Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am service

admin | 21 October 2012

“Everything is ready”

“Everything is ready”, it seems, but are we? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? What, indeed, 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”?

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them, though, no doubt, that raises the larger question about the struggle for the good in our lives. But the point, surely, 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 for Christians “at all times and in all places” 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. “Wherefore,” St. Paul bids us, “be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

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 really a parable of the whole 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 this service we see 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 about our full yearning for his love, “be[ing] filled with the Spirit; … singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as the Epistle so wonderfully puts it. It is about our life with God in prayer and praise.

It is about putting on Jesus Christ; our very being and identity is found in him. We cannot follow Christ and be found in him if we are not present where his Word is proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.

There is more here in the gospel than the story of the disorders of our love through lack of love. Here, too, is the larger pageant of God’s love in the face of the forms of our unloveliness. 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. Think of three inter-connected panels, each with a picture in them.

Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus cleanses the temple of the moneychangers and merchants. What is that, but the abuse of the temple through excessive love of money? Love excessive is about loving things the wrong way, in this case, loving money or riches too much. And then, there is the gospel parable of the Lord’s vineyard. What is that, but love perverted, our humanity trampling down the vineyard and even the Lord of the Vineyard with violence? Love perverted is about our vicious repudiation of God. Nowhere do we see that more graphically and tellingly than on the Cross. And now, here, in the parable of the wedding-garment, what do we have but love indifferent? Love indifferent is about our lack of care about what really matters. It contains as well more than a modicum of violence. Those who were first invited not only made light of the invitation but some of them went so far as to kill the King’s messengers. Even in our indifference, there lurks the potential for violence. In all three parables illustrating love excessive, love perverted and love indifferent, what else do we see but the love of God in Christ overcoming and re-ordering and rekindling our love? They are told for that purpose; in short, to make us wise in understanding about what Jesus wants for us.

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 refusals, his coming and our consumer obsessions, his coming and our nonchalance, our utter indifference. But surely the parable is told to make us ready “both in body and soul,” 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. “Everything is ready” and God would make us ready, too, that “being ready both in body and soul” we “may cheerfully accomplish those things that [Christ] wouldest have done.” Such is the quality of our lives in Christ, he in us and we in him.