There is a wealth of meaning carried by the imagery used in today’s First Reading and Gospel.  The image of the Kingdom of God as a meal.  The power of that image was much more evident, I would imagine, to the people of Isaiah’s or Christ’s time, than it is to our own.  They had not yet sacrificed the notion of the meal to the drive-thru or in front of the TV.  The people of Isaiah’s and Christ’s time still held very intensely to the notion of the meal as a drama, a document, in which the whole of their lives, the quality of those lives was acted out, expressed, and affirmed.  The feast celebrated on the mountain in Isaiah, the wedding feast in the Gospels, in a word, a meal done well, experienced rightly, all of that is life as God intended it to be, life done well, acted out rightly.

When life is right, when it is marked by right understanding, right relationships, the meal is right.  But when that is not the case, when righteousness fails, the meal is disrupted, the document is distorted.  The verses in Isaiah just prior to this reading speak to the corruption of the covenant, the infidelity of the people.  And Isaiah describes it as a hunger in the people.  He says, “In the streets they cry out for lack of wine …. “. 

The almost harsh sounding imagery of the guest who is thrown out in the Gospel because he would not dress properly strikes the same note.  The issue is not proper dress, the issue is the disruption of the meal, refusing to do it right, refusing to accept the right relationship between himself and the host, and to do so on the host’s terms.  Perhaps that is really the heart of the imagery.  Do we come to the meal on our own terms, or on those of the host?  Do we write the document that expresses our lives, or does God?

This imagery is very rich both in scripture and in human experience.  But there is a disturbing side also.  If something very ancient and very deep within us makes of a meal a document that speaks of the quality of our lives, what is being said by what our culture makes of meals?  The speed of them, the superficiality?  How many families do we know that eat together, all together, same time, same place, more than perhaps once a week?  What is added to the document of our lives by the fact that we in Western Europe spend more on remedies for indigestion that many nations spend on food?

The invitation to the banquet that is given us is an invitation to nothing less than life itself, life as God means it to be.  And that, if done rightly, is a thing to celebrate.