INVITATION TO BANQUET OF LIFE


SAINT BERNARD, ABBOT, DOCTOR

Ezek 36:23-28; Ps 51:12-15,18-19; Mt 22:1-14

Attendance at the Divine Wedding

Human life on earth is a struggle we must engage in; it is a journey we must make; it is a battle we must fight; it is also a death we must die. Our life is all these and even more. But what makes our mortal life worth living is the end for which we live it. The true end of human life is linked to its origin. If we understand the purpose of life on earth, then we must have grasped our origin. Similarly, understanding the origin of our lives is to receive illumination into the purpose of our existence. Because of the importance of knowledge of these two, God revealed his word to us. God had to do this because the knowledge of these principles or pillars of our existence, which are supposed to come to us naturally from creation, became recondite or hidden due to the darkness and distortion caused by sin. The word of God, which is meant to illuminate our understanding, was never hidden from us. God freely expressed his word through creation and through his inner interaction with man and woman he made. We lost the interior light of life only when we sinned against God by abandoning his word. Sin is always our preference for self over God; a desire to do our will rather than the will he reveals to us. Sins multiply in our lives when we live forgetful of the fact that we come from God and go back to God. Hence, we must enter the divine communion here and continue it hereafter.

The story of the Israelites is always an illustrative teaching for us. God called Abraham and revealed his will to him. He constituted his children a nation for the purpose of bringing all nations to himself. God’s choice of them means forsaking their own selfish dreams or desires to fulfil the divine will for them and for the world. The sin of Israel is their failure to follow the plan of God, who made them a nation and a communion for his own purpose. God exiled them from his land so that they would remember the purpose for which they were made. He sent them back to the nations from whom their father Abraham was called and chosen. Without a desire to do God's will, Israel is just like any other nation. God proposed to gather them again and make them fulfil his design. “I mean to display the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned among them. And the nations will learn that I am the Lord—it is the Lord who speaks—when I display my holiness for your sake before their eyes.” God gathered Israel again from the nations, but the grace of a new heart of flesh will not be given only to those who are Israelites physically, but to all peoples and nations who hear the word of God and believe it. These constitute the new Israel that is mystically gathered on the mountain of God, the new Jerusalem, which is the Church of Jesus Christ.

The parable of our Lord about the king who gave a wedding banquet for his son captures this whole insight into the divine purpose for creating us. “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a feast for his son’s wedding. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited, but they would not come. Next, he sent some more servants. “Tell those who have been invited,” he said “that I have my banquet all prepared; my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered; everything is ready. Come to the wedding.” But they were not interested.” God created us for this banquet; how can we not be interested in attending the wedding banquet? What is the purpose of our lives here without a desire for the eternal banquet? The importance of these questions and the gravity of missing the eternal banquet made Saint Bernard of Clairvaux abandon everything and devote his whole life to the service of God in the monastery. He was born into a noble family near Dijon, in France, in 1090. He joined the new monastery at Citeaux in 1112, founded fourteen years earlier to counter the laxity and riches of the Benedictine Order. Bernard always attracted a crowd, for he arrived at the monastery in the company of his four brothers and two dozen friends. Within three years he was sent to found a new monastery at Clairvaux, in Champagne. He remained there as abbot till his death. By the time of his death, the Cistercian Order had grown from one house to 343 houses, of which 68 were daughter houses of Clairvaux.

Let us pray: O God, who made of the Abbot Saint Bernard a man consumed with zeal for your house and a light shining and burning in your Church, grant through his intercession, that we may be on fire with the same spirit and walk always as children of light. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. 

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