28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

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I am always struck, 
when reading Matthew’s version
of the parable of the wedding feast,
by how violent and disturbing it is.
Luke’s gospel includes the same parable,
but there it is a pretty straightforward story
of people refusing an invitation to a great feast
and other people being invited in their stead.
But in Matthew’s version
we have emissaries murdered,
cities destroyed,
and guests who are underdressed
being cast into the outer darkness.
Luke’s simple story of the abundant feast 
to which God invites us,
and the importance of accepting that invitation,
takes on in Matthew a dark and somber coloring.

Matthew’s parable shows a world 
in which people act 
against their own self-interest:
what do the unwilling invitees gain
by killing those servants
who brought them the invitation?
It shows a world in which people
more than match evil for evil:
why destroy the innocent
alongside the guilty
in retaliation for murder?
It shows us a world beset by,
as the prophet Isaiah puts it,
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
It shows us a world 
enclosed in the shroud of sin 
and entangled in the mesh of mortality.
It shows us, in short, our world.
It shows us how we reject and react and retaliate.
It shows us how even the joyous event
of a wedding banquet
can be turned into 
one more manifestation
of the evil in which we 
are enclosed and entangled.

But the parable does more that,
for if that was all it did 
then it would hardly be good news.
The image of the wedding feast
draws our minds to God’s promise
that this sad, violent world 
will one day be transformed.
It draws our minds to Scripture’s promise
that God “will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wines,”
the promise that God 
will wipe the tears from every face
and that death itself will be destroyed.
And it draws our minds 
to our liturgy’s promise that, 
even now, 
in the midst of all this sin and sorrow,
we are blessed to be called 
to the supper of the Lamb,
who bears away the world’s sin
and gives to us his peace.
Even now, beneath the veil 
and within the web that death has woven,
the Lamb of God feeds us with himself,
sustaining us each week in his banquet of love,
a feast of rich food and choice wine.

Matthew’s version of the parable
weaves together in a striking fashion
the promise of the wedding banquet
with the violence and sorrow 
that shrouds our world,
as if to remind us that death’s defeat,
which is already won for us 
in the resurrection of Christ,
is something that is not yet 
fully realized in us.
It reminds us that the Lamb’s peace
is truly present to us in this meal,
but veiled under sacramental signs
that only faith can discern.

But what about that 
underdressed wedding guest
who is cast into the outer darkness?
How does he fit into the picture?
It does seem strange that someone
who was dragged in from the streets
should be faulted for not wearing
something suitable for a royal wedding.
But in Scripture, clothing 
is never merely clothing.
The Psalms speak repeatedly 
of the righteous being clothed
with joy and salvation,
and the wicked being clothed
with shame and dishonor.
In the New Testament, St. Paul speaks
of clothing yourself with compassion, 
kindness, humility, 
meekness, and patience.
He speaks, above all, 
of clothing yourself with love,
which, he says, 
“binds everything together 
in perfect harmony” (Col 3:12-14).

If the wedding banquet 
is the Lamb’s high feast,
then surely love is the festive garment
in which we should be clothed.
It is not enough to be invited
out of the sad world of sin and death
and into the joyous banquet of life; 
it is not enough even to accept the invitation
and to gather with others to celebrate.
As St. Paul says, 
“If I comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge…
but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own… 
but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor 13:1-2).
For it is love that carries us out of this world of death
and into the banquet of life,
and it is the lacking of love that leads
out of the banquet into the outer darkness.
In the face of the violence and sorrow of the world,
we who have been invited must clothe ourselves in love.

But where do we find this love?
After all, are we not those 
who have been called in from the streets,
who arrive unprepared and unworthy?
But, St. Paul says in our second reading today,
“My God will fully supply whatever you need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”
We come to the banquet with nothing,
but if only we ask 
God will clothe us 
in joyful wedding garments 
of compassion, kindness, humility, 
meekness, and patience.
Above all, God will clothe us in his love.
And finding ourselves in such bright array,
we can reflect the light of God’s love
to a world enclosed in the shroud of sin 
and entangled in the mesh of mortality,
so that every tearful eye might hope to see
that day when all the saints will sing
“This is the LORD for whom we looked;
let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us!”

