“The wedding is ready”
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” Shakespeare’s famous sonnet begins. “The marriage of true minds” is a wonderful concept. It reminds us that there are different ways of speaking about marriage including metaphorically. Scripture, too, uses the marriage image in different ways that go beyond the literal and institutional. In fact, marriage is frequently used as the image for the union between the grand opposites: between man and God, between heaven and earth.
The Gospel for The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity is a case in point. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, who made a marriage for his son.” The parable is rich in its suggestive power. It points to the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, to the marriage feast of human redemption, as it were. But the parable is also about the impediments, the obstacles, that stand in the way. The wedding is said to be ready but are we? What does it mean to be ready?
This Sunday falls within The Octave of All Saints’. All Saints’, too, is about a kind of marriage, the union of God and man in the Communion of Saints. In a way, the Communion of Saints is a wedding celebration where everyone has on “a wedding garment” for all have been made ready for the marriage feast.
What are the impediments to the marriage and the marriage feast? By using the word “impediments,” Shakespeare alludes to the language of the marriage rite in The Book of Common Prayer. “I require and charge you both in the Name of God, from whom no secrets are hid, that if either of you know any impediment, why you may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, you do now confess it.” Impediment refers to “any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together.” Impediment as just cause refers to the objective reasons against the union, such things as bigamy or polygamy, incest, and fraud.
What, then, are the impediments to our being at the marriage feast of God and man in the Communion of Saints? Indifference and violence. The invitation is given and ignored. It is given again, “but they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise.” The indifference to the king’s invitation is because we are too much with ourselves. Or, as the poet, Wordsworth, puts it: “the world is too much with us, late and soon,/ getting and spending we lay waste our powers,/ nothing in nature is ours.” Even more, the remaining invitees “took [the king’s] servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them.” Shooting the messenger takes on a whole new meaning. The good news, the Gospel, comes with a price. There is persecution.
Back at the beginning of the Trinity Season, on The Second Sunday after Trinity, we had the story of invitations to a banquet feast that were refused because of excuses. Our excuses are our attachment to other things in place of God. Here our refusals take a most violent turn; not so much our attachment to other things in place of God as our outright rejection of God. It is a stark picture of the sorry reality of one aspect of our humanity. Yet, in each case, the parables also present us with the divine purpose which is to have the house filled, for “all is ready”. God would have us be worthy of being at the marriage feast. God’s will cannot be constrained by our wills; it is precisely our folly that makes such a presumption. We call it sin.
Here, being ready has to do with having on “a marriage garment”. What does that mean? Well, I think, it refers to our being at the marriage feast intentionally and not accidently, deliberately and not casually; in short, being there with a sense of purpose. Our minds and wills at one with God’s mind and will – “the marriage of true minds”.
The Communion of Saints reminds us of our Christian vocation. At All Saints’ we hear the core of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, namely, the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes, or the Blessednesses, signal the qualities of soul that belong to that Christian vocation. We are called to holiness. St. Paul in this morning’s epistle also signals something of what it means to be ready. It means “walk[ing] circumspectly” or paying attention to what truly matters; it means “redeeming the time,” an intriguing phrase which suggests the doing of all things for a greater purpose; it means being wise and “understanding what the will of the Lord is;” it means “making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things;” it means “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” It is a total view of things.
We have to will what God wants for us. His grace alone “keep[s] us from all things that may hurt us” even as his grace alone makes us “ready both in body and soul.” His grace alone moves in us so that we “may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done,” meaning the things that God would have us do. We are not left in the dark about those things. The greater darkness is what lies within our hearts of indifference and violence when we spurn the heavenly invitation to the marriage feast.
The year runs out in the themes of judgment and mercy. Here we see both the judgment against our indifference and violence and the mercy of God’s will to join himself to us. The image of the marriage feast captures so much of the joy and the delight that belongs to the Communion of Saints. It belongs, too, to our liturgy and pattern of Christian life whereby we are being made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars,” being made ready for the fellowship of God and Man in the Communion of Saints. But only if we act upon the invitation and enter into those good things which God has prepared for us to walk in. For, then, we might say, we shall have achieved “the marriage of true minds.”
“The wedding is ready”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XX in the Octave of All Saints’
November 6th, 2011