TWENTY-EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME A

[cappie]

The parable for today as well as the one that precedes it fit with our understanding of salvation history. God comes first through the prophets and then through Jesus, and some people reject both.

In today’s Gospel despite the offers of the King, many choose not to attend the wedding banquet, which is the end-times feast Isaiah promises in our Old Testament  Reading.

In the Gospel, after the rejection by the original invitees, the king gives an invitation, which is so like Jesus. He says, “ go to the crossroads in the town and invite everyone you can find to the wedding” Everyone is invited into God’s kingdom, even those who were previously outcasts. All is well until the king bumps into an improperly attired guest and remarks, “ How did you get in here, my friend, without a wedding garment?” The wrongly dressed guest could have answered, Your servants practically dragged me in off the street. The man gives no reply.

Then we get the ending that makes us wonder where Jesus is coming from. The king tells his servants, “ Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”

We look again and see the moment everything changed. Jesus said, “ So these servants went out on to the roads and collected together everyone they could find, bad and good alike; and the wedding hall was filled with guests..

The parable of the Kingdom of Heaven from today’s reading is a picture of the coming judgment. If we focus on the weeping and gnashing of teeth, we miss the grace of this parable. The king gives a free invitation to the wedding banquet. No one has to earn his or her seat at the table. Both the good and the bad are encouraged to come into the feast.

Now, guests to a wedding feast were not expected to provide their own attire. They would be given robes on entering the banquet hall. The invitation was open. The feast was an unearned gift, and so was the necessary clothing. For the first Christians, the parallel was baptism. The early church placed robes on those coming out of the waters of baptism. The white robes were an outward sign of the inward grace of being clothed in Christ. Candidates for baptism were washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb as Jesus’ righteousness covered their sins.

As the wedding banquet is the judgment at the end of time, the robe expected of the guests was this baptismal robe. The grace is that the guests, both good and bad, did not have to provide the robe. The king wants the man to explain how he is improperly attired after having been offered the garment needed for the feast. He was given the clothing for the Kingdom of Heaven and refused to wear it.

It wouldn’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ teachings to decide that the point of the story is that we already have our baptismal robes and therefore can afford to be smug. No guest to the wedding banquet should enjoy seeing others who were invited failing to join the feast.

 

The cost of the free gift of grace is too high for us to feel self-righteous and to show no concern for others.

The gift is to see that even after having his gracious invitation rudely rejected, the king continues to invite others to the banquet. The feast is not reserved for the perfect, but for those willing to be perfected by the generous offer of the host to cover our imperfections with his own robes of righteousness. Far from making us arrogant, this is cause to be humble, knowing that we neither deserved nor earned our invitation.

But as the last line, “Many are called, but few are chosen” hangs in the air, we also see that those who have been robed in Christ are to live into that new life of grace. Having been perfected in Christ does not give us license to continue unchanged. We are to respond to God’s call by conforming our lives ever more closely to Jesus’ life.

 To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you just have to receive the gift freely offered and then live into the life to which God has called us.

 

[BarbTherese]

7 hours ago, cappie said:

It wouldn’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ teachings to decide that the point of the story is that we already have our baptismal robes and therefore can afford to be smug. No guest to the wedding banquet should enjoy seeing others who were invited failing to join the feast.

I also think of the wedding robe as Sanctifying Grace necessary to enter Heaven.

Thank you again, cappie.