There are two ways to notify people to appear at a place or event. These two ways are a summons and an invitation. A summons is usually an official document. Its purpose is to simply notify someone to appear, for example, at an office, police station, or notary’s office. Refusing a summons can have legal consequences for a person. It is different with an invitation. An invitation kindly announces that the inviter would like to see the invitee at his celebration. It can be a wedding, graduation, or life anniversary. An invitation is not a coercive document. It respects a person’s freedom. He may or may not accept the invitation. The king in Jesus’ parable also invites people to his son’s wedding. He leaves them freedom to decide, even though he assumes that they will accept the invitation. But the opposite happened. Those invited to the wedding did not come.
The parable solves an important problem, which is called God’s will to save all people through Jesus Christ. This is how we should understand the characters in the parable. The King is God. His Son is Jesus Christ. The invited guests represent people and their attitudes toward salvation. At first, it may appear that God does not want to save everyone. It may seem as if He only has His favorites whom He wants to save. Only when they freely and voluntarily reject salvation will those from the “street” come along. We can answer in the spirit that God is completely free in distributing His gifts, to whom He grants them and in what measure. However, whoever is offered more of God’s love will also bear greater responsibility for God’s gifts. Whoever is offered fewer gifts will also have less responsibility. How all this is accomplished in individual cases remains a mystery between God and man. However, God always respects man’s free attitude. Man can accept or reject the invitation. Man will bear the consequences himself.
From another perspective, we could say that in the first stage, God invites man to salvation on the level of conscience or the natural law within him. If a man lives according to his conscience, even if it is not religiously formed, God comes to his aid in the second stage, which is called helping grace. We can also call it the inner voice by which God calls man to take a decisive step toward salvation. But even in this phase, man remains free. He does not have to listen to this voice. He can drown it out with something. But if he listens to it and wants to go further, then the third stage comes. In it, man consciously accepts God and through the individual sacraments, God gives him sanctifying grace. These are the white robes from the parable. It is God’s life in the soul of man. Someone might object that freedom is emphasized too much, and yet God, in his omniscience, knows which people will accept God’s grace and which will not. So man is not free. That God knows this is true. God’s knowledge, however, has no effect on human freedom. If some will be saved and others damned, it will not be because God knew about it, but because of how they freely decided. Even though God foresaw their decision from eternity, this does not mean that he caused it. Every person who dies will do so with a feeling of justice that God wanted and I did not want.
Let’s move from difficult dogmatics to our practical life. In it we see how people respond to God’s invitation. Some are indifferent. They are not fundamentally against God, but they have no time for him. These are those in the parable who went to their fields and to their businesses. Others are superficial. They are represented by the man who did not have a wedding garment at the wedding feast. These are people who profess to be God in appearance but do not care how they live. They do not care much about what their soul is like and what their deeds are. There are also militant enemies of God. In the parable, they are represented by those who killed the Lord’s servants when invited to the wedding. The meaning of their life is to fight against God, the Church, and Christians by all possible means. From cruel methods to subtle ones. Finally, there are people who yearn for salvation. They are represented in the parable by those who were invited from the streets. They are aware of their unworthiness, but they accept God’s invitation with gratitude.
They represent all sincere Christians who responsibly cooperate in their salvation, even while aware of their weakness and sinfulness. Every Sunday, Christ calls us to his wedding feast in church. Let us accept this invitation with joy and responsibility. Experience teaches us that a time may come when we will hear the church bells ringing on Sunday for Holy Mass, but our bodies may already be weak and limp. If a healthy person does not accept this invitation, it is either because he has serious reasons for it, or because he is impolite. For serious reasons, God understands. Let us always leave the altar with a request that we may once after death enter the eternal feast in heaven.
