Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 142

On this mountain the LORD of hosts
will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations;
he will destroy death forever.

The Lord’s parable in today’s gospel might sound familiar to today’s moviegoers who consume movies about powerful kings and beautiful queens, courageous knights and damsels in distress, dragons, magicians, curses, witches, ogres, gnomes, and fairies. These imaginary kingdoms have no judiciaries to challenge and condemn a despot’s arbitrary decisions and excessive punishment. 

But in 21st century America no one kills the postal employees who bring dinner invitations, and no one slaughters invited guests and burns their cities. Things like that might have happened in Jesus’s day, when Rome ruled the world; but I think Jesus’s mythical king resembled the Hebrew prophets’ LORD and GOD; the God and Father of Jesus whom we still worship. 

People who want the so-called New Testament God to be nice, benevolent, and peaceful regardless of the injustice and cruelty in his world, have not read this parable. This Father of a royal prince has limited patience; and the judgment day will come for his enemies. They might kill his prophets; they might crucify his son, torture his martyrs, and oppress his chosen people; but in the end he will destroy those murderers and burns their cities. 

Like those Christmas paintings with brilliant stars and bearded magi, our Good News describes a chiaroscuro of darkness and light. They imagine an apocalyptic worldscape with an impersonal, unbearable evil which must be – and will be – destroyed by a justice which is uncompromising and a mercy which redeems the helpless and the innocent. 

The Gospels remind us that without faith – without fidelity to one another and the promises we have made – our world collapses. But rather than listen to a preacher’s fuming about this terrible world, listen to the words of the American poet, Muriel Rukeyser, written in 1973:

Ballad of Orange and Grape

After you finish your work

after you do your day

after you've read your reading

after you've written your say –

you go down the street to the hot dog stand,

one block down and across the way.

On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth

    century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,

the rats run out of a sack –

sticking out of the crummy garage

one shiny long Cadillac;

at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,

a man who'd like to break your back.

But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose

    and pink, too.

Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel

where the hot-dog-man leans –

nothing else on the counter

but the usual two machines,

the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,

I face him in between.

A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on

    walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours

in the familiar shape

bright purple in the one marked ORANGE

orange in the one marked GRAPE,

the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE

and orange drink in the GRAPE.

Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each

    machine.

I ask him : How can we go on reading

and make sense out of what we read? –

How can they write and believe what they're writing,

the young ones across the street,

while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE

and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?

(How are we going to believe what we read and we write

    and we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles

and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.

It could be violence and nonviolence

it could be white and black, women and men

it could be war and peace, or any

binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.

Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.

On a corner in East Harlem

garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,

forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,

misery, withered hope,

a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE

and orange into the one marked GRAPE,

pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

The Word of God, incarnate among us in the person of Jesus, remains true; he promises the truth to us if we will live through him, with him, and in him. 

And he warns us, “Many are invited, but few are chosen."