Homily for the 19th Sunday after Trinity (28th Week of Ordinary Time)

By the time we get to the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22, the Lord has already shared a series of increasingly pointed parables in front of the chief priests and Pharisees. The timing, recall, is in fact Holy Week. The dramatic confrontation that has been building continues to mount.

In the lectionary choice of Isaiah 25, Holy Church shows us a directly relevant background for the parable. This great wedding feast is the culmination of God’s great love and provision for his people, the celebration to which the whole of creation tends. Though the parable itself is unsettling on multiple points, full of warnings that temper the joyous tone of Isaiah. I think Fr. Simeon summarizes this well when he writes: “For joy and celebration were we created, and so this parable will be a test of how much each of us is still in touch with the vocation of joy native to our deepest being.”

Let us begin with a rehearsal of the basic terms of the parable. A king of throwing a feast for the marriage of his son. The mainstream tradition understands the king as God the Father. As the Lord’s audience at the time would have quickly intuited, in the midst of multiple direct appeals to the religious leaders of the day, the original wedding guests were precisely those scribes and teachers who described themselves as friends of the king, and by extension the whole house of Israel. The Church fathers typically see the servants, sent to call the guests to the banquet, as the law and the prophets, or perhaps even the apostles themselves. After their rejection of the call, it is the outcasts of Israel, the tax collectors and sinners, and eventually even the Gentiles, who respond and come to the feast. I am aware of newer interpreters who, scandalized by the end of story, dislike the idea that the king here could be God, but to these I can only insist, like Stanley Hauerwas, that the parable is must be “uneasy reading” for those who want to use Jesus’ teaching to “underwrite a general critique of elites in the name of creating a community of unconditional acceptance.” I think the general mind of the Church on this must hold, however uncomfortable it may be to our age of militant inclusivity and indifference.

Of course it is exactly a “passionate indifference” that keeps the original guests out. They are just too busy with their own affairs. As Hauerwas says, “We believe that we are our own lords, doing what we desire…. We have no time for banquets prepared by the Father to celebrate Jesus’ making the Church his bride.” But this indifference triggers a violent rejection which suggests not just the historical treatment of the prophets but the death of Christ himself and the early Christian martyrs, including the apostles themselves. The invitation to the feast generates a kind of crisis. It is not necessarily that the invitees are merely violent men, but that the call represents an intolerable alternative to their lives as they are. The possibility of an extravagant banquet, freely given, suggests to them the hollow meaninglessness of everything they hold so important; it is akin to the violent reaction of an addict who cannot even conceive of a form of meaning and fulfilment beyond what he sees as his only source of survival. And in this sense we must immediately understand that the people in question cannot merely be the people of Judah or even her leaders, but all of us who are so married to the ways of this world that we cannot conceive of another. Again Fr. Simeon: “When all are doing becomes its own end, and when we find ourselves incapable of suspending the doing at least for a while, a strange and ominous mutation has taken place in our soul. We will then be incapable of accepting an invitation to be “totally at rest, without passions, without busyness, without diversion, without tasks. Or, in Saint Peter’s language, we will be horrified at God’s invitation to us to ‘cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares for you.’”

Or, to quote the prophet Isaiah, a few chapters after our selection today (28:11-12) “By men of strange lips and with an alien tongue the Lord will speak to this people, to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose;’ yet they would not hear.”

The difficulty of this call for man remains even for those who do enter the feast. The fathers note this as a clear analogue to the mixed character of the Church: many enter but not all remain. And this brings us directly to the idea of the “wedding garment.” What is it? The fathers commonly think of it as virtue, or charity. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” But here is where especially we must guard from a contemporary jump to boundless inclusivity for its own sake, as if the goal is mere ungrounded generosity. First, we are speaking of those who have entered the feast, that is, those who have entered the Church. Nowhere does the parable suggest that you can somehow don a “wedding garment” while wandering outside as if that somehow made up for rejecting the call to the feast. Second, the patristic gloss on charity might be summarized by St. Augustine’s comment: “Not any charity.” Origen, and others after him, invoke the language of St. Paul in Romans 13: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The wedding garment is Christ himself, or the charity of Christ. This corresponds rather perfectly with our collect for this Sunday: “forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee…” And how could it be otherwise when God is the source of all being, all reality, all goodness.

Though the language seems harsh to us, the binding of the hands and feet “symbolizes what the man has already interiorly done to himself. By refusing to embrace the glory of Christ’s friendship, he has confirmed himself in a condition of permanent slavery, thus reversing the process of Christian transformation.” He has accepted the invitation to the banquet with his lips, but he has failed to accept the fire of Christ’s love in his heart. He has failed to accept his vocation as bride.

For this is the most important interpretive key to the parable: the marriage is between the Son and his Church. That is, us. Why else is the king so concerned — in a way that surely would not be normal for a wedding — to fill the hall with guests, even guests of the most undesirable origin? It is because the guests are in fact the bride of the Son, and the Son is the one who makes them worthy, and in doing so increases his glory and reveals the love of the Father.

So, in the words of St. Paul in Romans (13:14), “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh.” This doesn’t mean a costume, as if we are somehow tricking God the Father, but a real transformation of identity, where, as Hopkins puts it, man “Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — / Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces.” This is a great mystery, at once a goad to discipleship and a reassurance against the scruples whereby we fret about whether we are really invited to the banquet and whether our garment will suffice. It is not a garment we can make ourselves, but one we receive through love, trust, and faithfulness, through accepting that our most real and most true calling in life is to worship God and share his goodness in the marriage feast of the Lamb.