Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Today's Scripture
In today’s reading from St. Luke’s Gospel we encounter the exclamation, “blessed is the one who will dine in the Kingdom of God.” Jesus proceeds to explain who will be invited to dine in the Kingdom of God. He begins by mentioning those who are initially invited but who spurn the invitation, and so are thereby excluded from the royal banquet. What should strike the audience as odd is the company Jesus then explains are invited next to the banquet, the only ones who actually get to dine in the kingdom: the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, and the many in the “highways” and “hedgerows.” These are not the sort of people we typically associate with royal banquets!
So it is with the Kingdom of God. This inclusion of the outcasts and downtrodden was of course foreshadowed in the Old Testament in the Kingdom of Israel, when King David invited Jonathan’s crippled son Mephibosheth to table fellowship with him (2 Samuel 9). And so it is with Jesus, and so should it be with us. We must learn to help, take care of, dine with, and fellowship with the downtrodden. We ourselves are invited to the wedding banquet, to the royal feast in the Kingdom of God. But we must recognize the many ways in which we are spiritually crippled and poor in spirit.
We must learn to live out the commands of St. Paul in today’s first reading from the Letter to the Romans. He exhorts us to live out our vocation to which God has called us. We each have different vocations, but can and must live out our Christian lives wherever God has called us. Moreover, the instructions in the second half of today’s first reading apply to all of us, and may be summed up in the dual command to love God and love neighbor. Only in recognizing our lowliness and by loving God and loving others can we fully participate in the royal banquet.
We already do participate in the royal banquet of the Kingdom of God at every Eucharist. However, participating in the Eucharist is not like other banquets where we finish our meal only to rest in luxury. Rather, the Eucharist is a pledge to live out the Eucharist in our daily lives. Receiving the Eucharist not only is an acceptance of the invitation to dine in the Kingdom, but it is also a summons to live out Jesus’ life in our own daily lives, and with those around us, spreading the Eucharistic Love which we have received, and which we read about in today’s first reading. Empowered by our weekly celebration of the Eucharist, let us go forth to love and serve the Lord and one another!
Jeff Morrow