A couple invited some people to dinner. At the table, the wife turned to their six-year old daughter and said, “Would you like to say the blessing?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” the girl replied.

“Just say what you hear Mommy say,”, the wife answered.

The daughter bowed her head and said, “Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner?”

In Matthew’s version of the Gospel story about the wedding banquet, the invited guests don’t come.[1] Why not? Who wouldn’t want to go to a wedding reception that includes a five-star dining experience? The King even sends out his staff to cajole those invited to show up. But to no avail.

They make excuses not to come. In our terms, they’re about being married, being busy, having a job or occupation. You can fill in the blanks. These are not bad things, but just “busyness with many things.”[2] Things we can control, direct and of which we can manage outcomes. Things we might prefer, actually, compared to the ambiguous uncertainties in the realm of grace.

Could it be the invited guests know deep down that when they respond to the King’s invitation, they will have to change? Could it be that when we enter the realm of grace, we also enter the realm of risk-taking, vulnerability? Could it be that grace is too much? Too hard?

The Gospel story of the wedding banquet throws all kinds of theological conundrums onto our path. Even when the King shifts gears and invites everybody and anybody, “good and bad”, we encounter an unwelcomed plot twist: One unfortunate guest who accepts the invitation, makes a mistake. He doesn’t put on the appropriate coat for the occasion and suffers the dire consequence.

Can grace, freely given, be too much for us to handle? And, so, it’s easier to say ‘no’.

The marvelous short story, “Babette’s Feast”, was made into an award-winning foreign film. It is set in a tiny village on the coast of Denmark. The people there are good people, but they’re living inside an isolated and lonely town, a sort of “sparse and sour” place.[3]

It’s a little world of laws and pettiness and religious rigor where the main characters—two elderly, spinster daughters of a deceased Lutheran minister—live a pretty Spartan lifestyle. They eat the same food every day, the same bowl of soup and the same codfish. They dutifully share their food with the disadvantaged, carrying on a ministry of their father. In fact, ‘joyless duty’ might be the key theme in their lives.

The movie version depicts a dark and cloudy, not-so-inviting environment. The place is bland, the food is bland, and it’s all in service of some sense of obligation. They’re not bad people. It’s just that you get the sense that deep down there is something important missing. They live a not-so-desirable life, not referring to material things so much as their spirit, their attitude.

Into this village comes Babette, a French woman, a cook, it turns out, who has lost her family in the revolutionary war in France. She runs away from France to save her own life and is sent by a friend to these sisters. She offers to be the sisters’ cook, in return for room and board. For fourteen years she dutifully cooks ale-bread soup and codfish, every day, just as the sisters wish. Because that’s what they like.

Then, Babette wins the lottery, ten thousand francs! After some negotiation, she talks the sisters into allowing her to prepare a fine banquet to celebrate their deceased father’s one hundredth anniversary. First, the sisters ask what kind of food she would serve. Babette replies that she wants to give them a French dinner, the way they eat in France.

They have a major meeting, among the remnants of their father’s Puritanical flock, to see whether they even want a French dinner. There’s also a lot of talk about whether or not they can allow alcohol, and the sisters, to humour their faithful Babette, go along with it. But they resolve to themselves only to fake their enjoyment of it. “It will be as if we did not taste it,” they promise.

Course after course, Babette lays on the table an enormous, beautiful, sumptuous feast. The guests’ eyes just widen, but as they drink a little bit more and more of the wine, they loosen up.

One of the guests, a general, is visiting his aunt, a member of the congregation. The general, who had eaten at the finest tables, knows better than anyone present the quality of the feast that he is experiencing.

The general is a man who has seen the larger world. He has been hurt, has gone through success and failure. He had obtained everything that he had striven for in life at this point. He was admired and envied by everyone. The general was a moral person, a good person, loyal to the king, loyal to his wife and friends. He was a good example to everyone in the village.

But as the conversations open up, he confesses that he was not altogether happy. Something was wrong somewhere. During his stay in the village, he is carefully feeling his mental self all over as one feels a finger to determine the place of a deep-seated, invisible thorn. And still, he had not yet put his proverbial finger on it.

Now, after the sixth course all the guests are starting to forgive one another, for in the years since the pastor’s death they have degraded into petty rivalries. Into the fourth glass of wine, they actually start enjoying it all, laughing and relaxing even into the unsolvable mysteries of life. They take pleasure in the gift of the feast despite all that has troubled them. They learn, finally, to enjoy this banquet that they never thought they could possibly enjoy. It was a world into which no one had ever before invited them.

“Babette’s Feast” first describes religion without grace. Of course, Lutherans are supposed to be the very ones who championed grace – but even those pious, Norwegian Lutherans could forget. Just prior to Babette’s feast, their Christianity had been a resented banquet, where as Christians “they were more afraid of the Risen Christ than even the crucified one.”

Grace is always too much.

At the end of Babette’s feast, the general stands up to give a speech. He begins by quoting the Psalms, “Mercy and truth have met, righteousness and bliss have kissed.”[4] Notice that often we would consider mercy and truth as opposites. Righteousness and bliss are supposed to be opposites, too, no?

What the general is getting at is acknowledging something beautiful that happened during the feast—great opposites overcoming their opposition and kissing one another, embracing one another. By love and grace, the world full of contradiction, tension and opposites is made one.

Grace is a free gift from God, yes. Yet, the gift places upon us a choice, a choice to respond and live through that gift. We will not resolve anything, ever. In the end, it is the King in the Gospel story who makes the final judgements.

In the end, it is God’s mercy and God’s truth that come together, in Christ’s love for us all. God invites each of us into a life of grace, abundance and joy. And no matter how we respond—since responding somehow, we will—God will continue to send, won’t stop sending, us invitations to attend a gracious meal, praying us to accept.

---

[1] Matthew 22:1-14

[2] Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Ohio: St Anthony Messenger Press, 2008), p.175.

[3] Rohr, ibid., p.180-183.

[4] Psalm 85:10 King James Version