Compelled into the kingdom

After the pastor’s wonderful message at my mother’s memorial service, a junior high school teacher on staff at the church took to the podium to share a few words. His chosen text was Luke 14:

“A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time for the banquet, he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. … So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you have commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled (Luke 14:16–23, ESV).

The rookie teacher brought out of the passage the bigness of God’s heart: There is not a kind of person He is not inviting to His sumptuous feast. When the original invitees show no interest, He goes looking for “the poor and crippled and blind and lame.” Driving down the main thoroughfare of your town, you will find some squatting on subway grates, or frequenting homeless shelters, or busking for quarters tossed into an open guitar case.

Not content to regale only the rich and the riffraff, God approaches yet a third category of people—those who must be compelled or they will not come in.

I had never thought of that aspect of the parable before, but the young preacher described my mother to a tee as a person in that third category. Mom was not your likely original invitee—a person raised in the Christian home and trained in the faith. Nor had she a congenital defect or material want that sometimes leads people to search. No, my mother was definitely of the third class of banquet invitees—a person who had to be “compelled.” On her own, she had no particular interest in going.

One is reminded of old Lot of Genesis fame, who, lacking resolve to make haste out of doomed Sodom at the angel’s request, was finally yanked by the arm. Likewise, when the good Lord saw that my mother was not to be won to the faith by winsome wooing, He graced her with a stroke in 2010 that in one fell swoop made her amenable to spiritual things.

I had never before seen in the Luke passage this kindness of God in compelling sinners into His kingdom. And certainly I had never conceived of my mother as one of these headstrong ones the psalmist has in mind when he wrote:

“Be not like a horse or mule … which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you” (Psalm 32:9, ESV).

It was a fresh insight into Scripture, by a youth group leader who himself had been “compelled” to the feast, after much former indifference, by an unpleasant stay in the local jail. After the memorial service was over, I went up to the teacher and commended his insight.

The teacher was my son.

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