It’s frustrating sometimes, but it’s a fact that even the most brilliant theologians don’t know very much about what our life with God in the future is going to be like. All we have are hints and images, and we get some of the most powerful ones in today’s gospel.
First, today we hear again the only image that Jesus uses more than once to describe eternal life, we’re told it’s a banquet, a wedding feast even, one where God is virtually at the table with us, a celebration of our presence together that doesn’t end. It’s the world reunited and transformed. I think that’s something that is appealing to all of us, and it’s amazing to think that God wants it, too.
But today we find out something else about that banquet, which is that it’s not like any regular human banquet. This is an all-encompassing banquet with no barriers, guests coming from not only across history but across every barrier and border that humans erect to keep people apart. There’s no barrier of social class or ethnicity in this banquet, no barrier between rich and poor, somehow, it’s one family reunited. God will make it work.
Today someone asks Jesus, how many people are going to be there, although what he really wants to know is what percentage of people are going to make the cut. Jesus doesn’t answer this question about how many, because he doesn’t want us playing this mental game of calculating our odds because then we start wondering about everyone else’s. Today’s gospel is not about how many. He wants us focused on that vision of the banquet, and really, on whether we live now as if that banquet is already here. Because that’s what God is looking for.
Let’s think for a moment about this banquet and what we’re told about it. People are going to come from the four corners of the earth for this feast with God, Jesus says, all types of people, and that’s the way God wants it. God is not thinking small numbers. The way God also wants it is that the system by which people are invited to this banquet is completely up to God, and the system God uses will really frustrate those who want there to be a system the way humans would invent a system. What we’d do if salvation were up to us as humans is make it like a selective university of some sort, and we’d have some system of religious observances and duties where over time you’d complete all the tasks you’re supposed to, you’d get letters from people who said you had a clean record, and avoid points off for making a mistake. It would be based on the avoiding of error and not the embracing of others. But instead, Jesus is suggesting that while religious observance and staying on the rails helps us a great deal, God’s system is about something else, it’s about really knowing Jesus. It is not about admiring Jesus or knowing things about him or even loving the idea of him. It is about really knowing him, and that means living the way he did, embracing everyone. That’s the narrow gate he says we should aim for, it’s narrow because we have to throw a lot of things aside in order to get through it. What we throw aside are the fences we build around ourselves, because really knowing Jesus means that you also know there’s no limit to who God cares about in this world or the next one.
So no, salvation’s not so easy, we don’t necessarily get it without really wanting it. If you want this banquet, it involves embracing God’s view of the world now, the world as a banquet where everyone in God’s eyes is equal. So then, we have to see that future dinner taking shape around us, we have to be there for the outsiders who do the right thing despite being off the reservation, for the sinners left behind by everyone, for the people who don’t have anyone to speak up for them, for all those people who at the heavenly banquet might be at the next table or maybe even at ours.
You know, years ago, fear used to be a good way to get people to want salvation. We get a little of the flavor of that fear from this reading, where we don’t want to be the ones who find ourselves locked out at the end. But maybe that fear just locked us into a fear of sin instead of an embrace of love, and that’s what the banquet is. Really knowing Jesus gives us a world-changing opportunity to do the right thing in this life. It’s the joy of that, the freedom of it, that God’s trying to communicate. Perfection is not within our grasp, we’re too human for that, but embracing Jesus actually is within our power. All those humble meals that Jesus shared with tax collectors and sinners and outcasts, all those smaller meals were a preview of what the great banquet of the future will feel like. That is now what we can do in imitation of him, worrying about and talking with and speaking up for people the world cares nothing for, And the door to that banquet might be a narrow one, but it’s wide open for people who have figured out that eating with others the way Jesus did is the path to everything.