“All things are ready”
Are we ready? “All things are ready,” we are told. Ready for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? And what is the wedding garment which seems to be so necessary such that without it we are cast out just when we think we are safely in; indeed “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Not exactly a pleasing prospect.
The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. “The days are evil,” St. Paul reminds us, and yet he bids us “be ye not unwise”. The quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. The times in which we live are 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 by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us and for us, come what may in the world around us including the sad parade of our own sins and follies.
One thinks, for instance, of St. Augustine, dying in his Episcopal see of Hippo Regius in 430 AD, even as the armies of the Vandals were besieging the city, about to obliterate what had been the work of a life-time in the formation of Christian souls and the development of a Christian culture. It was the first of a series of invasions that would virtually obliterate any trace of North African Christianity. It was to survive principally in the writings of its theologians, chief of whom was Augustine, whose writings would contribute greatly to the shaping of Europe.
Or one thinks, 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, or, perhaps, because of it, he produced the greatest epic poem of Christian pilgrimage of all times, The Divine Comedy, “to lead those”, as he says, “in a state of misery to the state of felicity”.
The point, perhaps, is also summed up in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where the Duke, exiled to the forests of Arden, poignantly, if not a little romantically, 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, that “sweet are the uses of adversity”. And yet, it was in “the dark wood,” Dante tells us, the dark wood of the world’s adversity and the soul’s perplexity, that he learned “a great good.”
The alarms and the adversities of our day, politically and ecclesiastically, globally and locally, rightly arrest our attention. The great biblical scholar Jerome, contemporary with Augustine, was responsible for the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible (so formative for Western Christianity right up to and including The Book of Common Prayer, as, for instance, in the Latin titles that adorn the Psalms). Contemplating the sack of Rome in 410 AD by Alaric the Ostrogoth, he wrote that “the mind shudders at the thought of the ruin of our age”. The mind shudders. It is not simply shattered. Rather it is shaken into thought upon the greater mystery and wonder of God’s Providence at work in and through the follies and foibles, the sins and wickedness of our humanity however distraught and however much in disarray. It is perhaps a strong and comforting reminder, in the sense of something strengthening, for us in the face of the uncertainties of our age.
Over and against the indifference of fate and fortune, the only counter is the awakening of the mind to the Providence of God. Even the adversities in our own affairs belong to the lessons of his care, tough lessons though they may be. Such lessons may be learned from the pageant of history, from the poets and the philosophers, and from the pathos of our own experiences. But surely they are best learned through the light of his Word illuminating a way of understanding, “understanding what the will of the Lord is”, as St. Paul puts in Ephesians.
We have spoken about Augustine, Jerome, Dante and Shakespeare. But there are a host of others who bear testimony to the Providence of God and the readying of the soul for the things of God in the face of crisis and adversities. William Nicholson, born in the late sixteenth century, was deprived of his living as an Anglican Priest during the interregnum – the English Civil War period in the mid-seventeenth century. He survived by teaching school at a time when the Prayer Book was banned and bishops were banished. But at the restoration in 1660, what did he do? It was not only that he was made Bishop of Gloucester but he undertook to write An Exposition on the Catechism.
He recognized that after such ruinous times what was needed was a return to the foundational principles of the Faith. What could be more foundational than the Catechism which seeks to create the resonance of God’s Word and Son in us? The Prayer Book catechism is almost unique for its liturgical character, its brevity and its strong insistence on the doctrinal basics of the Faith and our identity in the Faith. And such we may say is an illustration of the Providence of God readying our souls for the things of God in good times and bad. We would do well to return to the Catechism as belonging to our spiritual mindfulness.
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 God’s 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 which leads to our violence against his love, against his good for us. The point of such a hard parable is to shake us into readiness and preparation, to awaken us to the seriousness and the joy for what God provides 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. It includes and, indeed, demands our full-hearted repentance, our being here intentionally and thoughtfully, not carelessly and in a manner indifferent and casual.
For what is the 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 callous disregard and willful destruction. But the parable is told to make us ready “both in body and soul”, to shake us into thought and action. “All things are ready” in God and he would have us ready too, ready and prepared to enter into everything which he, in his Providence, has prepared for us. “All things are ready” and God would make us ready, too. He is, after all, “the good in everything”.
“All things are ready”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XX, 2017