Pastor’s Reflection

Guest of Honor

I have never liked head tables.  It is so often uncomfortable for brides and grooms in the more elegant wedding receptions.  Guests of honor sometimes find it hard to relax at the front table with everyone looking at them.  Priests often get put with them.  They find themselves next to beloved aunts or uncles who’s had a bit too much to drink.  People spend their lives writing books about wedding etiquette, especially who sits where:  head table or at the end next to aunt Margaret?  To the right or the left?  With the bride or the grooms party?

Wedding and formal banquets are sometimes still the locus for social climbing.  Jesus lived in a culture grounded in tribal, family and social honor.  To be excluded from any important circle was to lose not just “face” but your very identity.  If you did not keep up with social net-working, you ceased to exist or lost all chance of advancement to higher levels of influence and patronage.

What Jesus proposed to the guest at a dinner ( at which he was no doubt the “guest of honor”) began as clever advice about how to use humility to get recognition and a place at the head table.  But it quickly became utter foolishness when Jesus pressed on and told his audience to invite social outcasts to eat with them.  The poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind could not reciprocate.  Perhaps even worse, associating with them could even hurt your own social standing.  The first last and the last first.

We look around Saint Mary’s, and we see a very diverse collection of people.  I love the old 1915 photo of Friar Novatus Benzing, the builder of our beautiful basilica, in our lobby.  Most alums know him by rubbing his brass nose on the plaque just west of our great doors.  He is in the midst of a crowd of kids from over culture who could live in the what of Phoenix’s summer.  Chinese, German, Italian, Irish, natives, Hispanic, recent immigrants and those who had already been generation in the Valley of the Sun.  The challenge Jesus proposes in today’s Gospel is to build a sense of “kin-dom” as Albuquerque Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr notes.  One of the scandals of the Christian church is that Sunday morning in many places is still the most segregated time in America.  Not here.  But the feeling of family comes only when we reach out to each other build memories.  A repertoire of songs, tastes and sights associated with faces and events anchors them to memories.

In Matthew 25, Jesus makes it clear that when one’s world is extended to include the poor, the hungry and thirsty, the Ill-clothed, sick and imprisoned, the immigrant and the refugee, incredible life happens.  An invitation to Jesus’ wedding banquet extends life, both here and for the here after.  It is not too late to volunteer, to tithe, to stretch our lives to the margins, where the Beloved Community waits to welcome us and invite us to go up higher.  And if we are already a “guest of honor” at the Master’s Table, how much higher, after all, can we climb?

A Gentle Week,
Fr. Michael Weldon, OFM

Adapted from Celebration’s Pat Marrin, “Come Higher”