Reflection for November 6, Monday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time: Luke 14:12-14

Gospel: Luke 14:12-14

On a sabbath Jesus went to dine at the home of one of the leading Pharisees. He said to the host who invited him, "When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment. 

Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

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Reflection:

Who are those that we normally invite to dine in our home? Of course, our friends and relatives, for this is our normal human nature, and there’s nothing wrong with this. But Jesus points us to something that we often neglect, something that we often times purposely forget. And they’re the poor and unwanted; Jesus is pointing us to them for that is where He dwells.

Jesus’ contradicts us on how we normally invite people to dine in our home. Isn’t that we have not yet invited a poor stranger to dine for lunch or dinner? Yes, we have given food to the poor but we haven’t invited someone who is poor to dine in our house.

Why is it important to invite somebody who is poor to come and dine in our house? Because we are not only inviting the poor, we are also opening our house to God. Hard to believe? Let us try inviting someone who is poor and not known to us to come and dine in our house. And let us feel afterwards the unfathomable joy that it will give us.

In the story of the last judgment the King said: Whenever you did this to one of the least, you did this to me (Matthew 25:40). – Marino J. Dasmarinas