Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts”
The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the critical matrix for our understanding week in and week out. It is no less so for this Sunday. The Gospel is Christ’s parable which likens the kingdom of heaven to a great supper to which all who were invited made excuses. But is the kingdom of heaven a good equal to our other desires and pleasures in our concerns about property or goods or states of life, even such as marriage? How can that be? Thus the consequence of our refusals would seem to mean not only “no feast” but equally a denial of God’s will and kingdom, as if our conveniences and interests really take precedence over God’s will for our highest good, our blessedness. Here our preoccupations about such concerns contribute to our indifference to the things of God through too much attachment to worldly concerns. Loving the things of the world too much, the things that are always passing away, leads to the neglect of the things of God, the things that are everlasting. It is one of the forms of the disorder of our loves that constantly need correction.
We have to learn, it seems, how to care for the things of our daily lives in the right way by learning to love all good things in God. “Teach us to care and not to care,” as T.S. Eliot puts it; in other words, teach us to care in the right way.
It might seem that our excuses must frustrate God’s will. But that cannot be. We can only frustrate ourselves; itself a kind of self-condemnation. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready as the Gospel shows, bringing them in who could not come on their own, compelling them to come in who would not come any other way. In a way, it is a strong statement of God’s love for our highest good, a strong statement about what God wants for us and which is prepared for us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Now, in God’s time and will, not ours. But are we ready?
Yet the invitation nonetheless recognises human agency. God invites those whom he would have come willingly and freely out of love; those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It suggests hospitality and conviviality in our social joys as grounded in God’s purpose and will for us. It belongs, in other words, to human redemption. As John tells us, the first miracle which Jesus did at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee was to turn water into wine, an image of our social joys and pleasures but as belonging to God’s will for the good of our humanity; in short, our joy is found in him and his kingdom, the communion of saints. It is not simply about our private goods. To refuse the invitation is to deny the love in which we find the ultimate truth of ourselves, knowing ourselves as we are known by him, known in the radiancy of God’s glory and love which has been shown to us.
