All are invited

That’s this year’s Prisons Week theme, drawn from Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22. The king’s servants don’t check credentials. They go out to the main roads and gather ‘the bad as well as the good’ (v10) — filling the hall with people who never earned their place at the table. Invited. Not might be invited. Not invited if they prove themselves first. Invited. 

I wonder how often I do what the king’s first guest list assumed: that some people are simply better suited to a place at the table. It’s easy to make that judgement about someone in prison before I’ve ever met them. But you don’t need to earn an invitation to the Kingdom of God — the king fills the hall with exactly the people that list would have left outside. 

Then comes the moment that unsettles us. A man is already inside, already seated at the feast — and yet he’s found without wedding clothes. When the king asks why, as though he’s treated the invitation lightly, ‘The man was speechless’ (v12). It’s tempting to read this as grace being withdrawn. But grace was never meant to leave us as it found us. The invitation costs nothing to receive — but it isn’t meant to leave us unchanged. Being welcomed in isn’t the end of the story — it’s the beginning of being changed by who we’re sitting with. 

This is the tension Prison Fellowship holds every day. We never doubt that hope is real, and that no one in prison is beyond it. But we also never look away from the harm that crime causes, or pretend transformation is easy or automatic. Grace opens the door. It doesn’t leave us as we were when we walked through it. 

This October, please pray for each person PF works with — not only that they would hear the invitation, but that, in the community that welcomes them, they would also find the courage to be changed by it. Who might I see differently today, if I believed there really is a place for them?