 

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-10

You get the feeling that there must be
some sort of backstory.
A king sends messengers
to invite you to his son’s wedding
but you, for some reason, refuse.
The king sends more servants,
and this time you kill them.
The king then sends an army
that kills you and burns down your city.
What the heck is going on?
Why are all of these people
acting in such inexplicable ways?
I know that there can be
a lot of tensions around weddings,
but this is ridiculous.

Of course, we have no way
of knowing for sure
what the backstory might be:
perhaps long-standing hostilities
between the king and the invitees;
perhaps some cultural context
that is now lost to us.
But we don’t need to know the backstory
in order to get the main point of the parable:
God is inviting us to the banquet of life,
the wedding feast of the Lamb,
and if we refuse that invitation
we do so to our own detriment.
Jesus draws on the imagery
with which the prophet Isaiah speaks
of the fullness of life that God wishes for us:
“a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
Why would we refuse?
What would keep us from saying, “yes”?

But that is in fact what we do.
Like the people in the parable
we often respond to God invitation
with either indifference or even violence.
Throughout history, we human beings
have studiously ignored God’s invitation
to live the values of God’s kingdom:
the values of compassion and peace,
the values of concern for the weakest among us,
the values of generosity and self-sacrifice.
We human beings have even sought to eliminate
those whom God sends to remind us of this invitation,
not least Jesus himself, whom we hung on a cross.
I think today we can simply read the news
and see that we continue to shout each other down,
demonize those with whom we differ,
ignore those most in need,
and treat life as if it were a game
that you win by defeating those who differ
and grabbing all you can for yourself.
When God is offering us abundant life
why would we act in such inexplicable ways?
So we might ask, what is our backstory?

Our backstory is what Isaiah calls
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
Our backstory is the story of fear,
the story of mistrust and lack of faith,
the story that is told in Scripture
of our first ancestors
who were offered the abundant life of paradise,
if only they would trust in God to provide,
but who instead sought to become
their own gods, their own providers;
it is the story of faithless people
who preferred slavery and death
to reliance on God’s goodness;
it is the story of wars waged
in order to win for ourselves
what God wants to give us without cost.
This is our backstory;
this is who we are:
offered life, we chose death
rather than trust in God to provide.

But our backstory is not the whole story.
The good news of the Gospel
is that our past is not our destiny:
in Jesus God is writing for us a new story,
a story in which God will destroy death forever
and wipe away the tears from every face.
The parable of the wedding feast
should be read as a warning,
not a prediction.
Through God’s grace,
our story can be the story,
not of the old Adam,
the story of fear and faithlessness,
but the story of the new Adam,
the story of Jesus Christ,
who entrusted himself
fearlessly and faithfully
to the hands of his Father
and won victory over death.
The story of Jesus,
the story of God’s beloved
whom fear and death could not defeat,
can become our story.
And with this as our story
we can say with the psalmist,
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want….
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side.”
With this as our story we can say with Paul,
“I have learned the secret…
of living in abundance and of being in need.
I can do all things in him who strengthens me.”
We can become living signs of the abundant life
that God wants all people to share in;
we can be God’s invitation
to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

I am convinced that so much
of what plagues our world
grows out of fear and mistrust:
fear and mistrust of each other,
but even more fear and mistrust of God.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that the Lord will provide for all peoples
a rich feast, a banquet of abundance.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that only goodness and kindness follow us
all the days of our lives.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that God will fully supply whatever we need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
But this does not have to be our story.
Let us pray today that God, through his Spirit,
will draw us into the story of Jesus,
the story of God’s reign,
so that we can hear and answer
his invitation to the banquet of life.
And may God have mercy on us all.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

At this point in my ministry as a deacon –
four and a half years after my ordination –
I have performed a fair number of wedding ceremonies
and I realize that wedding can be times of high tension
 for everybody involved.
But even so, the characters in the parable
that Jesus tells in today’s Gospel
seem unusually stressed-out.
We’ve all received invitations
to weddings we did not particularly want to attend,
but it seems a bit extreme
to kill the person delivering the invitation.
And while it might hurt our feelings
to have our invitation rejected,
it hardly seems a fitting response
to burn down the city where the invitee lives.
And though an underdressed guest
might raise a few eyebrows,
we would probably not tie up his hands and feet
and cast him “into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth”
(presumably the wailing and grinding of teeth
of those who cannot get into this joyous celebration).

