One of the distinguishing marks of childhood, is how creative we can be when it comes to creating excuses. Many, if not most, were pretty far-fetched and unbelievable, but in our minds, they made perfect sense. Not so much to parents and teachers, and certainly not to your adult self looking back on them!
One of my brothers was particularly creative with language. Like most families, we weren’t allowed to argue with our fists. Generally, that’s a pretty good rule for all of us to live by! Well, my brother slipped up one day and made his point with another sibling kinetically. When he was pleading his case before Mom and Dad, he insisted, “I didn’t punch my sister. I pushed her with my fist.”
Extra credit for the effort to explain, but still an F in following the rules!
It’s funny how we can convince ourselves that our excuses make perfect sense, even when everyone else can see right through them. This is not something we completely outgrow. We just get a little more sophisticated in the excuses we make, especially when God invites us to do something we don’t really want to do.
Think about the Gospel today. Jesus tells us about a king who prepares a wedding feast for his son. He sends out invitations, but the guests refuse to come. So he sends his servants again, explaining that everything is ready. The feast is prepared, the table is set, and there’s no good reason not to come. Yet some guests go back to their farms or businesses, while others mistreat the messengers.
What makes this parable so striking is that the king isn’t asking them to do something burdensome. He’s inviting them to a celebration, to a free meal with all of the best food and drink! All the hard work is done. He wants to share something good with them, and they act as though they have better things to do.
Jesus is speaking directly to the religious leaders of his day, who refuse to recognize him as the Messiah. But he’s also speaking to us. God continues to invite us into personal relationship with him, and we can be remarkably good at coming up with reasons to turn him down. Sometimes our excuses sound perfectly reasonable. “I’m too busy to pray. I’ll get back to church when things settle down. I know I need to go to confession, but I’m not ready yet. I know I should forgive that person, but you don’t know what they did to me.” Other times, we simply put God off. We assume there will be more time later, when work slows down, the kids are older, or we finally get around to it.
But here’s the problem: we don’t have an unlimited amount of time to respond to God’s invitation. This life is the time we’ve been given to decide whether we will accept his invitation, to allow him to change us, and prepare our souls for eternity. God is patient and will continue to call us throughout our lives, but we shouldn’t presume we can put him off indefinitely.
What what makes our excuses so ridiculous is that God isn’t inviting us to something that will make our lives worse. He’s inviting us to the wedding feast! He wants us to experience his love, his mercy, and the joy of living in friendship with him. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows what will truly make us happy.
One day, at the moment of death, each of us will stand before God, finally seeing his love and wisdom in their fullness. Imagine understanding how often he called you back to himself and how many opportunities you passed up because you thought you had something more important to do. How foolish some of our excuses will seem then! How silly it will seem that we were too busy to pray, too proud to apologize, or too stubborn to let go of a sin we knew was keeping us from God.
The point isn’t to make us afraid of God. It’s to help us recognize the urgency of his invitation while we still have time to respond. God isn’t looking for an excuse to keep us out. He’s looking for every opportunity to share his love and grace!
That’s also why the detail about the wedding garment at the end of the Gospel is so important. When the king finds a guest without a proper garment, the man has no explanation for himself. The invitation was real, and he was allowed to come, but he wasn’t prepared to honor it. Accepting God’s invitation means more than just showing up. It means allowing ourselves to be changed. We can’t expect to follow Jesus while insisting that nothing in our lives needs to be transformed.
Of course, none of us does this perfectly. We all fall short. But there’s a difference between struggling to follow Jesus and deciding that we don’t need to. The Church isn’t a club for perfect people. It’s a place for sinners who know they need God’s help. When we fail, we turn back to him rather than using our failures as another excuse to give up.
As we sit with this hard-hitting parable, we can ask, What excuse am I making for not responding to God’s invitation? Is there a sin I need to confront, a person I need to forgive, a commitment I need to honor, or more time I need to give to God?
We don’t have to fix everything at once. But we must take the invitation seriously and respond to the grace God is offering us today.
The good news is that the invitation is still open. No matter what we’ve done or how far we’ve wandered, we can still turn back to God. Let’s not wait until the end of our lives to discover how foolish or insane our excuses were. Let’s respond while we have the opportunity to determine our eternity. One day, when we see God face to face and finally understand the fullness of his love, we will realize that accepting his invitation was never a burden or an inconvenience. It was the most important decision we could ever make. May God give us the grace to become his chosen!
