When speaking of the Kingdom, Jesus never tires of reminding His listeners that they still have to enter it and that this will not happen by itself. For the sake of the Kingdom one must leave everything behind and be ready to take up the cross. These words of the Saviour were perfectly clear: His listeners still remembered how, a little over a century before the events of the Gospel, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus in the then independent Judea, those who took part in an uprising against the government and demanded that the authorities strictly observe the norms of the Torah in the country were crucified. The rebels wanted one thing: the Kingdom, the kind they knew about, of course. And for its sake they gave up everything. Their ideas about it bore little resemblance to what Jesus speaks of, but He holds up their determination as an example to His listeners. They truly did leave everything behind.

Not like the characters in Jesus' parable who refuse to come to the feast, for reasons that might seem perfectly reasonable, but still refuse and lose what matters most. Their places are taken by those who have nothing in this world and no reason to decline. Is it a matter of priorities? Yes, of course, priorities too, but not priorities alone. It is no accident that Jesus speaks of a feast, of the first and the last, and of the places that many strive to occupy even at the risk of being driven from them.

The Kingdom is not a place, a structure or a hierarchy. The Kingdom is a state in which one can abide, but which one absolutely cannot, so to speak, fix in place, however much one may wish to do so. The desire to occupy better or worse places comes from this. For in the Kingdom there are, in fact, no good or bad places. There is only one criterion: is a person in his or her own place, in the very place God intended, or in one chosen personally because it seemed more suitable?

This also gives rise to the question: should one go to the feast or to the field just purchased? The wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom. If a person does not know which to choose, it means that he does not know what the Kingdom is. If he did know, it would never occur to him to compare the importance of the life he lives with anything he owns. Life is fullness, whereas a purchased field, possessions and even family are merely derivatives of that fullness. What matters here is not to confuse the part with the whole or the principal with the secondary. Only one thing can help us do this: the experience of the true life of the Kingdom, that very life which is salvation.

The Kingdom of God comes into this world, but a person must take a step toward it, for it is like a wedding feast to which everyone is invited, but not everyone wants to come. Very much depends on this step; that is why Christ speaks of it in such serious words. He may require everything from a person, even to the point of forgetting himself for the sake of the Kingdom. In order to take this step, the Good News must become more important than the things most important to a person: home, household, family, confidence in the future. (The Aramaic pair "love-hate" here simply means "prefer.")

But a serious step requires a serious decision, perhaps even more serious than the decision of the king or the tower builder in these parables. Christ wants trust, but He does not require madness: a person must soberly "calculate" whether the Gospel is truly more precious to him than all the rest of life, and if so, step toward it.

The meal in the house of one of the Pharisees, because of its rich symbolic meaning--a feast as the Messianic Kingdom--immediately gives Jesus material for new parables about the Kingdom He came to proclaim to people.

Fish, as the saying goes, look for deeper water, and people look for a better place. None of the invited guests wants to sit with a man disfigured by dropsy; let him come another day, since seeking healing on the Sabbath is a sin. Feasting is best with friends and neighbors whom you know, who smell pleasant, and who will not let your rich dishes disappear without return; they too will invite you to a "return dinner." And if you are a guest, it would also be good to sit at the head of the table, closer to the generous host.

This is ordinary human life, but for every situation Jesus finds the apt word, without moralizing or angry denunciations. He simply, as if joking, shows us, sitting with Him at table in the Pharisee's house, the whole absurdity of our normal life when one looks at it "from the point of view" of God's Kingdom.