“The wedding is ready”
What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? What is the wedding-garment without which, it seems, we are not ready; without which, it seems, we are out even when we think we are in; without which, it seems, we shall be “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”? It is a frightening prospect.
The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. There is the question, of course, about what it means to be a good person. For Christians there is no goodness in us apart from the goodness of God declared most fully in Jesus Christ. But the point is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us.
One might think, for instance, of an Augustine, dying in his episcopal see of Hippo Regius in 430 A.D., even as the armies of the Vandals were besieging the city, about to obliterate the many years of work of theological and spiritual formation. It was the first of the invasions which would virtually obliterate any trace of North African Christianity. It would survive in the writings of its theologians, chief of which was Augustine, whose writings and thought continue to shape and challenge the Church.
Or one might think, perhaps, of a Dante, cast out of his beloved city of Florence and into the dark wood of exile. And yet, in spite of his exile – no, because of it – he produced the greatest epic of Christian pilgrimage, The Divine Comedy, “to lead those”, as he says, “in a state of misery to the state of felicity”.
The point, perhaps, is best summed up in Shakespeare’s As you like it, where the Duke, exiled to the forests of Arden, poignantly says:
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
How hard and yet how necessary to know the “good in everything” and even more, that “sweet are the uses of adversity”. It was in the dark wood, Dante tells us, the dark wood of the world’s adversity and the soul’s perplexity, that “I learned a great good”.
The alarms and the adversities of our day rightly arrest our attention. The scholar Jerome, contemplating the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. by Alaric the Ostrogoth, wrote “the mind shudders at the thought of the ruin of our age”. The mind shudders. It is shaken into thought and reflection upon the greater mystery and wonder of God’s Providence.
To be defined by the circumstances of our day is to choose Fortuna – that ancient goddess of blind chance, Lady Luck. She, of course, goes merrily and gaily on her way, favouring first one and then another, but leaving so many more in the ruin of her train. You see, she doesn’t care. She goes merrily on her way. And if we choose to follow the revolving wheel of fortune and happenstance, ‘going with the flow’, as it is commonly said, then we shall be broken upon the wheel of her indifference. Broken as much inwardly as outwardly. And yet, perhaps, that may be the awakening of the mind to the Providence of God.
For God does care and, ultimately, even the adversities in our affairs belong to the lessons of his care. They may be learned from the pageant of history and from the parade of our own experiences. But they are best learned, I think, through the light of his Word illuminating a way of understanding.
In Jesus Christ, the Providence of God is written out for us to read most clearly and most dramatically. He is, we might say, the Mind of Providence, the Word and Son of the Father who “came unto his own and his own received him not”. The parable in today’s gospel is a parable of the gospel itself. Jesus shows us a picture of our indifference to his love, to his good for us, so as to shake us up into readiness and preparation: preparation for the eternal banquet of the blessed in communion with God and preparation for the foretaste and participation in that feast now in the banquet of the faithful, the Holy Eucharist.
Here, in the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ is the outpouring of God’s love for us. What, then, is the wedding-garment? It is nothing less than the charity of God in the sacrifice of Christ. The wedding-garment is Christ Jesus. “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ”. Our preparation is our full yearning for his love.
But there is more here than the story of the disorders of our love through lack of love. Here, too, is the greater pageant of divine love. God’s love shakes our love into order. With this parable St. Matthew completes, as it were, a kind of triptych – a triptych of divine love. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus cleanses the temple of the moneychangers and merchants. Why? Because of the abuse of the temple through excessive love of money. And then, there is the gospel parable of the Lord’s vineyard. What was that, but love perverted, trampling down the vineyard and even the Lord of the Vineyard with violence? And now, here, in the parable of the wedding-garment, what do we have but love indifferent? In all three, what do we see but the love of God in Christ re-ordering and rekindling our love? They are told for that purpose.
For what is this marriage-feast in the parable? Surely it is the marriage of heaven and earth, the union of God and man in Christ Jesus. It signifies his whole incarnate life – the preparations for his coming and our refusings, his coming and our indifference. But the parable is told to make us ready “both in body and soul”, as the Collect puts it, to shake us into thought and action.
“Everything is ready” and he would have us ready too, ready and prepared to enter into everything which he, in his Providence, has prepared for us.
“The wedding is ready.”
Fr. David Curry,
Christ Church, Windsor
October 25th, 2009
Trinity XX, 8:00am