28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

On this mountain the Lord of hosts
will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wines, 
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.  
On this mountain he will destroy 
the veil that veils all people, 
the web that is woven over all nations; 
he will destroy death forever. (Is 25:6-10)

The king said to him, 'My friend, how is it
that you came in here without a wedding garment?'
But he was reduced to silence. 
Then the king said to his attendants, 'Bind his hands and feet
and cast him into the darkness outside, 
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'
Many are invited, but few are chosen. (Mt 22:1-14)

Today Christ compares the kingdom of God to a wedding banquet. The image of the banquet is an important one to the New Testament, which is taken up, as we can see from the first reading, from the Old Testament.  Throughout the Gospels Christ refers to himself as the bridegroom and the Church as the bride.  This, in turn, is an echo of the prophet Hosea who describes Israel as the bride and the Lord God as the bridegroom. 

Marital imagery resonates with the whole of the faith.  The wedding rite describes the love of husband and wife as “an image of the love of Christ for his Church” and the love of married persons is the closest concrete image we have of the love of the Trinity: a love of persons that unites perfectly as one even as the persons joined retain their personal identities.  The Incarnation, God becoming man in Christ, is a kind of marriage of God and human nature, and through human nature, the entire natural order.  

And within the life of grace and conversion that is made possible by the Incarnation, Christ seeks to effect a marriage within each of us, to heal and restore the unity of body and soul within each of us, and by this healing and restoration to prepare us for communion with God and neighbor.  Thus the image of the wedding banquet has a personal significance as well.   And this healing prepares us for a participation in the larger banquet.  Once the integrity of our humanity has been restored by grace and the life of discipleship we are prepared for friendship.  Our personal restoration is a preparation for us to participate in the communal restoration of humanity. 

In our time and place humanity is more need of this than ever.  It seems to me, anyway, and I don’t claim to have any special expertise in recognizing cultural problems, nor do I claim to have any privileged experience that helps me reach this sort of conclusion better than others, but it seems to me that people today have a hard time arriving at the sort of personal integration and interpersonal fellowship that is signified by the wedding banquet.  

There are so many who have do not seem capable of being with others in friendship, and who yet are incapable of being alone.  I realize this is a sweeping generalization, and while I have no time to get into too many details of precisely what I mean, I will offer only that social media corresponds in a particularly close way to what I have in mind.  On social media one is not exactly alone, nor is one truly with other people.  And it is not coincidental, I submit, that we hear so much of the bullying that takes place there. 

While not itself evil – I confess to having a Facebook page! – the nature of social media provides a ideal home for the sort of malice that motivates bullying.  The vengeful are obsessed with the people they bully and malign, but are simultaneously incapable of living in peace with them.  Hostility isolates them from their victims, but in their isolation they are preoccupied with those they despise.  The feelings of superiority they enjoy as they attack their victims blind them to fact that they are exiling themselves to a kind of infernal middle ground where they have access to neither the peace of fellowship and nor of solitude.  For the proud, the envious, the wrathful, the lustful, the vain, every movement towards communion ends up frustrated and spoiled.  Every movement outward sends one back upon oneself.  Every movement inward is distracted by obsessions.  I think this is the significance of the man in today’s Gospel who before he is thrown from the wedding banquet is bound “hands and feet.”  

Most other forms of media follow this same pattern.  The sight of persons walking down the street wearing headphones is a familiar one to everyone.  And I don’t think anyone will deny that the seven deadly sins get a generous hearing in our popular culture.  When we break it all down into its component parts we end up with something pretty toxic: people isolating themselves under the cover of keeping company with their favorite artists, feeding eagerly on messages and sentiments that if internalized, make one even less fit for real human fellowship.  And when real human interaction becomes frustrating, where do people often turn for consolation and encouragement? – to the very entertainment that has hollowed their capacity for friendship in the first place. 

When we are baptized we are “clothed in Christ.”  This is the wedding garment that we are to keep clean.  This is the wedding garment that marks us as fit to participate in the wedding banquet.  By practicing the virtues of solitude – prayer, devotion, meditation – we are brought close to a Word that is very different from the one presented to us by the world around us.  It is a word that heals and restores us, that unbinds us, and renders us capable of communion and fellowship.  It prepares us to receive the Lord’s generosity and to share it with others, and seats us at his wedding banquet. 

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mt 20:1-6

"'My friend, I am not cheating you. 

Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 

Take what is yours and go. 

