Heavenly High Society

Welcoming the poor and persecuted into our hearts  

Matthew 22:1-14 

Jesus again in reply spoke to the chief priests and the elders of the people in parables saying, “The Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the feast, but they refused to come. Then the king said to his servants, ‘The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come. Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.’ The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests.   

          Every country, every culture and even every clan has a sort of high society that all strive to be part of. It’s not just my country of India that has a caste system, so does every country: upper, middle and lower classes. Now, for the longest time in America, Catholics always comprised the middle and lower rungs of this ladder. But do you know when we finally “arrived” and took a seat at the table of high society? It was when a Catholic first because president of the United States. In 1961, John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic president. He was the youngest man to ever be elected president – at only 46 years old – and also the youngest to die as president in 1963 in Dallas, TX, a day many of you will well remember. They called the White House “Camelot” in those days because JFK and Jacqueline were more like royalty – a handsome king and a beautiful queen – the Catholics had arrived in Camelot. Catholics were no longer the unimportant immigrants without a penny in their pocket, we were in high society.   

          In the gospel today, Jesus tells the parable about the high society of heaven, and what it takes to be a part of it, and who holds its privileged places. He describes a wedding feast in which the invited guests decline the invitation to come to the celebration. The king who throws the feast for his son then invites the lowly to the feast. He says, “The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come. Go out, therefore, into the main road and invite to the feast whomever you find.” And indeed they did, filling the feast with street people, the bad and the good alike. Like the Kennedys who found themselves in Camelot, so God wants to “cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly” (Luke 1:52), as Mary sang in her Magnificat. In other words, heavenly high society will be filled with the lowly and the lonely, the humble and the homeless, the poor and the persecuted, the unimportant and the immigrants.   

          My friends have you noticed how Pope Francis has been talking about the privileged place of the poor ever since he moved into his humble hotel room as pope? He wrote in his first encyclical, “The Joy of the Gospel,” these stirring words: “I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They [the poor] have much to teach us.” Just like poor Catholics have much to teach America. He goes on: “We need to be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the center of the Church’s pilgrim way.” The pope then gets even more personal, saying, “We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them” (Evangelii gaudium, 198).   

          In other words, we should see the poor as God’s privileged people, and those who are the high society not only of heaven, but also in our hearts. You see, the real “Camelot” is the heart of every Christian, and there every unimportant immigrant should feel like a king and a queen.

          Praised be Jesus Christ!