Поучение в 28-ю неделю. Объяснение дневного Евангелия: «Человек некий сотвори вечерю велию и зва многи»

Beloved brothers! Today the Gospel (Luke 14:16–24) will tell us about an unknown man who gave a magnificent feast, to which many guests were invited. Then the Gospel reveals a strange circumstance: the people who took part in the dinner table were not those who were originally invited to it, but completely different ones. A sumptuous feast was given in the evening and therefore was called the “Great Supper.” Evening is what we call the last hours of the day before night falls. The Tale of the Great Supper is a picturesque parable with which our Lord Jesus Christ depicted the Kingdom of God, prepared by the Heavenly Father “from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34) for His elect, and also depicted how the gospel of this Kingdom was received by humanity called to it. All of us, without exception, face death; We all must enter eternity through the gates of death and remain in eternity forever. Earthly life is the threshold to eternity. It is like a cramped and stuffy front room before the most magnificent and vast palaces. God's Kingdom is prepared for us in eternity; outside of him there is endless grief, a disaster that will never stop, crying and sobbing that will never be consoled and will never be silent. If tomorrow, in a week, in a month, an event was coming that would decide our earthly fate either for our benefit or our detriment, wouldn’t we take all measures, all efforts, all precautions in order to direct the event to a favorable outcome for us? Let us pay attention to our fate in eternity. Let us reject the sleep of despondency and forgetfulness in which we are immersed; Let us reject blindness, reject self-delusion, which imagines man’s life on earth to be endless. Let us believe the most reliable truth. Let us believe that we all face inevitable death. Just as it is true that we will die, it is also necessary that we take care of our fate in the afterlife. For this purpose, let us consider the parable of Our Lord about the “Great Supper”. Who is the founder of the supper? The Holy Gospel calls him “a certain man,” that is, an unknown, indefinite person. Obviously, this is God. He replaced Himself in the parable with His own image – a man. And since people forgot God, lost their true knowledge of Him, the correct concept of Him, then God, calling Himself a man, called Himself an unknown man: “A certain man threw a great supper, and called many people.” The large number of guests signifies that all humanity, without any exception, is destined by God for eternal bliss. Brethren! We are all called! No one is forgotten! No one has any reason or right to indulge in lamentation and despondency. When the time has come for the desired meal, the Founder of the feast sends a Slave to tell those invited. Both the time of the feast and the lonely face of the Slave have deep meaning. In the Greek text of the Gospel, written by Saint Luke, the term Τόv δοῦλοv is placed before the word “Slave”, which, by the nature of this language, gives the word “Slave” a special, separate sign. Here, the Lord Jesus Christ primarily and exclusively called Himself the Servant of God 170. He, equal to the Father and the Spirit in Divinity, is the only true Servant of God in humanity. He alone completely and completely fulfilled the will of God and is pure from all sin. Other holy men are relative saints (Rom. 4:2); human holiness is the least possible sinfulness. The One Servant of God appears in the parable as the only agent of human salvation; prophets, apostles, and church teachers were only ministers, instruments of the Word: “All things came into being, and without Him nothing came into being” (John 1:3). The time for inviting those invited is evening. This means: Our Lord Jesus Christ descended to earth in the last hours of the life of the visible world. Eighteen centuries have passed since this most fortunate event; the life of the world has not yet been cut short: “but in the sight of the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). The evening of God lasts, spreads out, so that all those who are called have time to gather for His Supper, so that not one of the chosen ones is deprived of it. This is how the parable depicts God’s view regarding people; Let us now look at the depiction of human behavior towards God. All those invited, as if by agreement, apologized and refused the supper. What kind of conspiracy is this, what is this unanimity in opposing God? This is the action of falling, common to everyone; this is proof of goodwill towards one’s state of fall, voluntary stay in it; this is a sign of the mortification of the soul by sin, which cannot and does not want to be awakened from the sleep of death, lower to the calling voice of the Son of God. Those invited put forward their earthly relationships as the reason for their reluctance to come to the supper. Another attributed such importance to academic, official, whimsical occupations that he considered it permissible to neglect God; another indulged in family concerns and forgot God; another, finally, became carried away by passions, mired in crude carnal pleasures and became completely alien to God. It is not just one obvious sin that robs us of our spiritual treasure; every earthly occupation, every earthly position takes away from him, when the soul is completely attracted and chained to them. Those invited refused to participate in the supper. The Founder sends the same Slave to gather along the city streets and alleys, along roads and crossroads, the crippled, the poor, the lame, the blind and, having persuaded them, bring them to the supper. The Gospel calls the Jews called as those who were previously invited to Christianity through the law and the prophets; homeless poor people and cripples wandering the streets and alleys, wanderers working on the road or stopping at a crossroads to choose a path, signify the pagans who are outside the home, outside the Church, outside the knowledge of God; the calculated physical shortcomings must be taken in relation to the soul. The invited Jews refused resolutely; after them, the called pagans were barely convinced to come to the supper: many centuries, countless sacrifices and entire rivers of blood were needed for the Word of God to convince them to accept Christianity. The glorious, rich, learned, and prosperous in this world should be recognized as called in the midst of Christianity: the advantages given to them by God over others, the convenience associated with these advantages for the knowledge of God and the service of God, express, without a doubt, God’s calling to salvation and supreme bliss... Alas! a sight worthy of tears! Those who are called remain like stones, inattentive to the Caller. It seems that only those stricken by disasters, illnesses, poverty, deprivation - only the crippled and poor in the civil sense are able to listen to God: they show obedience to God, as the apostle puts it, those who are ignorant according to the understanding of the world, the weak, the weaklings, the despised in the world (1 Cor. 1:27). And these humbled ones of the world must, under the guidance of the Word of God, with His powerful assistance, endure the fiercest battle with their fall, forcibly submit themselves to God, forcefully achieve salvation for themselves. The parable very accurately depicts how the wonderful Servant had to persuade and convince the poor, the blind, the lame and the crippled to come to the supper. We have become close and fond of our fall: it is hard to be separated from it. Our own nature has become incapable of good, and without the Savior it cannot do any true, whole good: “without Me,” He said, “you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Our own goodness is polluted by an admixture of evil. It cannot but be so: its source - the nature of fallen humanity - is a mixture of good and evil and constantly gives birth to an action consistent with itself. The Lord concluded the parable with a terrible sentence. He, seeing through the all-seeing eye the present and future inattention of people to Him, said: “many are the callings, but few are the chosen” (Luke 14:24). The merciful God calls everyone to salvation, but very few obey Him. We all belong to the number of those called because of God's ineffable love for us, but very few of us are included in the number of the elect, because inclusion in the number of the elect is left to our own free will. Amen. Interpretation of Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria You might be interested in: