Readings (Track 2)
Not many sermons start with “Didn’t we just hear that?”, but this one does. Last week we heard Jesus’ parable about the vineyard, and, with a couple minor adjustments, it sounds awfully like the parable of the king’s wedding feast that we just heard. Is Matthew padding his text? Or, put more charitably, what’s different? Perhaps two things.
First, the image of the wedding feast. Last week’s vineyard parable concerned the fruit that the tenants were to give to the vineyard owner. Here the invitees don’t need to give anything, simply, apparently, to show up. A wedding feast catered by the king. Sounds like it takes a special kind of…something to pass up that invitation. Happily, the Lectionary has paired our Gospel reading with Isaiah’s vision of the end-time feast (“a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, / of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear”). Each of our Eucharists is also an anticipation of that feast, but with important commonalities: everyone is welcome; there’s room for everyone; there’s enough for everyone. And this, perhaps, is one thing Jesus/Matthew wants us to notice. The invitees’ refusal is a head-scratcher, rather like the decision of our original parents to eat from that tree. Why blow off that generosity?
Second (What’s different?), that last paragraph about the fellow without the wedding garment. Looks like Jesus/Matthew wants us to understand that both the original invitees and those finally gathered had important choices to make. Hearing last week’s vineyard parable, one might assume that if one were in “a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (21:42), one could go on auto-pilot. Not so, warns this parable. Having the wedding garment is important.
The wedding garment. Matthew assumed that its meaning was self-evident. Two thousand or so years later, not so much. Here’s what we do know.
In the epistles (mostly written prior to Matthew) we hear exhortations to take off and put on clothing:
“Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom 13:12b[1])
“You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:22-24[2]).
“Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” (Col 3:9-10[3])
These texts are generally taken to refer to baptism, as is explicit in a text from Galatians: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal 3:27). A complete change of clothes: that would make the liturgy a bit more complicated. But these texts are not referring simply to baptism but to the ongoing choices the baptized are making after baptism.
So Matthew may be playing off this image. Not having a wedding garment: not having continued to put off the old and put on the new after one’s baptism.
Or, Matthew may be taking the wedding garment as a stand-in for the fruit he’s been highlighting throughout his Gospel:
“Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (3:8). (John to the Pharisees and Sadducees)
“You will know them by their fruits” (7:16). (Jesus on false prophets)
And, a few verses later:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (7:21).
In other words, the wedding garment as the fruit corresponding to saying “Lord, Lord.” And clearly, whether Matthew is playing off the taking off and putting on of clothing in baptism or the fruit metaphor within his own Gospel, it comes to pretty much the same thing. Pre- or post-baptism, we continue to have choices to make, and those choices matter.
Now, as it happens, our Gospel readings have been accompanied by readings from Philippians, where Paul from the start of the letter has been pursuing a parallel agenda: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (2:5). We heard him describe what that meant two Sundays ago: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Phi 2:3-4).
That’s hard, chiefly because having the same mind that was in Christ Jesus depends on experiencing God as generous. That was Jesus’ experience, and it’s pretty much the bottom line of the Sermon on the Mount. Not simply the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, but that “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (7:12a) is itself grounded on the previous verse: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
And that, in turn, raises the other question that drives this sermon: why do most of us (the preacher included) have such difficulty experiencing God as generous? Such difficulty putting our weight on (today’s) Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd; / I shall not be in want.”)? And once asked, the question pretty much answers itself: while we sing “This is my Father’s world,” most of the time we don’t experience this world as generous. The seven deadly sins—greed comes particularly to mind—have so distorted God’s good creation that generosity is often in short supply and that—here’s the supremely evil part—we have trouble experiencing even God as generous.
So we’re stuck, with only fear as a motivation to patch together some sort of minimally acceptable wedding garment? No. Recall what we’ve been hearing in Philippians. “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:12b-13). That “to will and to work” suggests equal attention to the healing of our imaginations, of our perceptions. I suspect that Jesus’ healings of blindness are disproportionately prominent in the Gospels because sight is so powerful a metaphor for our experience, our construal, of the world. What we see (or don’t see) pretty much determines what we do.
Second, all Paul’s attention to the quality of parish life, even, in today’s reading, to particular relationships: “I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.” In a world that takes not looking to one’s own interests as the fast track to ending up as road kill, Paul envisions the parish as being the place where God’s generosity can predictably be experienced in the way parishioners generously treat each other. That’s one reason why we’re called the Body of Christ.
God knows, visions of God’s generosity can get us wondering, but usually can’t do much more. The rewiring of our grey matter that we ask for every time we take the Body and Blood, that can do somewhat more. The generosity that we receive from and—hopefully—return to fellow parishioners, that can do somewhat more. And slowly—please God—God’s generosity becomes something we can put our weight on and so begin to mirror that mind of Christ.
[1] Cf. Dunn Romans 9-16 p.793.
[2] Cf MacDonald Colossians Ephesians p.304.
[3] Cf. MacDonald Colossians Ephesians p.136.
