'S INVITATION AND HUMAN RESPONSE
Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A Fr. Ugochukwu Ugwoke, ISch Isaiah 25:6-10; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14 There is a difference between receiving an invitation and accepting it. We may be invited to an important celebration, yet choose not to attend because something else seems more important. In today’s Gospel, Jesus uses the image of a wedding banquet to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. The tragedy is not that the guests were never invited, but that they refused to come. In the Gospel, the king prepares a wedding feast for his son and sends servants to summon the invited guests. Everything is ready, yet some ignore the invitation and return to their farms and businesses, while others mistreat and kill the servants (Mt 22:1-6). The responses of these guests reveal how easily ordinary concerns can become obstacles to God. Work, business and personal ambitions are not evil in themselves. The problem arises when they become so dominant that God no...
