The Wedding Garment
Proper 22 Matthew 22:1-14
9 October 2011
The parable of the wedding banquet is a familiar one to us. We have long known that Jesus meant it as a warning to his generation. It was directed towards those who felt themselves to be insiders—they already had God’s invitation to the celebration when the Messiah came. But they didn’t like the kind of party the Messiah celebrated when he finally appeared: God, the great King, announces that the day of the fulfillment of the promises had come, but those to whom the promises were made did not like the shape they took. Of course, the great Marriage Supper of the Lamb has not yet arrived. We are still awaiting the coming Kingdom. What took place in Jesus’ day was anticipatory—the foretaste of what is still to come. So now we are the ones who have the promised seats at the Messianic Banquet. Do the warnings of the parable also apply to us?
The parable speaks about a second invitation: those who were not originally invited. We can see ourselves in this group. All of us here this morning are those who have been gathered from the streets and by-ways and alleys of this world. The great King wants his banquet hall filled with guests. We are here at Mass this morning as those who are renewing our reservations for the great feast of the age to come by participating in the Eucharist. We are grateful to be asked—we were not on the original guest list. So far so good.
But then comes the notice about the poor guy without a wedding suit. Apparently unlike the other guests, he figured that all he had to do was show up—no need to rent a tux or whatever was the equivalent in those days. But the king was insulted—the guest, admittedly invited at the last minute, was taken to have offended against the dignity of the occasion by showing up in ordinary work-clothes. Instead of merely having his servants toss the man out, however, the king had him bound hand and foot and thrown “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Obviously this is not a story about a banquet now, but a lesson about something far more serious. What might it be? To what does the wedding garment refer?
The standard answer in the commentaries is: “good deeds”, that is, righteousness or justice. You may answer the invitation to God’s party in faith, but good works are eventually required. There is a passage in the Book of Revelation where the white linen garments of the saints are their righteous deeds. But I am somewhat unsatisfied with this interpretation. It too easily lends itself to legalism: how many good deeds do you need? Now there are two other places where the outer darkness and the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth are spoken of in Matthew’s Gospel: in the parable of the talents, at the end of which the lazy guy who wouldn’t do anything with his one talent was consigned there; and at the conclusion to the story of the healing of the centurion’s servant. There Jesus had been amazed at the faith of someone like the Roman Centurion and warned, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven”—that is, the Messianic Banquet—“while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
This points us in a slightly different direction. Those who were cast out have failed to understand who Jesus is and so have not responded appropriately to Him. We could call this a lack of faith, but I want to suggest, along the same line, that the wedding garment stands for a personal commitment to Jesus—the relationship to him of the disciple, the true follower. That is, the essential thing we need, if we are to be at home among the other guests at his party, is to be clothed with the qualities of character that belong to the Kingdom of our great King: love, mercy, justice, and peace. These qualities of character are only obtained when one has learned seriously to follow this King, this Messiah, in a life of personal devotion to Him.
How does a person become seriously involved with Jesus? What do we mean by personal devotion to Him, following Him as our Lord? Well, we cannot seriously serve Jesus if we don’t know Him. We cannot be a disciple of our Lord if we don’t have trust in His teaching. We cannot follow Him if we don’t believe in Him. So our first task is to decide what it is that we can know about Him. Is it possible to know Jesus as a personal Friend and Master and Teacher? And is there some way in which we can reasonably believe that we have become his followers? Of course, I believe that there is.
The kinds of friends we have—from casual to intimate—vary according to the degree in which mutual self-revelation has taken place. Most of us have few really intimate friends because the degree to which we trust each other to know the secrets of our hearts is quite limited. Some of us have no one whom we trust, or who trusts us enough, to share that deeply. The heart longs for this kind of friendship, though many of us find it hard to be vulnerable enough to find it, or take the kind of time required to develop it.
Now, you might be saying, how can a person possibly have such a relationship with Jesus? Of course, there are some differences, but this is the model we are working from. Listen to these words of Jesus: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Jesus is the Son of the Father. It is that relationship with the Father that He shared with his friends. Nothing He could have told them was more revealing of Himself. But, of course, when He showed them Himself, and when they responded with their friendship, they recognized that this friendship was different than the one they shared amongst themselves. Jesus was their human Friend, but there was something much more to Him and that “something” made Him a Friend like no one else.
