“Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding-garment?”
God’s questions call us to account, to a sense of intentionality and agency without which we are lost in indeterminacy and indifference. “Be ye not unwise” Paul bids us, “but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” That will of the Lord is about the quality of our life in Christ, he in us and we in him. It is sanctification, the grace which moves in us. It requires our full hearted attention to the transcendence of God, to the givenness of the created order, and to the realities of our common life in the body of Christ. Something is required of us. This is the meaning of the wedding-garment.
“See then that ye walk circumspectly,” Paul says, paying attention to all that is around us, “redeeming the time,” a lovely phrase which is about our life as ordered to God, our God-awareness, as it were, even in the awareness that “the days are evil.” We know this only too well. How to live a good life is not about possessions and pleasures. It is about life in Christ, a life of prayer and praise, of a kind of joy in the midst of the disturbing and dark times in which we live. The constant thrust of the Christian faith is that we are not fundamentally defined by the circumstances and events of our world and day, however much the days are evil. That is simply the context for our lives in faith which is about our constant attention to God in and through our lives with one another. Being alive to God in Christ is our calling and our challenge.
This means, as Paul suggests, being “filled with the Spirit,” another lovely phrase which is explained in terms of the qualities of prayer and praise alive in us through the liturgy: “speaking to yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs; 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.” This is a wonderful and vibrant statement of living faith which contrasts with contemporary claims about personal faith and/or personal identities which are radically incomplete and indeterminate, solipsistic and narcissistic. They are really all about oneself in a kind of idolatry of the self. “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God,” on the other hand, speaks to our lives together in the Faith which is corporately confessed and lived in the body of Christ.
Quite simply something is required of us. This is illustrated in the powerful Gospel parable which Jesus tells: the kingdom of heaven is likened to the marriage feast of a certain king for his son to which we are bidden, or invited. But what is our response? First, those who were bidden, “would not come.” They refuse or ignore the invitation. The invitation is issued yet again for “all things are ready; come unto the marriage”. Some “made light of it and went their ways,” turning to their own immediate interests of property and merchandise; others took the servants of the king “and entreated them spitefully, and slew them;” a reference to the prophets sent by God to call us to repentance. The consequence is their destruction.
But what about the wedding, itself an analogy of the marriage between heaven and earth, between God and man in Jesus Christ? “The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy.” The parable now turns on the question of what it means to be worthy. The servants are instructed to go out into the proverbial highways and bid “as many as you shall find to the marriage.” They “gathered together all, as many as they found, both bad and good.”
God seeks our good but something is required of us, namely our working with his will for our good; our readiness. This is the point of the wedding-garment. In a way, it belongs to the questions that call us to account, to who we are in Christ.
The questions of God awaken us to self-consciousness albeit through the knowledge of our separation from what in principle we know to be good and true. “Where are you?” God asks us in the garden because in eating the forbidden fruit the eyes of Adam and Eve “were opened and they knew they were naked.” This is the beginning of our self-consciousness as living and thinking beings. God’s question calls us to account. Adam replies, “I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.” “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” God asks. Adam answers directly and honestly – it isn’t really about blaming Eve. He simply describes what happened. This leads to God’s fourth question: “What is this that you have done?” to which Eve responds directly and honestly, too, yet with a sense of a dawning awareness about deceit and evil. “The serpent beguiled me and I ate.” We are in this story as deceived and deceivers. It is really a kind of fall upward into reason albeit through our separation and self-contradiction from the truth of our being in God. We choose the serpent’s half-truth; we come to know good and evil but not as God knows them.
Likewise in the story of Cain and Abel. It begins with God asking Cain, “Why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen?” It marks the beginning of the long, long tradition of sibling rivalry, of brother against brother which structures the entire Book of Genesis, as well as the possibilities of reconciliation under the Providence of God. Cain and Abel, Abram and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael (who will become the progenitor of the Islamic peoples), Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Cain is angry at Abel. Why? Because he resents the good which was shown to Abel and not to him. As God says, “If you do well will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Will we master our feelings or be mastered by them?
Cain’s anger is about envy, the inability to accept the good of another not just because we want it for ourselves but because we do not want it for them. It is one of the most destructive sins especially for the human community. Cain lures Abel into the field and kills him. In an echo of God’s first question to Adam, God asks “Where is Abel, your brother?” It is not that God doesn’t know. The question calls Cain to account. How does he respond? With a lie, “I do not know,” he says, and then asks a kind of rhetorical and dismissive question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This is to deny our obligations and connections to one another. He shows a kind of indifference towards his own brother, towards another who, like him, is made in God’s image.
The point is telling. Our envy and indifference towards one another easily slides into hostility and harm towards each other, a point which the Gospel makes about our indifference and refusal of God’s invitation that turns to hostility and murder. God’s last question to Cain is exactly the same as his last question to Eve in the story of the Fall. “What have you done?” The heightened sense of what we have done is poignantly expressed. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says. God is not indifferent to human suffering and evil. The voice of our brother’s blood cries out to God throughout all history in the sad and sordid tale of our inhumanity towards one another, from the blood of Abel to the blood spilled in Israel and elsewhere in the days of evil. We are being called to account, to the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God.
And so too with the wedding-garment. We cannot be indifferent to God’s invitation nor to one another. Something is required of us, a certain kind of attention and thoughtfulness. We can only come to the wedding in faith as the active principle in us about God and about who we are in the sight of God. The parable is itself a parable about revelation; God revealing himself to us and us to ourselves. The whole pageant of Scripture is simply about those two truths, God and us. And what is spread out in the rich fullness of the Scriptures is distilled and concentrated for us in the Creeds, themselves the full statement of faith and the pattern for our life in Christ.
A passage attributed to Augustine summarizes the patristic and classical Anglican understanding of the Creeds and their necessity.
The Creed is a simple, short, full comprehension of our Faith,
that the simplicity may provide for the rudeness of the hearers,
the shortness for their memory, and the fullness for their doctrine.
The Creeds shape us in what they state; they are formative principles by which we pray what we believe. They set before us the Faith in which we see ourselves in Christ. They belong to our being transformed into the image of Christ by the renewing of our minds, by our understanding what the will of the Lord is. As Augustine puts it,
Call your faith to mind, look into yourself,
let your creed be as it were a mirror to you.
See yourself there, whether you believe all
which you profess to believe, and so rejoice
day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth,
let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your
soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you
arise? So by the daily repetition of your creed
dress your soul. (Sermon 58.13)
Prayer is “man well drest” (Herbert).Our liturgy is itself that preparation for the wedding feast of the altar by awakening us to God and to ourselves in God. It is about putting on the wedding-garment of Faith that we may be with Christ.
“Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding-garment?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 20, 2023