SERMON – PENTECOST XVII
October 9, 2011 (Feast of Blessed John Henry Newman)
+In the Name…
“But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment; and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless” (St. Matthew 22:11-12).
You’ve heard me say so many times that Jesus used Parables not only to use metaphor and allegory to present truth, but also to get the attention of his hearers in saying things that were shocking. He wanted to “shock” his audience in what they heard Him say in order to take them to a new place of spiritual understanding and reality. This morning’s Parable, known as the “Parable of the Wedding Feast.” certainly does that to us – doesn’t it?
Jesus uses the image of matrimony (the invitation to a marriage feast) because God invites all men and women of all times and places into a life-long union of mutual love and commitment with Him – a covenant of eternal and unbroken love and fidelity that He proposes, and for which He yearns for us to accept – a covenant established full and finally by the blood of His Son on the Cross.
Jesus did say, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (St. John 3:16-17).
Jesus illustrates this action of love by God through Himself as the Son Who was sent to the world in the invitation He makes when the King in the Parable (who represents God the Father) tells his servants to call those who were invited to the marriage feast. This invitation is to the children of Israel to come to new relationship with God the Father through His Incarnate Son. In the Old Testament, we hear God speaking through the prophet Hosea as a man seeking a wife: “…I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (2:19-20).
We’re told in the Parable that the King’s servants, who were sent to make the invitation of the King to his son’s marriage feast, were rebuffed. We’re told, “…they[those invited] would not come.” The King tries again through his servants to impress the urgency of accepting this gracious invitation. The invitees are told, “…everything is ready; come to the marriage feast.”
We’re then told: “But they made light of it and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.” This symbolizes the children of Israel’s refusal to come to what is being offered; and the fate of many a prophet who were killed by those who rejected the message and invitation of God.
We’re told that the King becomes very angry and destroys them for their refusal. Here is an example of the shocking and harsh tone and emphasis that Jesus often makes in the Parables. His message here is that refusing God’s will and revelation has severe consequences now and for eternity. But we know that God wills all men to be saved, and that contrition and repentance is the remedy to disobedience and the refusal to accept what God gives.
The King then says, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy” – meaning that their refusal of the invitation forfeited their relationship to God, and had caused a serious separation between themselves and God. No one is worthy of God’s love and mercy (we can’t earn it; it is a gift of grace), but if we squander our state of unworthiness in rejecting God, we make ourselves unworthy. We’ve separated ourselves from the God who pursues us.
The King’s servants are then sent out into the thoroughfares to gather all whom they could find, “both bad and good; so that the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
This symbolizes how the Gospel of Jesus Christ was extended beyond the children of Israel to the Gentiles, to (as the Prayer Book puts it) “all sorts and conditions of men.”
But then there’s a final twist in the story, the King, as he views all the assembled guests, “saw there a man who had no wedding garment, and challenged this guest as to why this was so. The man was speechless. We then hear the King say to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”
God does not look on the outward appearance of man. We were taught this when Samuel was sent to Jesse to choose for God a king to replace Saul. When Samuel looked upon Eliab and was pleased with his appearance, the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance, or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (I Samuel 16:7).
It was not about improper clothes and physical appearance that angered the King when he saw the man without a wedding garment. The “garment” is symbolic of one’s right relationship of gratitude and humility before the Lord who calls us to and into new things. In the Book of Revelation, we read that at the marriage supper of the Lamb the Bride (the Church) is “clothed with fine linen, bright and pure – for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints”(19:8). The man, who was seen without a wedding garment by the King, was seen as a man who took for granted his invitation to the wedding feast, to something that had been graciously extended to him, and was there in a state of being the same way he was before he was invited. He wasn’t there in a spirit of repentance.
The “wedding garment” in the life of the Church refers to our being clothed with new life at Baptism – being born again of water and the Spirit. The traditional white Christening gown symbolizes the new life in the Spirit given. But new life given by God needs to be received, just as invitations to new opportunities need to be received with gratitude and a willingness to give in return.
Jesus ends the Parable in saying, “For many are called, but few are chosen” – meaning that God calls us to something, and has a destiny for each and every one for our good and for His glory; but we can choose to ignore the call and create our own destiny, which removes us from the gracious choosing of us by God – wherein is found Life, that is Life indeed. We can go our own way, while God hungers for us to walk according to His way. Father John Bartunek in his book, The Better Part, states: “God’s plans seem to interrupt our own, and we forget that ours have no meaning except inside of his” (p. 255).
This doesn’t necessarily occur through an open, calculated, and determined act of rebellion on our part, but simply by our refusal to acknowledge that we are not own. We are and everything we have is owned by God. The one and only thing that we can claim as our own, are our sins! And once we realize that they are ours, we need to turn away from them by putting them at the foot of the Cross.
Today is the Feast Day of Blessed John Henry Newman, because it was on October 9, 1845, that he was received into the Catholic Church from the Church of England. He had made his journey home.
In one of his parochial sermons preached as the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford on the Parable before us today, he said:
“Many there are who, without thus rising against the will of God, yet will not admit that it their duty to serve Him under that dispensation, whatever it is, to which He has chosen to subject them, that they are accountable for what they do, and must bring forth from within, by the power of their will, what may duly respond to the circumstances in which they stand. Accordingly, they deliberately and on principle suffer themselves to be borne down the stream of life passively, by whatever happens to them.” Newman rails against this for the sake of God’s intent for man. He continues:
“I have noticed these instances of want of resignation, not for their own sake, but in order to illustrate, by the contrast, that law of birth, of which I am speaking…that we are brought, without our consent of being asked, into a certain state of things, into a life of suffering, and of moral discipline; and are imperatively required to obey God under it, as if we had brought ourselves into it, on the pain of fearful consequences, if we do not.”
Newman is reiterating the truth of the Gospel through the Parable before us that we are to respond to what calls us to do, what He invites us to and to do; and our lives are to consistently be about daily responding to His grace, that we become all He wants us to become. As the US Army once said in their recruitment advertisements, “Be all you can be!”
Our task in this Newman Fellowship, this new gathering of old and dear friends in Christ, who in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (as we heard today) we claim in thanksgiving as “a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat,” which we find in a corporate life of Word, Sacrament, prayer, and fellowship in the Church Catholic, which we are finding in a new way in this Fellowship- a Fellowship in Christ to which we know God will bring many others in His time, is to keep our minds and hearts on what they need to kept upon.
We have heard from St. Paul what our spiritual disposition, intention, and focus is to be:
“Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” He then adds: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:6-9).
+In the Name…
Home Sermons