Day: October 30, 2022

“All things are ready”

“All things are ready”, but are we? And for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? The readings in the latter part of the Trinity season all have an apocalyptic quality to them. They point us to the end-times, to the idea of judgment, accountability, and responsibility that belong to the nature of our life in Christ. “Walk[ing] circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,” Paul bids us, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” No kidding, we might say. Yet it is really all about “understanding what the will of the Lord is” in the face of the evil of our days.

But 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”? A rather frightening and sobering spectacle.

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 is that the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. I have often told students that they are not the victims of Covid. And neither are you. Rather that is simply part of the setting and circumstance 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 circumstance 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, and even more, our evil to his love, to his good for us. Why? To awaken us to spiritual seriousness. To shake us out of our complacency and our evil and 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,” we will hear on the First Sunday of Advent. Yet, even now in these late days of the Trinity season, we are being called to pay serious attention to our life in Christ: being “wise” (Trinity 20), “taking the shield of faith” (Trinity 21), being “partakers of grace” (Trinity 22), knowing that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Trinity 23); these all the point to our end in Christ, that “ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding: that ye might walk worthy of the Lord”, being made “meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light,” (Trinity 24). In other words we are being recalled to our vocation as Saints, wonderfully illustrated for us in the Feast of All Saints in the vision of the Communion of Saints and in the Beatitudes which define our spiritual lives.

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