Proper 23 -- Isaiah 25: 1-9; Psalm 23; Philippians 4: 4-13; Matthew 22: 1-14
A homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at The
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Springfield, Illinois on Sunday, October 12, 2014.
“INVITATION AND PREPARATION”
(Homily text: Matthew
22: 1-14)
We begin
with a bit of humor this morning……
A grown son
lives with his widowed mother. One
Sunday morning, early, she goes to the son’s door and knocks, saying, “Son,
it’s time for you to wake up, it’s Sunday morning.” The son makes some unintelligible noises,
then rolls over and goes back to sleep.
A bit
later, the mother goes to the door again, knocks, and says, “Son, it’s time you
got up. It’s Sunday morning.” Again, the son grunts a little and falls back
asleep.
A third
time, she goes to the door again, knocks harder, and says, “Son, it’s Sunday
morning. You need to get up now and get
going.” The son wakes up and says, “Mom,
give me one good reason why I should get up.”
Mom answers
by saying, “Son, you’re the priest, that’s why!”
The moral
of this humorous story is that it is all about an invitation – a call from God
- and about preparation to answer that invitation….the priest son had been called,
invited to be the pastor of his church.
But being called and invited isn’t enough….that priest son also had to
prepare for the position he’d been invited to fill by getting up and by getting
ready for services that day.
Today’s
parable, the Parable of the Wedding Feast, is all about invitation and
preparation.
Let’s look
at it in some detail.
First of
all, this parable is the third in a series of parables (we’ve heard the first
two in the two Sundays immediately before this one) which is directed against
the leaders of God’s people in Jesus’ day:
The chief priests, the elders of the people and the Pharisees. These three groups are the target of today’s
parable.
Next, we
ought to acknowledge that this parable – like so many of them – is an
allegory. An allegory may be easily
explained by saying it is a case of “this equals that”. Its intent is to place an easily understood
idea next to a spiritual principle….it is not to be taken literally in every
respect, for its intent is to look beyond itself to the deeper and more abiding
truths of God. So, for example, in the
parable, the wedding feast is a commonly used image for the relationship
between God and God’s people, occurring often in the Old and New Testaments.
This
parable looks backward into Israel’s history, and it looks forward into the
experience of the Christian Church. In
this respect, this parable is similar to many others, as well. The parable describes the harsh treatment of
God’s prophets in Old Testament times, many of whom were poorly treated and
even killed for daring to tell the truth about the wayward ways of God’s
people. Many scholars think that Jesus’
comment about the “King coming to destroy those murderers, and to burn their
city” seems to refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD by the
Roman army. But this parable also looks
backward to the treatment of people like John the Baptist and forward to the
treatment afforded many of the early apostles and Christian missionaries.
Some
aspects of this parable deserve explanation:
For example, the individual who was invited to come into the banquet
hall, but who was thrown out of the banquet hall because he lacked the proper
clothing, seems to strike our modern sensibilities as being an unfair situation. Yet there is evidence in the Old Testament
that if a person was invited to a kingly feast, the king himself would provide
the proper clothing so that the individual could attend.[1]
We said
near the beginning of this homily that two themes emerge from this
parable: invitation and preparation.
Let’s
explore both.
Invitation: Jesus makes clear that God extends an
invitation to come into fellowship with Him (after all, eating a meal together
in ancient times signified – above all – fellowship with others) again and
again. God’s people had been invited
into a faithful relationship with the God who created them and who had formed
them into a people, a people who were supposed to be faithful to Him, living
out a covenant relationship.
The Old
Testament prophets and God’s emissaries now, in the time that Jesus came to
live among us, were often ignored as they articulated God’s invitation and call. Oftentimes, they ignored it because they were
preoccupied with other things. That was
the experience of the early Christian Church, for the Jews to whom Jesus had
been specifically sent largely ignored His message of hope and love.
So, God
issued invitations to come into fellowship to others. Oftentimes, those who responded were from the
margins of society: The tax collectors,
the prostitutes and other sinners, and now, in Matthew’s day, the Gentiles as
well. God’s net had been cast far and
wide, inviting everyone into fellowship with God the Father through the Son.
Preparation: Notice that two things are necessary to be in
fellowship with God: Acceptance of the
invitation, and preparing to properly receive it. That seems to be the point of Jesus’ comment
about the man who didn’t come wearing the right garment.
Those who
have passed through the waters of baptism and who have come to faith in the
Lord have accepted God’s invitation to come into fellowship with Him.
But just
showing up isn’t enough. Today’s parable
drives home the point that we are expected to actively prepare to be in
fellowship with God. We do this by reading
and studying God’s Holy Word, we do this by serving God by serving others, we
do this by amending our lives so that we are clothed in the righteousness of
God’s salvation, in much the same way that early Christians were clothed in a
white garment once they came up out of the waters of baptism.
To accept
God’s invitation, but to do nothing to properly receive it, is to rely on what
has been called “Cheap Grace”. The two
aspects of our walk with God go together:
Invitation and preparation.
To these two
things we have been called. AMEN.
