If God wants to host a wedding banquet for us, as promised in our readings this weekend, the Lord will have to outdo Bill and Leslie Jourdain.  Only a few people attended their wedding in the chapel at Holy Cross, Collinsville, so Becky and I assumed that the wedding dinner would be a quiet intimate affair.  When we arrived, however, a large banquet room was filled.  And around the outside several serving stations featured food from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Leslie and Bill set the bar high for the Almighty.

This weekend God invites us to his banquet hall featuring a variety of fine wines and rich food, beef with marrow in the bone, and veal.  It’s a wedding feast.  Jesus is both host and groom and we are guest and bride.

But God will not be dining on his own cuisine.  No, God’s appetite is already sated.  He has swallowed the shroud of death that hangs over us and all peoples.  Death is destroyed.  At this banquet God wipes away all cause for tears.

Therefore, St. Paul, urges us to “Rejoice in the Lord always.”  As we wait for the banquet hall doors to open we live with the blessing that, “The peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard our hearts and our minds in Jesus Christ.”

Get dressed in our wedding attire, which we received in baptism, even Jesus Christ.  The aroma of eternity wafts out even now.

Is. 25:6-9; Philippians 4: 4-13; Matthew 22:1-14