4th Sunday of Easter – Year A

Deacon Tom Vert

Preached: April 26, 2026

About a year ago, we received a “save the date” invitation to a wedding from a friend in India.

His daughter was getting married, and we were invited to join the festivities with family and friends just south of Delhi in November last year

We had heard about Indian weddings from others, that they were huge feasts lasting multiple days with food, drink, dancing and joy….and therefore we decided we had to accept the invitation!

It was two full days of happiness with multiple events, the Mehndi ceremony with henna, the Sangeet night with Bollywood dancing, a beautiful, spiritual Hindu outdoor wedding with flowers and incense at a refurbished castle and we will never regret going!

We accepted the invitation, not knowing exactly what would happen, but our lives were enriched by the experience.

Today, we see in the readings an invitation to a joyous life with God, and we can decide how to respond.

In the psalm we sung, we hear of the Shepherd who will spread the table before me, anoint my head with oil, and fill my cup until it overflows!  We can picture in our minds the overflowing banquet table.

In the gospel, Christ tells us that he came into this world so that we may have life and have it abundantly, and we can again imagine an abundance of gifts.

The image of a table and feasting can remind us of the wedding at Cana when Christ performed the miracle making more and better wine, a symbol again of His overwhelming generosity of love.

Christ offers us a feast if we join our life to his as a blessing and an encounter that gives us strength and peace.

We should clarify here that we are not talking about something call the “prosperity gospel”.  This is when it is preached that if we are great Christians, and give generously to the Church, then God will bless us with a perfect, trouble-free life, with wealth and perfect health here on earth.

This is a distorted way of thinking, as it puts the focus on our performance, our “work” so to speak, as the enabler or trigger for God to act.

We know that this is not true, and St. John tells us the truth in his letters, “this is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit…and so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them, we love because he first loved us.”

God is the source of love, and it is our free will choice to accept the invitation to love, or reject it, it is never forced upon us!

Remember the parable of the wedding feast and the first guests who were invited said they were too busy with planting, business, etc., and they did not accept the invitation to join the king in the banquet.   But the guests who were invited later accepted in joy and humility and got to enjoy the relationship with the host.  The gift is ours to freely accept if we choose to.

We should note that the feast that we are invited to is not a physical wedding banquet but instead is a life encountering God.

It is a life where we accept the feast of grace and gifts of the Spirit, wisdom, understanding, strength, holiness and someone we can count on in the good times and in the struggles of life.

It is an invitation to allow God to transform us during our life to make the gifts into fruits, becoming more patient, kind, joyful, peaceful and loving.

The invitation is free and requires of us only to act like sheep who listen to the voice of the Shepherd, as we take time in our lives for prayer to be connected and to be able to hear the voice of the one who loves us.

When we are connected to Him, we are not guaranteed of earthly gifts, but we are guaranteed of heavenly gifts as the psalm tells us…we shall not want, we will find rest and peace, our souls will be refreshed, he will lead us on the right path, and goodness and kindness will be with us all the days of our life.

God is reaching out to us each day to connect with us…the question is….

Are we going to accept the invitation to the feast?