Sermon LXXXVII.
Ingratitude.
A certain man made a great supper, and invited many. …
And they began all at once to make excuse.
—Gospel of the Day.
You know, my dear brethren, the parable given by our Divine Lord in the Gospel of to-day. The principal point of it is in the words which you have just heard. The guests who were invited to the supper, instead of feeling honored by the invitation and accepting it gladly, began to make one excuse or another; one had his farm, one his oxen, and another had just married a wife. None of these reasons would have prevented them from coming to the supper had they really wished to; they were mere flimsy pretexts put forward to hide their indifference to their host and to all that he had to offer them.
You know this parable, and I think you also know well its meaning. As our Saviour uttered it the coldness and ingratitude of those whom he had come to save rose up before him, giving him a foretaste of the agony which was afterward to overwhelm and crush him in the garden of Gethsemani. His heart, burning with love for men, longed and thirsted for love in return; it was all he asked; could he but have had that all the pains of his sorrowful life and terrible death would have been as nothing. But no; he foresaw that, after all, those to whom he stretched out his arms on the cross in loving invitation would, for the most part, turn a deaf ear to his appeal; would give him at the best but a reluctant and half-hearted service; would keep as much as possible for themselves, and give as little as possible to him.
And, in particular, he foresaw that the crowning gift which he had in store for his rebellious and ungrateful children—his own Body and Blood, which he was to leave them in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and in which he was to remain with them even after his work was done and the time come for him to return to his Father—would be rejected by the greater part even of Christians with the same indifference with which his other sacrifices were to be met. He saw himself in our churches, unwelcomed and almost unknown by the most of those whom he loved to call his friends. He saw that, though for a time in the first fervors of faith, when the sword of persecution drove those to his side who were not overcome by it, he would, as he desired, indeed be the daily bread of his people, yet there would come a day when that faith would be dimmed, and the love which sprang from it would grow cold. He knew that an age would come when—shame to say it—his church would have to force her children by strict laws and threats of excommunication to receive him in the sacrament of his love even once a year. And he knew that, in spite of all this urging, many still would excuse themselves from the divine banquet, offered so freely to, nay, almost forced upon, them; that millions every year would miss their Easter duty; would either turn from the bread of life to the food of swine by deliberate choice, or at least would, on some frivolous pretext, put off the time of their reconciliation till the last day appointed for it had gone by.
Alas! my dear brethren, children of this God and Father who has done so much for us, I fear that some even of you who hear my words have once more thus grieved his heart and despised his love. In all this long time of Lent and Easter which, has just gone by you have missed the duty to which the most sacred and solemn of all the laws of the church has called you. But still our Lord has not yet treated you as you have treated him. He has not yet said to you, as the host said in the parable: "None of you that were invited shall taste of my supper." No; once more, in this great festival of Corpus Christi, he makes yet another appeal to you, to put aside your excuses, and to come to him with all your heart and soul. Do not, I beseech you, continue to insult and despise him who thus humbles himself before you, and still tries to remind you of his goodness and mercy. Come to him without delay, and make amends for your past neglect; all will be forgiven and forgotten. But remember, if tempted to reject him once more, and to postpone your return, that even his infinite mercy will at last have to yield to his justice; that his loving Spirit cannot strive with you for ever.