A Most Unusual Wedding Feast

I find the greatest stories are ones that have a similar, if not exact, likeness from parables and stories taken from the Word of God.

This story taken from The Boston Globe sounds suspiciously like Jesus' parable of the Great Feast (Luke 14:15-24). I believe that when we see it happen in our earthly modern day world, we can better clearly grasp the true scope of the significance of the story.

True Grace is best represented in the form of a Feast, because it is food for our soul, comes at a sacrifice to the giver, done without charge, undeserved, free, no strings attached, on the house, to those who do not deserve it, and to those who can never pay them back.

This Feast is reserved for you in Heaven...

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A Most Unusual Wedding Party
The Boston Globe
June 1990

Everything had been prepared, including the expensive wedding ring. Months before the wedding, the bride and the groom-to-be planned a great reception. The couple had gone to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston and painstakingly picked out the menu, the china and silver, and even the flower arrangements that they liked. The bill came to $13,000, and for something like that, they had to leave a 50% down payment.

The next few months were spent on ironing out the remaining one thousand and one details: the immaculately-white wedding cake, the limousine, and of course, last-minute finishing touches on the wedding gown. Everyone was so excited.

Then the day the invitations were about to be sent out, the groom-to-be suddenly got cold feet and told his fiancée that he really wasn’t sure if he was ready. To make a long story short, the wedding was canceled, and the woman, our potential bride, as expected, was upset.

To make matters worse, her ex-fiancé disappeared altogether from the scene, leaving her the painful task of canceling all previous arrangements, including the wedding party. As if things were not bad enough, when she went to the Hyatt to cancel the reception, the Events Manager shook her head sympathetically and told her, “The contract is binding. You’re only entitled to $1,300 back. You have two options: to forfeit the rest of the down payment, or go ahead with the banquet. I’m sorry.”
Guess what the bride decided to do? She decided to go ahead with the party—not a wedding party, of course, but a big blow-out. She had the wild notion of inviting not her family and friends, but the poor people of Boston! So she invited the aging from the nursing homes—and still not content with that, she also sent out invitations to rescue missions and homeless shelters! Her friends, of course, thought she had gone out of her mind. “Are you crazy?” they told her, “throwing a party that’s free for all?!” “Yup,” she quipped, “all in honour of the groom.”

And so in June of 1990, the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Boston hosted a party unlike any other held there before. The homeless came; the elderly were wheeled in from their nursing homes. People who were used to picking up half-gnawed pizza from trash bins feasted instead on chicken cordon bleu. Hyatt waiters in tuxedos served champagne to senior citizens in wheelchairs and aluminum walkers. Bag ladies, drug addicts, and beggars took the night off from the streets of downtown Boston, relished the wedding cake, and danced in the most unusual wedding party of all.