NOTES for Luk 14:16-24

The words "many are called, but few are chosen" are often perceived as an assertion of a certain elitism. However, if we look more carefully at the parable, we can notice something else. The feast was prepared for a certain number of guests who refused to come. Others were invited in their place, and their number was probably about the same. But then still more guests were called, which means that, on the contrary, there turned out to be even more chosen ones than those originally called. Perhaps this visible contradiction is what troubled the evangelist Matthew and prompted him to add the episode about expulsion from among the chosen.

But we know that when we speak of a visible contradiction, the matter concerns some important message for us. Let us remember the words: "The servant said, 'Sir, what you commanded has been done, and there is still room.'" It seems to us that in these words, "there is still room," there is some very important indication that no matter how desperate a condition we may be in, no matter how much it may seem to us that now "the pit will close its mouth over me" (Ps 68:16), there is always this hope that "there is still room," and there really is.

And still this strict refrain sounds: many are called, few are chosen. Yes, but who said that strictness is bad? Strictness is good right up to that very line beyond which depression, despair, despondency, and so on begin in the person to whom strictness is applied. At that point strictness must urgently be changed to tenderness.

Of course, one must sense that a person is at the line. No human being is capable of this, however much we may encourage ourselves with our emotional sensitivity. But "what is impossible for people is possible for God." And He always places boundless kindness beside strictness. Then He needs to tune a person's heart to perceive one or the other, depending on the state that person is in. And He always succeeds well at this if the person loves Him.

The meaning of Jesus' parable about those who are called and those who are chosen is quite clear and needs no explanation. Yet questions remain. The most important is a practical one, concerning our own spiritual choices and the choices we make in life. If only people in adverse circumstances find a place at the table, does that mean there will be no place for us unless we ourselves become like them?

There is a traditional answer to this question: what matters is not what we have at our disposal, but how we regard what we have. Formally, this answer can be considered entirely correct. But what does it actually mean for us? And what, in fact, was the chief problem of those comfortably situated people whom the host invited to his feast? Their possessions? Their material prosperity or well-being in life as such? Probably not.

Each of the comfortably situated invitees turns the host down not because he possesses something, nor even because he has just acquired something important. They all turn him down because their acquisitions, whatever they may be, impose a particular pattern of behaviour on them, entirely determined by what they have acquired. It is this pattern that makes them decline the invitation.

At first glance, it might seem that this is simply a choice between two alternative courses of action, between the invitation and one's own interests, ultimately between the world and the Kingdom. But if we think the situation through, it is not difficult to see that the real choice is between relationships and their absence.

The host was not inviting these guests for no reason; evidently he shared with them a longstanding and seemingly deep friendship. Yet it turned out that, at the happiest and most important moment for their friend, each of the invitees chose not their relationship with him, but their own world, their own life, with which they shut themselves off from the person inviting them. Essentially, the choice is not between different forms of spiritual life, but between spiritual life and its absence, even if we take the host to be not the Messiah but a perfectly ordinary person. For spiritual life is precisely relationships: relationships with God, with Christ, with our neighbours.

To reject relationships in favour of anything else is, in effect, to reject spiritual life. Against this background, the appeal to those who have nothing becomes understandable: nothing prevents them from appreciating the importance of the relationships offered to them, since they have nothing that could obscure those relationships. Perhaps this is not the best option—after all, everyone would rather welcome their old friends than people from the street, even people who are always ready to come—but in the circumstances it is the only possible one.

Everyone who comes to Jesus is essentially asking Him the same question, expressed most clearly by the unnamed “ruler” in today's passage: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The very wording of this question presupposes a single particular deed. In the original it reads, “What having done shall I inherit eternal life?” This is exactly how the Slavonic translation conveys these words: “What having done shall I inherit eternal life?” When we ask Christ such a question, we usually do not sense how dangerous it is to the habitual course of our life. The ruler evidently expects to be told to donate a certain sum or perform some ritual act. Later, the hajj would become a striking example of such an act: make a pilgrimage to a certain place and earn the mercy of the Almighty. But to inherit eternal life, which belongs to God, one must surrender one's entire life. This is what Christ's answer implies when He proposes that this ruler give away everything he has. It is difficult not only because it truly requires giving one's whole life to God, but also because it is fearful to fall into the hands of the living God. The feat of trust is one of the hardest and most significant.

At times we look at spiritual people—priests, monks, or simply laypeople whom we know to be people of the deepest faith—and it seems to us that they are close to God, that they are among His closest friends, and that He will invite them to His banquet. But what about us? We are ordinary sinners; we do not know Scripture as well as they do; we probably do not fast as diligently; perhaps we sometimes omit our rule of prayer. Yes, all this is true. Yet, aware of all our spiritual poverty before the Lord, we must always be ready for one thing: to respond immediately as soon as He calls us. And He will call—there is no doubt about that. Some may think the words “Many are called, but few are chosen” indicate that Christianity is something spiritually elitist. Yet we all understand that Christianity is the principal faith on earth, and that this is not true of it. What, then, is the apparent contradiction? The point is rather that “narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt 7:14). God is open to everyone, but only to the person who truly wants this and makes an effort toward it, for “since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it”—this alone is what is being said here.

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.

Today's parable of the wedding feast directly concerns the question of life, joy, and love. After all, we all strive for these things. We all need them. But one fine day, or more often than that, we face a choice: where should we seek life and joy? We can begin to build our own life and our own happiness, whether family happiness or some other kind. Or we can go to the wedding feast, a constant Gospel image of Christ's Kingdom. The choice is entirely free.

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.