Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Lesson: Is 25:6-10a
Epistle: Phil 4:12-14, 19-20
Gospel: Mt 22:1-14
The Last Judgement by Pieter Huys (1553-1554)
In the Gospel for today’s Mass, Jesus continues his apocalyptic preaching mission in Jerusalem during the final week of His earthly life. Sitting in the Temple and teaching on the day after His triumphant entry into Jerusalem, He seeks to reach the hearts of the listening Pharisees in one last attempt to win them over to the message of the Gospel. Jesus does this by laying out multiple parables before them, which we have heard over the course of the last few Sundays. These parables reach their climax with that of the Wedding Feast.
"The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who gave a wedding feast for his son.
He dispatched his servants
to summon the invited guests to the feast,
but they refused to come.
A second time he sent other servants, saying,
'Tell those invited: "Behold, I have prepared my banquet,
my calves and fattened cattle are killed,
and everything is ready; come to the feast."'
Some ignored the invitation and went away,
one to his farm, another to his business.
The rest laid hold of his servants,
mistreated them, and killed them.
The king was enraged and sent his troops,
destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.
There is both a powerful message of hope and a stern warning to be found for ourselves in the first half of this parable. The context of Jesus’ preaching should make us bold in hope and confident in God’s power to forgive and reconcile us to himself. The Pharisees to whom Jesus is preaching are already plotting to have him killed, and following the end of this parable will repeatedly try to snare him with verbal traps that might be used to condemn him. Our Lord knows this, and knows that they are the ones who will kill Him in several days time. Nevertheless, He does not abandon them at this point to the hardness of their hearts, but seeks right up to the end to draw them into His salvation. Jesus does not abandon the Pharisees while there is still time for them to repent, and He does not abandon us while time yet remains in our lives.
Nevertheless, the parable itself has strong words that ought to rattle us with compunction. Those guests, the apparent elect who are invited to the feast, fall into two broad categories of refusal: those who actively persecute and put to death the messengers of the king, and those who simply cannot be bothered to attend because of worldly concerns. God makes no distinction between these two categories. All are destroyed alike and burned together in their city.
The message for us is powerful and startling: The Kingdom of Heaven is not a spectator sport. When through apathy or indifference we neglect to radically conform our lives to the Gospel message, then we are no better than those who actively persecute the Church. When out of lukewarmness we ignore the prompting of faith, hope, and charity, then we are ranked with those who abuse and oppress the prophets. When we neglect the spiritual and corporal works of mercy to focus our attention wholly or for the most part on earthly goods, then we will share the fate of those who put the martyrs to death.
Then he said to his servants, 'The feast is ready,
but those who were invited were not worthy to come.
Go out, therefore, into the main roads
and invite to the feast whomever you find.'
The servants went out into the streets
and gathered all they found, bad and good alike,
and the hall was filled with guests.
We must never forget that our salvation, our entry into the Kingdom of God, is first and foremost an unmerited gift from God. Consider what it means that “those who were invited were not worthy to come.” If even the invited guests were not worthy of the feast, than what can be said of the worthiness of the uninvited! As if to drive home this point that none of the guests were worthy in and of themselves, the servants are stated to have gathered up “all they found, bad and good alike,” or as Fr. Ronald Knox colorfully renders it, “rogues and honest men together”. Acknowledging our unworthiness, and the reality that “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift” (Romans 3:23-24a), all that remains for us is to allow the Gospel message to penetrate our hearts and to heed the summons to the wedding feast, which of course is all that the king desired of the original guests in the first place.
But when the king came in to meet the guests,
he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment.
The king said to him, 'My friend, how is it
that you came in here without a wedding garment?'
But he was reduced to silence.
Then the king said to his attendants, 'Bind his hands and feet,
and cast him into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'
Many are invited, but few are chosen."
The parable ends on a mysterious note that is not easily interpreted. Whom does this man without the wedding garment represent? How did he comes to be without a wedding garment, and how did he enter the feast in the first place without a garment. There is no clear answer, though many exegetes have made a stab at an answer. According to Origen, the wedding garment is “bowels of mercy and kindness”. According to St. Gregory, it is charity, while St. Hilary says it is the grace of the Holy Spirit. St. Jerome, for his part, explains it thus: “The marriage garment is the commandments of the Lord, and the works which are done under the Law and the Gospel, and form the clothing of the new man.” Per St. Augustine, the one who appears at the feast without a wedding garment is the image of the person who seeks their own glory, and not that of the Bridegroom.
Perhaps the obscurity of this image is the final admonition of this parable. While we cannot earn our invitation to the wedding feast, we must labor and keep guard over ourselves to merit our continued presence in the feast, against the day when the king will come to meet us in person. There is no clear, single explanation of the wedding garment because there is no single way of living out our baptism. The Gospel summons is unique to each of us, and thus there is a specific, unrepeatable way in which we are all called to live out our Christian vocation. It is against this standard of holiness, and none other, that we must honestly examine ourselves, our actions, and our way of life. In thinking about the man who was found undressed and cast into the outer darkness, we should have in mind every day this question: “How prepared am I at this moment to stand before the king?”