Matthew’s version of Jesus’ parable
is hardly a realistic depiction
of even the most emotionally fraught wedding.
But of course it’s not really a parable about wedding etiquette
and the deadly consequences of breaching that etiquitte.
Jesus’ parable trades upon the imagery
of the great feast at the end of time
that God, our first reading tells us,
“will provide for all peoples,”
a feast of “rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
At this feast, “The Lord God will wipe away
the tears from every face.”
It is this feast that fulfills the promise in our second reading
that “God will fully supply whatever you need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

The book of Revelation presents a particularly striking image
of this great feast at the end of time
in which Christ the lamb is united to his spouse, the Church.
At this feast the joyous guests sing, “Alleluia!
The Lord has established his reign,
God, the almighty.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory.
For the wedding day of the Lamb has come,
his bride has made herself ready. . .
Blessed are those who have been called
to the wedding feast of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:6-7, 9a).

In all these texts the joy of a wedding feast
at which two lives are joined together
becomes an image of the joyous event
of the union of our life with God’s life,
when God will consummate human history,
wipe away all its tears,
and fill every cup to overflowing. 

In the Eucharist that we celebrate every Sunday
we share already in the wedding feast of the Lamb.
I have heard the Eucharist described
as the rehearsal dinner for the Lamb’s wedding feast
but I believe it is something more than that
because in the Eucharist the Lamb is truly present with us
and the wedding feast is already begun.
We come, week after week,
to have our lives joined to the life of God,
to have our tears wiped away,
to have our cups filled to overflowing.

In the new translation of the Mass
that, as I mentioned last week, we will soon be using
the invitation to communion will now be,
“Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”
This is not only a more literal translation of the Latin,
but it makes just a bit clearer the connection of our Eucharist
with the wedding supper of the Lamb –
the great feast that God provides for all people
at the consummation of history.

We have been called, like the guests in the parable,
to the wedding supper of the Lamb
who has taken away our sins,
and we are indeed truly blessed
to have received this call.
But the parable is also a warning
not to take lightly so great a call.
Though the actions of the characters in the parable
seem extreme,
the very exaggeration of those actions
drives home the point
that this is a call to the feast of life itself
and to decline that invitation
is to reject the gift of life that is offered.
At the same time,
 the invitation is not to be accepted lightly;
we are to adorn our souls
with the wedding garment of love,
a garment that, as St. Gregory the Great put it,
is woven of two strands of wool:
love of God and love of neighbor (Homily 37).

In the Church we sometimes speak of the “Sunday obligation” –
that is, the obligation of all Catholics
to be present at Mass each Sunday.
But if we understand what the Eucharist is –
that it is our sharing in the wedding feast of the Lamb –
then the language of obligation,
which we might associate
with something we do grudgingly and under duress,
might seems to miss the mark a bit.
At the same time, as our parable reminds us,
how we respond to this invitation
is a matter of life and death,
and our weekly presence
at the wedding feast of the Lamb
is an obligation,
but not an obligation that we owe to God
or to the Church
but to ourselves:
the obligation
to let our lives be joined to God’s,
to let our tears be wiped away,
to let our cup be filled to overflowing.

