Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
“they all began to excuse themselves.”
Fr. Bernard Lonergan has written that religious conversion is “the habitual acceptance of God’s gift of love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit He has given us.”
I suggest this thought is as good as any in commenting upon our Gospel today. For it is the parable’s point that people failed to accept the invitation to dine in the Kingdom. Too many other interests got in the way of the invitation. This was because the invited lacked an “habitual acceptance” in their hearts.
We get a piercing light upon this refusal from our first reading today. There we hear perhaps the finest expression in the Sacred Scriptures of human openness to divine invitation: “he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself ….” Here we have the “habitual acceptance” God looks for in the human heart. It is not an achievement but a readiness, a willingness and more, a desire. In the human heart, this disposition is itself a graced condition. It has come down to us in the Greek word kenosis – emptying – in order to focus our attention on the work we have to do: habitually accept, and make room for, the love of God being given by the Spirit of Jesus.
Fr. Jean Corbon puts this word this way: “Kenosis is the properly divine way of loving: becoming a human being without reservation and without calling for recognition or compelling it.”
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Lenten Resources