We seek to make things perfect or as perfect as they might be in the eyes of the world. We wish to blend in as if we were not the privileged guests of a host beyond compare.

The second guest who refuses the call has purchased ten oxen and, therefore, cannot come. What holds this guest back now other than his attachment to other things? If we are invited by someone of great worthiness, then what sacrifices we make to answer that invitation! And yet here is this guest, who despite the call reckons that attending to his oxen is more crucial than hearing the invitation. Here the cultural gap does not help us. Does this man not have a legitimate excuse? But then we might consider that someone you can afford ten oxen could easily afford a servant to attend to that particular job. This is not a legitimate excuse; it is a self-serving pretext. The man now refuses to come not because he values his oxen but because he does not value his host. If the field of the first guest was a kind of alternative destination, the oxen of the second guest are simply encumbrances that distort his sense of value. The first guest does not hear his call because he is lost; the second guest does not hear his call because he is no longer listening.

And then comes the third guest who has taken a wife. Here, we have to understand that the metaphor of the wedding we see elsewhere in other parables is present by negation. The third guest insults the host more than the others for while they are lost or merely attached to other things, this third guest poses as a rival. It is not simply that he will not be coming; by implication, he is telling the host that he too is throwing a party. He is merely lost or merely encumbered; he is proposing that the host of the banquet is not that special.

And thus we see the obstacles to hearing God’s call, all concentrated in this one parable: the lure of the alternative, the trap of the things we hold, and the temptation to choose ourselves rather than God. These are the old enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil, blocking the road before us, severing our ties of communication with heaven, isolating us, making us turn inward to the perpetual vacuum of a sterile fruitlessness.

The desirables or undesirables who will be admitted to the banquet will not be admitted without condition; we know from another parable of a man who comes without the right gown and finds himself ejected. It is not enough just to hear the call; we must hear the call and realise its implications; we must hear the call and live out its meaning.

But how much more clearly does that call strike us when we realise but we are the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame? The call comes to us not because we are worthy of it but because the host of the banquet has deemed us worthy to receive this call. It is not because we are special in ourselves but because we have become special to Him, for all things are prepared for us. It only remains for us now to set aside our fields and our oxen and even our other plans for happiness and thus to turn and respond at last in love to love received.