[Sermon delivered at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2023.]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
The Gospel writers are always careful to show that when Jesus speaks, His words and topics tightly fit the situation in which He taught. The parable we just heard today[1] was no different. At first glance, we may simply think the parable is about the Final Judgement. The Church Fathers, commentators, preachers, professors mostly agree on this. Yet it is its context shows that the parable is so much more, both political satire and prophetic declaration, and everyone listening to Jesus understood well just which characters in the story represented them.
The parable appears both in St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s Gospels.[2] Jesus is in Jerusalem at the time the parable is told. St. Matthew clearly puts it within Jesus’ last week before the Crucifixion, at the Temple, and both accounts surround Jesus with His disciples, the Scribes and Pharisees, and in the hearing of the Temple authorities. The parable is as much for them as for the others, and in that context the meaning is bitingly clear.
Jesus’ first character in the parable is a King. Then there is the King’s Son who happens to be getting married. There are also the King’s slaves and attendants, a first round of invitees, presumably the notables and gentlefolk of the Kingdom, a second round of attendees, specifically a mix of average passersby, social riffraff, and possibly even common foreigners. Within that second crew of invitees there are those who took the trouble to get ready for the feast, and then those who made no effort whatsoever.
The Temple authorities were no idiots. They understood the King to be God, and based on the intel they had gathered on Jesus to date, the King’s Son to be the Son of Man. They knew the slaves to be the Prophets. The attendants, they were able to intuit, would be the Angels. They could then suppose the wedding feast to be the restoration of the Kingdom of God, which in their mind would be the Kingdom of Israel, but that is another parable.
This leaves the two rounds of invitees.
Remember that in this account, Jesus Our Lord is not only in Jerusalem, but He is at the Temple, heard not only by the commoners, but also the elite, the Romans, and especially the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. Listening carefully they would understand that the first round of invitations which went to people who either ignored the invitation completely, or who took the messengers and assaulted and even killed them, referred specifically to the establishment, who had ignored the prophets, cherry-picked their message, exiled them, beaten them (repeatedly), thrown them down cisterns, tossed them to wild beasts, sawn them in two, decried them as barking mad, or beheaded them as party favours.
Jesus also stated in the parable that the city of the first round of invitees was razed to the ground and those guilty were utterly destroyed. The listeners would understand that Jesus referred to the destruction of Samaria and Jerusalem, the widespread killings and deportations, even the woes suffered later under the Seleucids. Also, the High Priest and Sanhedrin would have had to have been idiots to miss Jesus’ inference that the same fate awaited them and all who stood with them at the hands of the Romans. After all, they were the inheritors of the Covenant, the first invitees, and Jesus had just told them that their City (understand that Jesus here clearly included the Temple) would be destroyed and their lives forfeit because of their inattention to the message of the Prophets.
To add insult to injury, the next part of the parable reflects to other challenges Jesus had hurled in the face of the Judaean elite before and after this parable, that the hookers and grifters were entering the Kingdom of Heaven before them, or rather, instead of them. After the King had destroyed his nobles and gentlefolk and their City, he decided still to have the Wedding Feast. Instead of the old guard, this time the guest list was thrown open wide to everyone, good and bad. If they came to the door, they were let in.
When Jesus said everyone, He meant everyone. He meant the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the uneducated peasantry. He even inferred the Gentiles, those outside the Covenant, who were colloquially referred to as “dogs,” would be allowed in. The High Priest and Sanhedrin, the Scribes and the Pharisees, they would not have missed the inference. Jesus had just told them all in the shadow of the Temple that the word of the Prophets would go out to those whom the current establishment had deemed unworthy, and these dregs of society would be admitted to the Kingdom of God in their place.
That had to sting just a wee bit.
So, we turn to this second round of invitees, those who were not the first pick. Here is where it gets uncomfortable because it is a promise accompanied by a warning. Jesus had just told everyone listening that the call to enter the Kingdom of God was now open to everyone, the castoffs, the undesirables, the low in station, even non-Israelites. The King had told his slaves to gather anyone who could to come to the Feast. And so they did, in droves. To the humble listening to Jesus, that had to be hopeful. But then Jesus threw in a warning
Jesus’ parable focused on one person in the throng without a “wedding garment.” Perhaps in this ultra-casual age this statement does not resonate as well as it used to, but in living memory people put on better clothing to attend things like weddings, and some cultures had prescribed costume for wedding attendees. Imagine if you would a crowd of people in daytime (or evening) formal attire, and in the middle of them someone in a hoodie, jeans, and who maybe had not bathed that morning. Nothing else screams, “I didn’t care enough to prepare,” than that. The wedding clothes, however, like everything else in the story, stand for something else, but what?
St. Gregory the Great in one of his homilies gives us a picture of what our Lord meant:
What do we think is meant by the wedding garment, dearly beloved? For if we say it is baptism or faith, is there anyone who has entered this marriage feast without them? A person is outside because he has not yet come to believe. What then must we understand by the wedding garment but love?[3]
St. Gregory explains that it was for love that God sent His Son to us, it was for love that this Jesus died for us, and that it was for love that He unites us in Himself. It is putting on this love that drives our amendment of life, our growth into the image of God, and our extension of God’s love to those around us without which is our wedding garment.[4] In this context, it is clear then that those who refuse to participate in God’s love, even if they respond to the invitation, have no place in the Kingdom if they have no place for the Kingdom in their hearts.
Jesus delivered this parable almost two thousand years ago, to a group of people now long dead, but does this mean the parable is now fulfilled and has no applicability? Hardly. The people in the streets of this parable are not limited to the people of Judea and the surrounding territories. No, this includes all to whom the Apostles and their successors have brought the invitation, across all peoples and nations and centuries. However, it is not enough to respond to the invitation. We also must put on the wedding garment, we must put on Christ,[5] that is, to assume the new nature, to conform to the new nature, and to grow into the new nature.[6] How much do we see today of the failure of people to answer the call or to put on the wedding garment once they do? In the Middle East today we see plenty in God’s name on both sides committing atrocities, and yet who are we to judge? What of the legacy of colonialism? What of the buried secrets of the residential schools? What of our maintaining the institutions of American apartheid? What of our callousness to those in need, calling them shiftless, lazy, even wicked? When we abandon love and dehumanize those with whom we disagree, can we truly say we are wearing the wedding garments? If we are wearing wedding garments, for many of us they are in tatters.
Our Lord’s warning in the parable is not just for those who were around Him, but it is also for us. Not only do we heed God’s invitation to participate in His Kingdom, but we must also do the work of conforming ourselves to Jesus’ example. Regardless of our ethnicity or ancestry, our upbringing, our class, or our station, when we respond to the call to the wedding feast, each of us needs to put on that festal garment and not show up in the jeans and hoodie of our old nature.
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.[7]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Mt. 22.1-14 [2] Lk. 14.16-24 [3] Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, 38.9, Patrologiae Latinae, J.-P. Migne, ed., Paris, Migne, 1844-1864, 76:1287, drawn from Thomas C. Oden and Manlio Simonetti, edd., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 14-28, InterVarsity Press, Downer’s Grove, 2002. [4] Ibid. [5] Gal. 3.27 [6] Rom. 12.2 [7] Gal 3.27-29