Day: June 9, 2024

“God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”

The Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a strong encouragement to enter into what is made known to us in Jesus Christ. To put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God. But God is greater than us, greater than our hearts in disarray, indeed, as Anselm so memorably put it, “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought,” to which we might add, and loved. Nothing greater.

Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship has priority. It is as simple as that. Yet to say this misses the greater reason. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our loving worship of God whose love defines us. It is so easy to miss the essential point. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.

The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable is the Gospel proclamation that “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” That is, to be sure, a blessing. As such it is not a right. But the refusal of the invitation is the refusal of the blessing.

What is Jesus saying by way of a parable about our threefold refusal of the invitation? He is convicting our hearts about our indifference to the things of God and about the distractions in our lives. He is reminding us of the priority of God’s grace and the importance of entering into what God provides for us. We can only be moved by our hearts and minds. The parable convicts our hearts and our minds about our neglect of the things of God because of our indifference and our preoccupation with land, property, and personal affairs. I have bought a piece of ground; I have brought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife.

Interesting and provocative excuses. Does the third imply that wives are like ground to be inspected, or oxen to be proved? But then again, is there not an even deeper critique implied in the ownership of land and the use of domestic animals? Is the land really ours? Are the oxen simply there for our use and pleasure? And then by extension, are we here simply to be used by one another, and then to be cast off into the dustbin of history? In a way, these excuses open us out to a larger view of the spiritual nature of our everyday lives.

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