Catholic Commentary
Parable of the Great Banquet: The Rejected Invitation (Part 2)
23“The lord said to the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.24For I tell you that none of those men who were invited will taste of my supper. For many are called, but few are chosen.’”
Luke 14:23–24 describes a master instructing his servant to compel guests from highways and hedgerows to fill his banquet after the originally invited guests refused his invitation. Those who rejected the invitation will not taste the supper, illustrating how rejection of God's grace by the religious establishment opens salvation to the marginalized and outsiders.
Grace overflows all boundaries, but rejection of grace carries real and eternal consequence — the Kingdom includes everyone, but not everyone will come.
The verb keklēmenoi ("those who were invited") is a perfect passive participle, emphasizing that these were people who had been legitimately called. This is crucial: the parable is not about those who never heard the invitation, but those who heard it and turned away. In Luke's narrative context, this is the judgment falling upon those in Israel — particularly its religious leadership — who had received the Law, the prophets, and now the preaching of Jesus himself, and yet found reasons to decline. The excuses given earlier (a field, oxen, a new marriage — vv. 18–20) are not evil in themselves; they represent the ordinary weight of temporal concerns crowding out the eternal summons.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological sense, the movement "into the highways and hedges" anticipates the post-Resurrection mission to the Gentiles (Acts 1:8; Rom 11:11–24). The original invited guests — those within the covenant who refused — prefigure the religious establishment's rejection of the Messiah, while the lame, blind, and poor of the streets (v. 21) and the strangers of the open road together form the Church: a gathering that makes sense only as a gift, not a merit.
In the moral/tropological sense, each Christian is both servant (sent to compel others toward the feast) and potential guest (always at risk of finding more urgent business than the Lord's table). The anagogical sense points unmistakably to the eschatological banquet of the Lamb (Rev 19:9), to which all are called but not all will come.
Catholic tradition has found in these two verses a rich warrant for both missionary urgency and a sober theology of grace and freedom.
On "compel them to come in": St. Augustine famously invoked this verse in his controversy with the Donatists (Epistle 185; Contra Epistulam Parmeniani), arguing that the state could legitimately apply pressure to bring schismatics back to Catholic unity — the cogite intrare principle. The Church has since substantially developed beyond Augustine's application (the Second Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae affirms the right of persons not to be coerced in religious matters), but Augustine's underlying theological point stands: grace itself is a form of holy compulsion. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God's free initiative demands man's free response" (CCC §2002), and that divine grace can move the will without violating it (CCC §1993, citing the Council of Trent). The "compelling" of the servant is thus an icon of prevenient grace — it precedes, enables, and invites human freedom without overriding it.
On the exclusion of the originally invited: Catholic teaching on the possibility of rejecting salvation is unambiguous. The Council of Trent (Session VI) affirmed that justification can be lost through mortal sin — through a turning away from God in favour of lesser goods. The original guests in this parable do exactly that: they prefer land, commerce, and domestic life to the feast. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Matthew 69) warns that the danger is not dramatic apostasy but the slow, reasonable-sounding accumulation of temporal excuses.
On the universality of the invitation: The Catechism, citing Lumen Gentium §16, affirms that God's salvific will extends to all human beings (CCC §847). The highways and hedgerows represent that universal reach. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium §§20–24, draws directly on this missionary dynamic: the Church goes out, does not wait for the worthy, and finds the peripheries to be privileged places of encounter with God.
These verses confront contemporary Catholics on two fronts simultaneously. First, they call every baptized person into active missionary witness. The servant does not post an announcement at the city gate and wait; he goes to the roads and hedgerows. In practice, this means recognizing that the "highways and hedges" of our own moment — social media, workplaces, recovery groups, prisons, hospital wards, the margins of our own parishes — are precisely where the urgent invitation is to be brought. Pope Francis's call to a "field hospital Church" is a direct echo of this verse: go to where the wounded are sheltering, and compel them with credible love, not abstract proclamation.
Second, verse 24 is a quiet but serious warning against the complacency of those already within the household of faith. The originally invited guests are not villains; they are busy, sensible people whose reasonable priorities crowd out the absolute claim of God. The Mass — the Eucharistic feast that this parable directly prefigures — is offered every Sunday. The question this parable poses to every Catholic is not "Am I good enough to attend?" but "Am I actually attending — with mind, heart, and will — or am I sending my regrets from the hedgerows of my own distraction?"
Commentary
Luke 14:23 — "Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in"
The geography of this command is deliberately expansive and escalating. Earlier in the parable (vv. 21–22), the servant had already gone into the "streets and lanes of the city" — the predictable urban margins — and returned reporting that there was still room. Now the master sends him beyond the city walls entirely, to the hodous (roads, highways) and phragmous (hedgerows, field boundaries). These are liminal, undomesticated spaces: places where travelers pass through without belonging, and where the genuinely destitute — those with no permanent address, no community, no social standing — might shelter. The spatial movement from the city center outward to these wild fringes enacts theologically what Luke narrates throughout his Gospel: Jesus consistently moves toward those whom society has expelled or ignored — lepers outside the gates (17:12), the demoniac in the tombs (8:27), the tax collector in the sycamore tree (19:1–10).
The word translated "compel" (anankason) is the most theologically charged term in these verses, and it has generated centuries of commentary. In its most natural Lukan sense, it does not imply physical coercion but the urgent, even importunate insistence of a good host upon a reluctant guest. Think of Near Eastern hospitality culture, in which a guest's repeated demurral is expected and the host's repeated insistence is the very form of welcome. The destitute wanderer on the road may genuinely doubt whether the invitation is real, whether there is truly a place for someone like them at such a table. The "compulsion" is the servant's persistent, credible assurance: Yes, even you. Come. This reading is consistent with Luke's portrayal of grace as initiative — God does not wait for the worthy to self-select; he sends his messenger to seek and to persuade.
The purpose clause — "that my house may be filled" (hina gemisthē mou ho oikos) — is not incidental. The master's desire is fullness, completion, abundance. The banquet is not diminished by the absence of the original guests; it is not a consolation prize. The hall will be filled. God's salvific purpose will not be frustrated; the rejection of some does not shrink the Kingdom but redirects its offer toward those who will receive it with gratitude.
Luke 14:24 — "None of those men who were invited will taste of my supper"
The shift to the first person ("I tell you") is significant: Luke's Jesus steps slightly outside the frame of the parable to address the listeners directly — the Pharisees and legal scholars reclining at the table in the host's house (vv. 1, 7). The word "taste" () is precise and almost eucharistic in resonance: it is not merely that they will not attend, but that they will not experience, will not receive into themselves, the nourishment of this feast. The exclusion is self-inflicted — the text never says the host locked the door against them; they themselves sent their regrets.