Of course, you might think, we cannot share with Him nor receive from Him what His disciples could; we cannot interact with Him as with our own friends. You have a point, but it is not as strong as you might think. First of all, it is possible to enter into a relationship of mutual sharing with Jesus. His sharing with us is accomplished by means of Scripture, particularly the Gospels. If we are willing to spend some time with the Gospels, it is amazing how strongly we can be impressed with the personal presence of Jesus and come to know Him deeply. This possibility is largely due to the operation of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who bridges the gap between the days of the first century and our own and makes Jesus present to us.
This means, of course, that we have to come to a reading of the Gospels in a prayerful openness to the Holy Spirit. The project of becoming a Friend of Jesus would be impossible were it not for the work of the Spirit. Jesus promised: “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” In another place Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The Spirit takes what is of Jesus and reveals it to us—that is, Jesus reveals Himself to us through the Spirit—and the whole process is based on our meditation on the Scriptures which contain the record of His life and deeds and words.
The other part of friendship is our self-revelation to another. How can this take place in our relationship with Jesus? Again, it takes place through the Spirit. As we learn Jesus through the Scriptures, that revelation calls out from us a personal response to the Lord whom we increasingly know as present to us. We find our hearts opening up and we increasingly speak our minds to Jesus, sharing with Him what we feel and where we hurt and what we desire in our praying. Those thoughts and fears and dreams and hopes, which we express in prayer, are taken by the Spirit and specifically offered to our Lord. Remember those words of St Paul: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
In the midst of this mutual interchange, we will discover the obligations of our friendship. Here is where our friendship with Him is different than our friendship with others. Perhaps to some degree, we do become like those who are our most intimate friends. That is why your mother always warned you to make good friends—those who would help you to be a good person, not those who would drag you down. But it certainly is true that if we hang around with Jesus in any serious way, we are going to become like Him. We will recognize that if we are going to be His friends, we must allow Him the leadership in the relationship. We are the followers and He is the Leader. He won’t treat us like servants but friends, yet He is our Lord and not our pal. As He put it: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
There are a couple of other conclusions from this line of thinking. First of all, while the Holy Spirit is at work throughout the world in ways that none of us know, the Spirit works manifestly and by promise within the Church. We are given the Spirit in fullness in our baptism, and so it is only the baptized who can really know Jesus in any deep personal way. Only they have the Spirit personally bestowed on them. Obviously the Spirit can lead different people in different ways according to their willingness to be led before their baptism, but the depths of personal experience of Jesus are reserved for the baptized, those who belong to the Body of Christ.
Another point to be made is this: since the same Spirit works throughout the one Church, we all have a common relationship with Jesus. In fact, by sharing our experience of Jesus with our brothers and sisters in the Church, we can make sure that our understanding of Jesus is not eccentric, that is, off the mark. If we are too much off on our own with Jesus alone, we can go astray. Our own personal relationships with Jesus require the corrective and the sustenance of the whole Body of Christ, including the Sacraments.
Some people have historically opposed the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus to a Sacramental relationship with Jesus. But if the Spirit who enables our personal relationship with Jesus operates in the Body of Christ expressly by means of the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, then it is true to say that our personal relationship with Christ is nurtured sacramentally. Obviously we cannot think that it is sufficient only to be baptized and receive communion—we have a lot of personal work to do. But that personal work is enabled by the sacraments and fostered by the one life of the Body of Christ which is the Spirit.
When we look at the dire warnings about being thrown into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, we might think that the lack of this personal relationship with Jesus ought not to be considered so serious. I don’t know for sure to what such awful words refer, but there is something about which we can be sure: if we are not seriously involved with Jesus in such a way that we know ourselves to be His disciples, then we have missed most of what the Christian religion is about. The whole meaning of the Kingdom of God is human life raised to the level of intimacy with God. Imagine a society composed completely of the friends of Jesus. That is what the Church is supposed to be now in a way that points toward the glorious promise of the Kingdom in the future. Of course, none of us yet has reached perfection in that relationship. Our sins and foibles will be a part of us until the Lord comes and we are translated from this stage of our existence. But even in our present state of imperfection and sin, we can be developing that friendship with our Lord which is the wedding garment signifying our reservation at table in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.