“I can do all things in him who strengthens me!” (Philippians 12:1)
THESE words of St. Paul from the Second Reading this Sunday evoke the joy of Christian life. With the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, we can face and endure the challenges and pains of life. Our faith in Jesus brings us courage and hope. With Christ, there is no burden that we cannot carry, and no day that we cannot endure.
I see this message reflected in the faces of our people who attend our daily Masses. Their love for the Catholic faith, particularly the Holy Eucharist and their joy and piety, inspire me to live my priestly ministry to the fullest even in a pandemic time.
Life with Jesus is a promise of joy and peace! It’s what Jesus conveys in the Gospel this Sunday, the Parable of the Wedding Feast. William Barclay explains it in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.
First, the parable reminds us that God’s invitation is to a feast as joyous as a wedding feast. His invitation is to joy. “To think of Christianity as a gloomy giving up of everything which brings laughter and sunshine and happy fellowship is to mistake its whole nature. It is to joy that the Christian is invited; and it is joy he misses if he refuses the invitation.”
Second, the things which make people deaf to the invitation of Jesus are not necessarily bad in themselves. In the parable, one person went to his farm and the other to his business. They did not engage in an immoral adventure, but instead, they took care of their livelihood. The problem is that they got busy with the things of this world that they forgot the things of eternity.
It is true for many of us. As Barclay says, we are often preoccupied with the things that we see that we forget the things which we cannot see, to hear so insistently the claims of the world that we cannot hear the soft invitation of the voice of Christ.
Third, the appeal of Christ is not so much to think about how we will be punished as it is to see what we will miss if we do not follow his ways. The tragedy of those who refuse to accept God’s invitation is the joy of the wedding banquet—a life filled with grace.
Indeed, in the last analysis, God’s invitation is an invitation to grace. As Barclay puts it well, “Those who were gathered in from the highways and the byways had no claim on the king at all; they could never by any stretch of the imagination have expected an invitation to the wedding feast; still less could they ever have deserved it. It came to them from nothing other than the wide-armed, open-hearted, generous hospitality of the king. It was grace which offered the invitation and grace which gathered men in.”
My friends, may we never miss God’s invitation to a life of joy—the joy of Christian life!
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Fr. Rodel “Odey” Balagtas is the pastor of Incarnation Church in Glendale, California.
