Who Will Be Welcome at God’s Feast?

Today’s reflection is by Bondings 2.0 contributor Phoebe Carstens.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time can be found here.

Probably only a few among us find easy comfort in Jesus’s initial words from today’s Gospel reading  “When asked if only a few people will be saved, he responds:“Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough” (Luke 13:24).

As LGBTQ+ Catholics and those who minister with them, we recoil from the notion that we may be locked out and told “Depart from me, all you evildoers!” (v. 27)is certainly not a comfortable image nor one that seems to align with an understanding of God as one who embraces all people with the unconditional love of a parent. I personally know many who have struggled with this passage and the way that it has been used as justification to tell people that they are not worthy or not welcome in God’s kin-dom. 

How, then, are we to read it? What do we do with this encounter with Jesus wherein he says that not all will be strong enough to enter through the narrow gate, that there will be some who insist they know Jesus but be met with a rebuke to depart from him? 

Perhaps our answer lies at the end of today’s reading: the puzzling revelation that “some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last  (v. 30)” A reversal of roles, a reversal of expectations: a hallmark of Jesus’s preaching. Jesus often utilized parables to undermine and challenge expectations, frequently reached out to the unlikely and unexpected passerby, and also made choices that baffled his closest companions and challengers alike. His teachings, it seems, were not meant to be accepted blindly. Rather, they invite reflection.

Perhaps it is discomfort that this passage is intended to cause. Jesus’s words are not intended to strike abject fear or cause us to doubt God’s desire for us. Instead,they are meant to draw us deeper inward, deeper in touch with God who dwells within by asking us to consider: what would cause God to say to us, “I do not know where you are from?” (v. 27).

If we  feel assured, confident that though many will be turned away, we will surely be reclining at the table of the Lord, Jesus answers us as he does to the questioner in the Gospel: we will be shocked when we see so many entering the kin-dom, but we are not allowed. If we consider ourselves to be first, to be so certain of our own salvation that we are glad that some will be excluded, that the parameters of the kin-dom make it so that only those who think like us and look like us and act like us will get in, then in fact, we are the ones who have closed the door on ourselves.

If we, the Church, make a habit of closing our doors and of casting away those whom we do not know–especially the stranger, especially the immigrant, especially the marginalized queer person– can we truly be surprised when God says that we should expect the same treatment from the Divine Judge?

So, who will be welcome at God’s feast?  We find the yet again unexpected answer: “people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God” (v. 29). That is to say: all peoples will come together and be welcomed in. There is not a single direction from which people are not called, welcomed, and embraced by God. 

If this is true, if the table of the Lord is indeed ever-expanding and ever-full of all peoples, then this passage is ultimately meant to encourage us. When we take to heart the sobering idea of being turned away (as many of us in the LGBTQ+ community have been told will happen to us), then we realize that we must not turn away anyone. When we consider what it would mean to be excluded, then we learn that we cannot exclude any of our siblings. When we feel the pain of hearing that God may tell us to depart, we realize the cruelty of inflicting that pain on anyone else. We learn that these are not the ways of building up God’s kin-dom.

Instead, when we witness the presence of God within ourselves and within our communities and insist upon opening the door for all, then so too will the door be opened to us. The table will be full, and all will be welcome. 

–Phoebe Carstens, New Ways Ministry, August 24, 2025