Blessed indeed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

On Friday, the good news
was that the trading day on Wall Street closed
with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down only 128 points.
The bad news
was that this ended a week in which the Dow lost 1874 points,
over 20% of its value.
This week Russia, Indonesia and the Ukraine
suspended trading on their stock exchanges
to try and prevent the instability of US financial markets
from infecting their economies
and the country of Iceland teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.
And, in what is certainly the most ominous sounding bit of news,
the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index,
known as the "fear gauge,"
climbed to a fifth-consecutive record level.
I must admit that such news makes my own "Volatility Index,"
my own personal "fear gauge," begin to rise,
not least because I’m not exactly sure
that I completely understand the financial news
with which I’m being bombarded,
nor do I really feel that I am in a position
to even begin to evaluate the proffered solutions:
should the government intervene
and, if so,
is the right amount of money being spent on the right things?
I just know that when I made the mistake this past week
of opening the quarterly report
from my TIAA-CREF retirement fund
it seemed that I had somehow lost a lot of money
without ever having the pleasure of spending it
and I could feel my volatility index — my fear gauge —
rising to record heights.

Why regale you with news of the business world
and of my own personal anxiety?
Because I suspect that many of you
have also looked at your retirement plans
or stock portfolios this week,
or at least been subjected to the ever-rising tone
of anxiety about the economy in the news media.
Some might even have more immediate worries
of losing a job or a home.
And I suspect your fear gauge is also rising.

What consolation can the word of God offer us today?
Our Gospel reading for today seems to depict a situation
in which the volatility index is off the charts,
with invited banquet guests
killing those who bring them their invitations
(wouldn’t a simple "no thank you" have sufficed?),
and the king who is throwing the banquet retaliating,
not just by killing the invited guests,
but by destroying their entire city.
You just want to say, "OK, everybody take a deep breath."
But our other readings sound a quite different note,
a note of confidence,
a note of faith
that we will be able to weather the storms of life,
a note of hope
that our fear gauge does not have to grow inexorably higher.
In our second reading, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians,
Paul tells us that he has learned the secret
of living in abundance and of being in need,
of being well fed and of going hungry.

Of course, the ups and downs of Paul’s fortune
do not have to do
with the ups and downs of the stock market
but with the fact that he writes from a Roman prison
and does not know if he will ever see freedom again.
Still, as different as Paul’s problems may be from ours,
we might be interested in knowing
what the secret of his equanimity is,
what the secret is
that keeps his fear gauge in the lower numbers,
despite the rather dire situation in which he finds himself.

His secret is not, as we might first suspect,
that he has simply detached himself from life,
so that he does not care and has no opinion
about how he would like things to turn out.
Paul would have been quite familiar with such a strategy,
since it was the one taught by the Stoic philosophers of his day:
one preserves oneself from life’s fortunes
by not clinging and not caring.
But it is not this path of stoic indifference that he takes;
rather, his secret, which he quite openly shares, is this:
"I can do all things in him that strengthens me."
Paul’s secret for controlling his fear gauge
is not to keep himself from caring,
not to keep himself from clinging,
but to care passionately about and cling tightly to
the one who, as he puts it,
"will fully supply whatever you need."
Paul believes, with Isaiah in our first reading,
that "the Lord God will wipe away
the tears from every face."
Paul believes, with our psalmist,
that "the Lord is my shepherd" and "I shall not want."

But notice that this hope about which Paul cares passionately
and to which he clings tightly
does not promise that Paul will not be in need
or that he will not be hungry;
it does not promise that he will ever be released from prison.
Paul’s secret is his faith that in Christ he has a hope
that can never be defeated by life’s circumstances,
because in Christ God has come to share our circumstances,
so that in all our circumstances —
whether imprisonment or financial loss
or any other situation that sets our fear gauge rising —
we can find the presence of God that will sustain us.
If we can fix our eyes on what Paul calls
God's "glorious riches in Christ Jesus,"
if we see the circumstances of our lives
as pervaded by God’s sustaining presence,
then we can find hope and we can conquer fear,
no matter what storms batter us.

This, of course, is easier said than done;
it requires that we cultivate a capacity
to pay attention to God’s presence in our lives,
a capacity that is planted in us by God’s grace,
that grows through prayer,
that is nourished through the sacraments.
But perhaps we might start
by simply attending to our own personal volatility indexes,
and when we feel our fear gauge rising,
to make our own prayer be the words of Paul:
"I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."