Invited, But Not Present

You call everyone to dinner. Then you call again.

They come eventually, but slowly, and not really. Someone is finishing something, someone is still talking about their day, and someone sits down with a mind clearly elsewhere. The food is on the table, but nobody is quite there.

It's a small hurt, but a real one. You didn't ask for much, only that they be here.

That's the first half of Sunday's Gospel (Matthew 22:1-14), and it's uncomfortable. A king prepares a wedding feast for his son. The invited guests "would not come." He sends servants again: everything is ready, come. But they "made light of it." One goes to his farm, another to his business. Some seize the servants and kill them, and the king answers with violence.

It's tempting to skim past that. Let's not. Jesus is saying that ignoring God's invitation is not harmless.

But notice who these guests are. Most aren't enemies of the king. They're busy. A farm and a business are perfectly good things. Their sin isn't hatred. It's that they were invited to the greatest feast of their lives and treated it as one more item on the list.

That sounds familiar. We don't refuse God so much as drift past him. And the feast is real, because it happens every Sunday. We call it the Mass. We show up on time, we stand and sit and say the responses, and the whole time we're planning lunch, running through Monday, wondering what's keeping the kids so restless. The King sets the table, and we're thinking about the next meal.

Technology makes it worse. We carry in our pockets a device built to pull us away from wherever we are. We sit across from the people we love and are somewhere else. We are reachable by everyone and present to almost no one. When someone you love is talking, look up. And if we can't give our full attention to the person in front of us, how will we give it to God in front of us?

The king isn't offended in his pride. The feast is for us. Every time we stay somewhere else in our minds, we're the ones who go hungry.

So this Sunday, put the phone away before you walk in. When the priest lifts the Host, be there.

The invitation has already been sent. All that's left is to be present.