Coming to be With Jesus – No Excuses
16But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. 17And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ 18But they all alike began to make excuses.
Think of people that you want to be with.
Think of people that you don’t want to be with you.
Think of people that you have to be with.
It doesn’t take much of a reason for you to excuse yourself from someone you don’t want to be with you and you don’t have to be with.
And sometimes, we’re just looking for a good excuse, or at least what we might think is a good excuses, to not have to be with the people we don’t want to be with.
Ask my dad and mom sometime what excuses I came up with to not go to school in the 7th and 8th grade. They weren’t usually very good ones.
Jesus has us considering excuses today.
And the specifics are there in the story:
The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’ 19And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ 20And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’
And the specifics are important, but that will be a different sermon.
Instead, we’ll just consider this simple point: they didn’t want to there. They didn’t want to be with the man who gave this great banquet.
They wanted to be with someone else or be somewhere else.
So, they made excuses.
Our Lord comes and reveals in His Word that He wants to be with us. He wants us to give us His wisdom on how to live,
how to speak,
how to love others.
He wants to hear us and listen to us.
He wants us to be fed by Him and joyous in Him and with Him.
And too often, we make excuses.
The excuses are many and various. You’ve heard them, and you’ve said them.
The details are important, and that will be many sermons to come!
But we’ll focus on this one important detail – if you have an excuses for not saying, thinking, and doing what He says to do or believing what He promises –
we don’t want to, sometimes.
We’d rather be saying, thinking and doing what someone else wants us to say, think, and do or believing what someone or something else promises.
(Proverbs leaving?)
This tells us, there is something wrong with our very wants in this world.
Jesus has this warning for us today:
24For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’”
\As we consider a feast that has been prepared, a massive feast – consider the many excuses God would have for not wanting you there.
You’ve already rejected and told Him no, too many times.
You’ve already said you didn’t exactly want to be with Him and listen to Him and love Him and His Word and ways.
He knows you’ve thought too often you know better than Him.
You can’t possibly repay Him. What could you give to Him?
More than that – you owe Him. A massive debt.
Does He really want to be with you?
Does He really want you in His house?
Does He really want to eat with you and drink with you and teach you and listen you?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
God didn’t give excuses! God gave His Son so that He can be with you.
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us.
He knows we too often don’t want to with Him and He knows the ignorance and stupidity and pain that brings us, so He came to be with us!
He knew we owed a debt and that we could not possibly repay it, so He paid it, He bought everything!
Come, everything is ready! Jesus says. All is finished. For your acceptance from God.
For God to be at peace with you.
For you to be with Him now and forever.
And so He sent His apostles to announce that everything is ready,
and so He sends His pastors and church to announce that everything is ready.
We pastors are messengers, heralders of the this message.
It’s not about us. But about the man, the God-man, who finished everything and wants everybody with Him, in His love, in His wisdom, in His freedom.
We pastors preach this message, first to show you who you are –
an excuse maker,
someone who sometimes doesn’t want to be with Jesus and listen to Him and this hurts us all,
and then also this:
the poor and crippled and blind and lame.
We sometimes don’t know how helpless and bad we are without God’s Word and the pastors who preach it.
And then for you to hear this, that Jesus, the Master of the Feast, wants the poor and crippled and blind and lame brought in,
and given new clothes in baptism,
and given new food in the Lord’s Supper,
and given a new way of seeing God and His mercy and peace and forgiveness,
and given the strengthen and power to begin to walk in God’s will and ways,
and given new life in Christ.
God wants to be with you for you have to have His wisdom.
To be with Christ, to be of Christ, will mean not being ‘of yourself and of the world.’
To be at the feast, means you’re not somewhere else, with someone else.
But we agree with St. Paul who says,
I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… (Philippians 3:8).