They Went Their Own Ways

A Reflection on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Beloved in Christ,

In this life, there are many ways to refuse God.

Some are dramatic. A man may deny the Faith he once professed. He may openly reject the commandments of God, mock holy things, or defiantly declare that he will have no part in the Kingdom of Heaven. Such refusals are easy enough to recognize for what they are.

But in the parable of the marriage feast, Our Lord describes another kind of refusal, and perhaps a much more ordinary one.

The king has prepared a marriage for his son. The feast is ready. The servants have been sent. Those who were invited need only come. Yet we are told: “But they neglected, and went their own ways, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise.”

There is something so very commonplace about it! It wasn’t that they rejected the invitation, but rather they neglected it. One went to his farm. Another went about his business. Neither of these activities are evil. The farmer was not going to commit some notorious sin. The merchant was not necessarily engaged in dishonesty or greed. Men must cultivate fields. Men must buy and sell. Families must be supported; houses maintained; bills paid; meals prepared; work accomplished.

The tragedy here is not that these men chose evil things. The tragedy is that, when the King called, something else seemed more important.

We sometimes might imagine that the great danger to the spiritual life is hostility toward God. Certainly such hostility exists – we often encounter it on a daily basis. Indeed, the parable itself proceeds from those who merely neglect the invitation to others who seize the king’s servants, abuse them, and put them to death.

But Our Lord mentions the neglectful first.

They do not attack the servants. They do not curse the king. They do not announce that they despise his son or object to the marriage. They simply have other things to do. And this may be one of the most dangerous temptations in the Christian life precisely because it can coexist for a very long time with the conviction that nothing is seriously wrong.

We have not rejected God… we simply have something that must be finished first. Prayer can wait until we are less tired. Confession can wait until life becomes less complicated. The Scriptures can wait until we have more time. Reconciliation with someone whom we have wronged can wait until emotions have settled. The amendment of some persistent sin can wait until circumstances are more favorable.

We like to think: There will always be another opportunity. So our answer is not “no.” It’s just “not now.”

Yet enough “not nows,” accumulated quietly over the years, can eventually become a life whose practical answer to God has been “no.”

For this, the word used by the Gospel is striking in its simplicity: They neglected.

Neglect seldom feels as serious as deliberate rejection. That is why it is so easy to excuse.

A garden does not have to be attacked in order to be destroyed. It need only be neglected. A friendship need not end in a bitter quarrel; it may simply be left unattended until two people who once knew one another intimately become strangers. A house does not have to be deliberately demolished in order to fall into ruin. It is enough that necessary repairs are always postponed.

So also with the soul.

Few Christians wake one morning and consciously decide that henceforth they will become cold toward God. More often the cooling happens almost imperceptibly. One prayer is omitted because we are tired… then another because we are hurried. One examination of conscience is postponed. One resentment is allowed to remain because dealing with it would be unpleasant. One compromise is made because the circumstances are unusual.

None of these moments will feel momentous, but habits are being formed, priorities are being revealed. The soul is learning, little by little, what it will interrupt and what it will not. And God can gradually become the One whom we expect always to wait.

There is a reason, perhaps, that the examples Our Lord gives in today’s parable of those who neglected the invitation are so ordinary. Had the man gone from the king’s invitation to some den of obvious wickedness, we could comfortably distance ourselves from him. Instead, he goes to his farm. The other goes to his merchandise. Suddenly the parable becomes uncomfortably familiar.

The things which most successfully compete with God are not always sins. Often they are good things which have escaped their proper order.

Work is good. Family is good. Rest is good. Recreation is good. Providing for the future is prudent. Caring for one’s property is responsible. Even the countless little obligations of ordinary life are ordinarily genuine obligations.

Christianity does not require us to despise these things, but it does require us to know where they belong.

The farm becomes dangerous when the King may always be postponed for its sake. The merchandise becomes dangerous when every other appointment is fixed but prayer remains negotiable. Even family, that most natural object of our love, can become disordered if love for those whom God has given us somehow becomes an excuse for forgetting the God Who gave them.

The problem is, simply put, priority.

A good thing put in the place of the Highest Good does not become better, even it it was good to begin with. Instead, it becomes an idol.

And there is another side to the parable which makes the refusal more tragic still.

The invited guests are not being summoned to labor. They are being summoned to a feast. “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my calves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come ye to the marriage.” All things are ready. The King has done the preparing, he bears the expense, he provides the feast. The invitation is not fundamentally a demand that they give something to him. It is an invitation to receive what he has prepared for them.

And still the farm seems preferable. Still the merchandise cannot wait.

There is here something which reaches to the heart of our (sometimes) distorted understanding of the spiritual life. We can so easily imagine God principally as One Who wants something from us: our time, our obedience, our sacrifices, our attention. And certainly God commands these things. But before He commands, He gives.

Before there is our prayer, there is His grace. Before our repentance, His mercy. Before our sacrifice, His Sacrifice. Before our search for Him, His search for us. Christian life is not principally the story of what we have grudgingly surrendered to God, but is rather the story of what God has prepared for us. “All things are ready.”

The Gospel does not merely say that they neglected the invitation, but it adds that they “went their own ways.” And herein lies the deeper challenge.

Because there is nothing inherently wrong with having a “way” to go. Every one of us has duties, plans, hopes, occupations, and responsibilities. But the Christian life gradually teaches us that these cannot remain simply our own ways. In all that we do, in all ways that we travel, they must become ways traveled with God.

The farmer need not cease being a farmer. The merchant need not cease his business. The mother need not abandon her household; the laborer his work; the student his studies. But each must learn that his farm, merchandise, household, work, studies, plans, possessions, and future belong within a life whose first direction has already been determined.

The King has called. Everything else must find its proper place in relation to that call. This is why the spiritual life is so often less a matter of abandoning ordinary things than of putting ordinary things back into order.

So there is a great mercy hidden in this Sunday’s warning. Because the servants are still calling, the feast is still prepared, the doors have not yet been shut.

Perhaps we have neglected prayer. Then pray today. Perhaps Confession has been postponed repeatedly. Then stop waiting for the imaginary week when life will finally become uncomplicated. Perhaps some duty toward God has been pushed continually toward tomorrow. Begin it today. Perhaps the spiritual life has become something fitted around everything else, receiving whatever scraps of time and attention remain. Then hear the invitation again: “Come ye to the marriage.”

The King does not ask us to cease living ordinary lives. He asks that our ordinary lives cease being lived apart from Him.

There will always be farms. There will always be merchandise. There will always be something unfinished, something inconvenient, something apparently urgent, something which whispers that the things of God can safely be postponed until tomorrow.

But the Christian cannot spend his whole life going his own way and suppose that, merely because the road contained many good and respectable things, it must therefore have been the way of Christ.

The great question is not whether we had things to do. Of course we did. The question is what we did when the King called.

For His feast is prepared. His servants have gone forth. His invitation has been given. And all things are ready.

30 August 2026