Some years ago, Hollywood produced an exciting film titled The Bridge on the River Kwai. The setting was during the Second World War in a Japanese Concentration Camp for prisoners of war. One of the prisoners, the Senior British Officer, talked the Japanese into letting the prisoners build a bridge over the River Kwai. The officer realized that it would boost morale, give life some purpose, engender hope if the men had something to which they were committed each day.

The work proceeded to the point of conclusion with a bridge that was a substantial piece of engineering skill; in fact, it was such a logistical benefit to the Japanese that the Allies had to send in an expedition force to blow it up. In the movie, there is a dramatic scene when the Senior British Officer, himself a prisoner of the Japanese, suddenly confronts with stark realism the fact that the other prisoners and he had spent all their time and energies building a bridge for the enemy!

There is, in the story, a lesson for all time. We, too, often spend our time and energies in pursuit of, or to perfect, the wrong things. This was the situation with those invited to the wedding banquet in the story Jesus told. They had an invitation to the party of a lifetime, and yet, they were diverted by lesser things.