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THE PARABLE OF TJHE WEDDING FEAST.
St Gregory the Dialogist writes that the King is God Himself, and the marriage is symbolic of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the union of Christ’s divine and human natures into one Person. The feast is symbolic of Christ’s Church, which exists, we remember, in heaven and on earth. St. John Chrysostom's’ commentary is similar to this interpretation. He adds that, at first, Christ invites the people of the Old Covenant, the Jews, to join this great marriage feast, which is the Church. But they fail to respond. He invites them a second time, and they are too busy with earthly concerns, to which St. John Chrysostom's states that “when spiritual things call us, there is no press of business that has the power of necessity to call us away.” So it is then that the ordinary people of the ”highways,“ the Gentiles, are invited.
Now, Christ has summoned us to His feast, that is to His Church, so that here we may partake of His sacred foods, those that are filled with Grace—the Holy Mass—and that prepare us spiritually for eternal life with Him, for life in that eternal aspect of the Church. But, for this feast we must prepare, or we shall be cast, like the man in the parable, into the outer darkness. Without this, being part of the Church here on earth, we are no better—NO BETTER—than those who rejected and crucified Christ, since failure to prepare ourselves is a form of rejection—it is a gross insult to the King—and therefore our ultimate fate too, in the life to come, will be no better.
We are blest by God to be members of His Church. We have been invited to partake of the feast and we have accepted the invitation. When we attend Holy Mass, we share in the feast that the King, Christ Jesus, has readied for us and doing this we prepare ourselves for an eternal feast in the life to come.
Twenty Eighth Sunday of Year A
11th October
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