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and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." One of the guests caught up the phrase: "the resurrection of the just." "Yes!" we can fancy him saying, "that belongs to me, that is a matter about which I have a right to speak." The heavenly kingdom was familiarly conceived of among that class as the scene of a sumptuous banquet; at least, that was to be the first act of the great drama. The notion was founded, probably, on the imagery of Isaiah xxv. 6: "And when one of them that sat at meat with Him heard these things, he said unto Him, Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God." One can readily picture him. A demure Pharisaic saint, a man whose evidences were all perfectly clear, so clear in fact that judgment and the love of God were quite needless additions. His salvation was plainly decreed; why should he vex himself with spiritual conflicts, benign ministries, and the daily burden of the cross? He had all the pious platitudes of his school at his tongue's tip. One of them slipped easily off, as he lifted up his eyes with appropriate fervour-" Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God." His sleek self-satisfaction, his unclouded conviction that whoever might fail, he should be there and feast on the fat things of the heavenly kingdom eternally, drew this parable from

the Saviour's lips. It is terribly stern to all presumptuous Pharisaism, it is benignantly pitiful and attractive to all self-distrustful ignorance and sinfulness, all self-abandoned wretchedness and despair. It is emphatically the parable of the kingdom. It is the charter of the poor and outcast; it claims the pariahs of a narrow and selfish human society, as the citizens of the great universal kingdom over which God rules in love. It establishes His relation to even the poorest and wretchedest outcast, trudging with naked and blistered feet along the rough highways, camping under the hedges, sleeping on the door-steps, or moaning in the prisons, of the world. All such, but specially the most wretched, are here called to and claimed for the heavenly kingdom, and yet, though the myriads of the weary and heavy laden have in all ages pressed into it, "YET, THERE IS ROOM!" This leads us to consider

II. The boundless comprehension of the call. "A certain man made a great supper, and bade many;" and first, remember, first, the very men who turned the bidding into scorn.

The guilt of sin, in this and kindred parables, is not the feature which is put foremost, but rather its misery. I may venture to say that in dealing with us, God seldom puts it foremost, save when for us He laid the whole burden on His well

beloved Son. God sees its misery in us; God lays its guilt on Christ. It is as wretched, starving, dying, that He looks on us. There is no aversion, no hate. The guilt which He must hate is there on Christ, borne away into the waste. But pity, profound, unfathomable pity fills Him, as He sees the prodigals wandering further and further into the wilderness, so hungry, so weary, so hopeless of help, that they resign themselves to share the husks and the sties of swine. And He made ready a great supper-the bread of the Father's house, the bread by which the angels live-and sent swift messengers to call them home. Them! His prodigals-whom do you mean? I have only one clue. The hungry, the thirsty, the weary, the wounded, the dying, are the "called” everywhere in the Book of God: and just because they are the hungry, the weary, the wounded, the dying. It is just that which touches this great bountiful King. It is the lost sheep which is most tenderly sought; it is the sick child which is most heedfully nursed; it is the starving soul which is most largely fed.

If your hearts were open to this parable you would feel that it is just your neediness which gives you, through grace, the strongest possible claim on His pity, sympathy, and aid: you would plead this as your title-deed-the right which He gives to you in Christ to a place at the Gospel feast, a

mansion in His home on high. But are these "the many" in the parable? Was the outcast pagan world called first and at once to share in the bounty and benefaction of the King? No. There is a mystery here which we cannot fathom. We cannot understand fully how there was to be an appointed time; a time, too, far on in the world's history-but not in the history of the universe, perhaps this earth of ours is but the beginning of inhabited worlds-for the gathering in of the Gentile with the Jew to the great feast of the Gospel. It seems a dark mystery—that long pagan night-but we see into it but a little way. secret things belong unto God. We can measure the visible dispensations, but we know not what ways of God with human souls that darkness veils from sight. We shall understand it one day, when the clear sunlight of heaven falls upon it all, and our cry will be, "O the depth of the riches of His wisdom and His love!"

The

I believe that the purpose of God in the calling of the Jews thus early was to make them His witnesses and missionaries to the Gentiles, as Joseph, Daniel, and Paul became; and thus not to retard, but to anticipate by ages, the promulgation of His good news to the whole human world. But they would not. They would not even recognise their own want of the blessing. They fed and puffed

themselves with the chaff of privilege, but they would have none of the bread of God, nor should any one else have it. Thus much they had firmly settled. Woe be to any divine messenger who should venture to pass through their coasts on his way to call the starving Gentiles home! Their taste was for the bread of this world. When God spake to them of His banquet, as St. Augustine says, they opened their jaws and not their hearts :"And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come. So that servant came, and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say unto you, That none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper." The streets and lanes are to be ransacked,

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