At 12 noon today, the Holy Father Francis appeared at the window of the study in the Vatican Apostolic Palace to recite the Angelus with the faithful and pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
These are the words of the Pope in introducing the Marian prayer:
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
With the story of the parable of the wedding feast, Acts of the Apostles (cf. Mt22.1-14), Jesus outlines the plan that God has thought of for humanity. The king who “made a wedding feast for his son” (v.2) is the image of the Father who has arranged for the whole human family a marvelous feast of love and communion around his only begotten Son. Twice the king sends his servants to call the guests but they refuse, they don’t want to go to the party because they have other things to think about: fields and business. Many times we too put our interests and material things before the Lord who calls us – and calls us to a party. But the king in the parable does not want the room to remain empty, because he wishes to donate the treasures of his kingdom. Then he says to the servants: “Go now to the crossroads and all those you will find, call them” (v.9). This is how God behaves: when rejected, instead of giving up raises and invites to call all those who are at crossroads, without excluding anyone. No one is excluded from the house of God.
The original term that the evangelist Matthew uses refers to the limits of the roads, that is, those points where the city streets end and the paths that lead to the countryside area, outside the town, where life is precarious, begin. It is to this humanity of the crossroads that the king in the parable sends his servants, in the certainty of finding people willing to sit at the table. Thus the banquet hall is filled with “excluded”, those who are “out”, of those who had never seemed worthy to participate in a party, a wedding banquet. On the contrary: the master, the king, says to the messengers: “Call everyone, good and bad. All!”. God also calls the bad ones. “No, I’m bad, I’ve done so many …”. He calls you: “Come, come, come!”. And Jesus went to lunch with the tax collectors, who were public sinners, they were the bad guys. God is not afraid of our soul wounded by so many evil, because he loves us, he invites us. And the Church is called to reach today’s crossroads, that is, the geographic and existential peripheries of humanity, those places on the margins, those situations in which they find themselves encamped and live shreds of humanity without hope. It is a question of not settling on the comfortable and usual ways of evangelization and witness to charity, but of opening the doors of our hearts and of our communities to all, because the Gospel is not reserved for a select few. Even those on the margins, even those who are rejected and despised by society, are considered by God worthy of his love. He prepares his banquet for everyone: just and sinful, good and bad, intelligent and uneducated. Last evening, I managed to make a phone call to an elderly Italian priest, a missionary from the youth in Brazil, but always working with the excluded, with the poor. And he lives that old age in peace: he has burned his life with the poor. This is our Mother Church, this is the messenger of God who goes to the crossroads of paths.
However, the Lord places a condition: wearing the wedding garment. And let’s go back to the parable. When the room is full, the king arrives and greets the guests of the last hour, but he sees one of them without the wedding dress, that kind of cape that each guest received as a gift at the entrance. People went how they were dressed, how they could be dressed, they wore no gala dresses. But at the entrance they were given a kind of cape, a gift. That fellow, having refused the free gift, has excluded himself: so the king can do nothing but throw him out. This man accepted the invitation, but then decided that it meant nothing to him: he was a self-sufficient person, he had no desire to change or to let the Lord change him. The wedding dress – this cape – symbolizes the mercy that God gives us freely, that is, grace. Without grace one cannot take a step forward in the Christian life. Everything is grace. It is not enough to accept the invitation to follow the Lord, it is necessary to be available for a journey of conversion, which changes the heart. The habit of mercy, which God offers us ceaselessly, is a free gift of his love, it is precisely grace. And it requires to be received with amazement and joy: “Thank you, Lord, for giving me this gift”. it is a free gift of his love, it is precisely grace. And it requires to be received with amazement and joy: “Thank you, Lord, for giving me this gift”. it is a free gift of his love, it is precisely grace. And it requires to be received with amazement and joy: “Thank you, Lord, for giving me this gift”.
May Mary Most Holy help us to imitate the servants of the Gospel parable in coming out of our schemes and our narrow views, announcing to everyone that the Lord invites us to his banquet, to offer us the grace that saves, to give us his gift.
[01196-EN.02] [Original text: Italian]
