Dear friends,
Before we begin today’s Scripture reflection, I want to update you on Pope Leo XIV’s health.
At the Angelus this morning, he told St. Peter’s Square that doctors had found a small nodule on his lung, caught at a very early stage, and that he has decided to have surgery to remove it.
As I reported this morning, the operation will take place early this week at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital.
If you haven’t yet, you can add your note to our get-well card for the Holy Father.
Letters from Leo will deliver every letter to the Vatican on behalf of our community.
We’ll share more updates as we learn more. The truth is, we won’t know much until after the surgery, likely on Tuesday.
Now to the readings. Today’s Gospel is about a wedding feast nobody wants to attend, and Pope Leo preached on it minutes before asking the world to pray for him. We’ll also go back to a November morning in 2013, when Pope Francis told a small chapel that Christians are called to a party.
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“Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.” — Matthew 22:9
The king in today’s Gospel has done everything right.
The calves and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, the hall is ready, and his servants have gone out twice to tell the guests.
One of them wanders off to his farm. Another goes back to his business. A few of the invited seize the messengers and kill them.
Jesus tells this story to the chief priests and elders, men whose lives were organized around the Temple, and the parable lands on them first. But it doesn’t stay there for long.
Anyone who has ever said yes to God with the mouth and no with their time and energy has a seat somewhere in that crowd of excuses.
Isaiah saw the same situation centuries earlier.
On the mountain of the Lord, he wrote, God will provide for all peoples “a feast of rich food and choice wines,” and he will wipe away the tears from every face.
The Psalmist describes a table spread before his enemies, with a cup that overflows. Scripture keeps describing salvation as a meal, and people keep finding excuses to be somewhere else.
Pope Leo XIV preached on this parable from the window of the Apostolic Palace this morning. He began with Thomas Aquinas, who taught that goodness, by its very nature, tends to spread.
A father whose son is getting married wants everyone to share his joy, Leo said, and then he lingered on the detail most of us skip. “When faced with rejection,” the pope told the crowd, “the king does not call off the wedding or cancel the celebrations.”
The king widens the guest list instead.
His servants go out to the main roads, and they gather everyone they find, “bad and good alike,” until the hall is full.
Leo told the pilgrims that this hall is close at hand. It is our churches and our homes, the ordinary places where Christ keeps declaring his love and waiting for our yes.
A few minutes later, Leo told the same crowd about the nodule on his lung and asked them to pray for him. He had just spent his homily on a king who refuses to cancel the feast, and he delivered his own hard news in the same steady voice.
I think that might teach us something about Leo XIV, and more importantly, about ourselves.
