It can be a
lot of fun to receive gifts, especially on a birthday and other special
occasions. But what good is a gift, if
we are limited in how we are able to use it?
There are some restrictions that have a good reason for being
there. For instance, when my parents
gave me a BB gun one Christmas I was given strict rules of where I could use it
in order to protect those around me and myself.
Sometimes a gift of money or a gift card might include instructions to
only use it for something fun or enjoyable rather than something boring or
practical. I’m not talking about those
types of restrictions. I don’t even know
if anyone has ever experienced something like this, but what if we got a gift
and we were only allowed to use it if the person who gave it could enjoy it
too. “Here’s a new car, but you can only
use it to drive me back and forth to work.”
Or, “I’ll pay for your trip but you have to take me along with you and
go where I want to go”. Maybe the gift
giver simply put ridiculous on the gift in some way that limits the enjoyment
or even the usefulness of the gift.
For us to say
that a gift is truly given freely, then that gift ought to have no strings
attached, except maybe for safety reasons as I mentioned before. As soon as we limit what can be done with the
gift, we really limit the freedom of the gift.
Likewise, we limit the freedom of the person receiving the gift.
When we hear
the parable in the Gospel of Matthew today, we might be tempted to think that
the king is putting harsh restrictions on his gifts. He deems those who he originally invited to
be unworthy and later throws out a man came without a wedding garment. But if that is our thought (or if we think
this is the way God handles His gifts), then we have misunderstood the gift.
The King in
this parable is of course, God the Father.
The wedding feast is symbolic of the Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven
There are
important things that we can take from this to apply to our daily lives. First of all, God can’t force this grace on
us. We have to make a choice whether we
are going to accept that grace or not.
This goes back to what I’ve been talking about with receiving a gift
that is freely given. God could force us
to take His gift of grace (I mean, He created the universe out of nothing, He
could find some way to force us to accept His grace) but then it would no
longer be a free gift. He wants us to be
able to make our own choices. More specifically,
He wants us to be free to choose to love Him and to freely choose to accept His
grace. However, in order for us to have
the freedom to choose to love and to choose to accept the grace and the
invitation, that also means we are free to choose to not love Him, to not
choose the grace, to reject the invitation.
In other words, we are also free to sin.
Another important point that we learn
from this is that God values our free-will.
“Free-will” simply means that we are free to choose. God values our freedom so much that He is not
willing to do anything that would sacrifice our freedom to choose. Even though He could make it so that we could
no longer sin, He still wants us to have that choice. He can’t force evil out of us.
Some people try to argue that God
should be able to make evil in the world go away. They say they don’t understand why He doesn’t
do that. Some even try to argue against
the existence of God by saying that if there really were an all loving God,
then He would get rid of all evil in the world.
The problem with those arguments is that in order to do that, God would
have to get rid out our free will as well.
God is not willing to do that. He
wants us to make the choice for ourselves.
Choose to love or choose to sin.
Choose the grace or reject it.
Choose to accept the invitation or choose to be locked out as the
parable says.
So it is time to make the
choice: accept that grace and come to
the wedding banquet.
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