Highway to Heaven

I’m very happy to be back with you, after a period of being away that was longer than I had anticipated. I very much appreciate your prayers while I was gone. I certainly felt them, and I hope you felt my prayers for you too. 

The coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot about how we live. There are the day to day effects of having to social distance and wear a mask, but we experience how things have changed perhaps most profoundly at the bigger moments of life. Think of a wedding, for example. In normal times, it’s maybe the most joyous occasion we know of, a chance for the friends and relatives of two different families to come together in celebration. In a pandemic, though, plans have to be changed, and precautions have to be taken to keep people safe. Fewer guests might be invited; some guests who might have come before will decide not to. Such is life in the middle of a pandemic. 

In the Gospel today, Jesus gives a parable about a wedding feast that is affected not by a pandemic but by the apathy of its invited guests. The idea of celebrating joyfully at a wedding probably sounds great to us, especially because we can’t do that right now, but even in normal times, we know that conflicts come up, and different obligations prevent us from what doing what we want. But the invited guests in the parable are different — they don’t *want* to attend. They make excuses about needing to attend to their farm and to their business. Those things can wait — after all, it’s the king who is inviting them! It’s the king’s son who is being married! But they’re not interested. 

The Parable of the Great Banquet (c. 1525) by The Brunswick Monogrammist

This parable comes shortly before Jesus’s final entrance into Jerusalem. It’s very clear that he is the son for whom the wedding banquet has been prepared. What is this wedding banquet? It is the union of heaven and earth, the final fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation of the human race through the person of his Son. We might say that in Jesus, and especially in his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, God has married himself to us — he has joined himself to our reality and redeemed it. And he has made us worthy of himself; he has invited us to dine forever in the eternal banquet of heaven. Ultimately that is the only thing that will last – not the world we see around us, certainly not the present pandemic – but the joyous celebration of the union of our reality and God’s in the eternal life of heaven. 

The question is: are we interested? Are we preparing for that final heavenly banquet? Or do we take it for granted, or worse, are we missing the chance to RSVP because we are focused on the things of this life, like the invited guests in the parable? This is perhaps especially a temptation in times of suffering, whether general suffering like a pandemic or particular suffering like a personal struggle or private tragedy. In those moments, when it can be so very hard to look beyond our present grief, we especially have to remember that the final reality will be one of joy, where “the Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face,” in the words of Isaiah. 

The good news is that each time we come to Mass we have a chance to refocus ourselves again on that joyous celebration to come. Why? Because in the Eucharist, we have a preview of the Son’s wedding feast; by receiving this Sacrament, we receive him — his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity — and we remember that there is nothing more important we do on earth than to united ourselves to him, he alone who can carry us from the sorrows of the present world to the eternal joys of the world to come. The Eucharist is nothing less than a foretaste of that heavenly banquet. 

Blessed Carlo Acutis, pray for us!

Friends, yesterday in Assisi, Italy, an Italian teenager named Carlo Acutis became the Church’s newest blessed. He died in 2006 at the age of 15. He was a pretty regular teenager; he loved games and computers and the internet. But more than anything else, he loved Jesus and he loved receiving him in the Eucharist. When he was diagnosed with leukemia, he knew that his sufferings were as nothing compared to the joyous celebration of heaven. He said that the Eucharist was his “highway to heaven” and yesterday that was proven to be true. May this Eucharist, and every Eucharist, be the same for us – a preview of eternal life, and the very means of getting us there.