Looking ahead again, I see two steps on the Last Supper, so I will spend a bit of today and tomorrow on the scriptures of this step. Still looking ahead, I also see that the next session after this one covers three chapters of Matthew's gospel, consisting of Jesus' final teachings before his Passion. I think that locking the exercises to the calendar might not be such a good plan for this step! Again, revisiting it later is always an option, and I will be looking for a way to continue this discipline of walking daily with Jesus after I reach the end . . .
This session covers Mt 22.
(1-14) These verses cover a couple of different important ideas. The first illustrates again the dangers of allowing our own agendas be more important to us than the invitation which God offers us to know him intimately, personally, transformingly; to feast on the banquet of himself which he offers to each of us. We have been personally invited, but if we're too busy he isn't going to smite us; he just extends his invitation to those who are not so enamored of their lives without him. It isn't that we need to spend each minute of every day contemplating the divine reality in lieu of the physical one around us, but that we must always interpret our world in the context of the eternal one to which we are invited. When we focus on the former so intently that we reject the latter, we find ourselves left out of the feast, but God will not fail to fill the banquet hall with those who are glad to receive his invitation and to partake of his rich feast.
But some will try to enter without clothing themselves appropriately. I was in the room for a discussion the other day in which someone was taking offense that we conduct an all-night vigil between Holy Thursday and Good Friday, when the rubrics apparently call for such a vigil to end at midnight. This same person has cast aside the rubrics to celebrate Holy Thursday mass in the way that they have desired, feeling too musically restricted by our obedience to the guidance to conduct the service a capella after the Gloria. Personally, I find that hour of prayer in the wee hours of Friday morning to consistently be one of the high points of my year. My point in this is not to lament another's hypocrisy, but to observe how quick we are to cast aside those teachings that we feel impede us while holding fast to those that restrict others. God has provided all of us with appropriate garments to enter the feast, and God alone is equipped to tell whether a heart has embraced being clothed in Christ.
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