What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? 

Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?

Are you envious because I am generous?'

Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last."

I think everyone can relate to the frustration of the first group of men from today’s Gospel, who end up paid the same wage after having done more work.  It is a little more understandable when one keeps in mind the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the early.  Before Christianity, the Jews were the exclusive chosen people of God.  God had chosen them, established with them the covenants, sent to them the prophets, and they labored in the Lord’s vineyard as his chosen people for centuries, and this labor was often hard.  They knew the abuse and the disdain of the Gentiles as a result of their fidelity.  They bore, as the men in today’s parable complain, “the day’s burden and the heat.” 

At the dawn of Christianity, the Church’s proclamation was that Christ has established a new covenant to which all are called on the basis of faith and our shared humanity.  The Gentiles – the non-Jewish races and peoples who were now included among the people of God – who had worshipped false gods and undertaken all manner of impure practices, as far as the Jews were concerned, were now on an equal footing with the Jews, and, understandably, some Jews had questions about this.  What happened to their privilege?  What was their reward? 

           

St. Paul addresses this very same issue in his letter to the Romans, and we see how hard pressed he is to provide an account of how this elevation of the Gentiles and their inclusion in the elect of God occurs according to God’s plan, and that the Christian proclamation does not imply that God has suddenly changed his mind regarding his chosen people. 

St. Paul makes his case by pointing out that what God has called all of humanity to is an exalted state incomparably greater than anything enjoyed formerly by the Jews.  God in Christ has revealed himself and made possible a complete intimacy with all that is good, beautiful and true.  The Jews should regard this as more than compensating for whatever advantage they have lost relative to the Gentiles.  To resent the loss of their superiority with respect to the Gentiles can only be the result of failing to realize the full magnitude of the gift given to them by God that they did not deserve any more than the their Gentile brothers. 

To cling to their former advantage in this way is tantamount to resenting the gift God has given to humanity in Christ.  It is not hard to recognize the kinship of this resentful attitude with the bitter sentiment expressed by Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where he declares, “It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.”  God’s act of generosity, because it took an unexpected form and involved the loss of something formerly enjoyed, went unrecognized and elicited its very opposite, an attitude of resentment and spite.  The words of the landowner are telling in this regard: “Are you envious because I am generous?”

Of course, this Gospel has more to do with the situation of the early church.  It has everything to do with us and our reaction to the Lord’s generosity, which all too often exhibits the same symptoms of spite and envy.  What I have in mind is summarized beautifully by a fellow named Michel de Montaigne, who was an important French writer from the Renaissance.  He said, “If we want to be happy, that is easy enough.  The problem is that we want to be happier than others.  And this is hard, because others always seem happier than they really are.” 

I suspect that Montaigne was right about most of us.  We tend to imagine others are happier than they really are.  When we meet people, and stop to say hello, and they generally don’t discuss their problems.  We ask how they are doing and the response is usually positive.  We are aware only of their happiness even as we are fully aware of our own anxieties and difficulties.  This by itself wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t disturb our peace and diminish our own happiness, but all too often it does, and betrays the fact that the happiness of others makes us fear that we are being left out.  Or to use the language of Jesus’ parable, it makes us fear that God is asking us to labor more for less reward.  The way we often console ourselves in these instances is telling as well.  “Everybody has problems” we say and remind ourselves that the sufferings of others are almost certainly as great as our own.  As long as others are not as happy as they seem we can be at peace.  We might simply be happy at the sight of others happiness, but this is often not our way.  We might take another attitude; we might rejoice that God was generous to another, but so often what seems, at least, to be God’s generosity to others elicits our envy. 

There is an episode in Dante’s Paradiso, his sojourn through heaven, where he encounters a woman who is near the bottom of heaven.  She was not among the most holy of persons, so there are many who are higher up and enjoy a greater closeness to God.  Dante asks her if she wishes she were closer.  She says no and says that if she did, she would be guilty of envy, which is, as she says, “contrary to the law of this place.”  She is referring to the fact that in heaven is ruled by charity, the contrary of envy.  The distance between our frustration at the happiness of others and the freedom expressed in this woman’s words is the measure of our conversion. 

A friend of mine is a big C.S. Lewis fan, and whenever we have conversations about faith he will almost always invoke something said by Lewis, and it usually hits the nail right on the head.  In one story called The Horse and His Boy, a lion (of course) tells a boy “I am telling you your story, no one is told any story but their own.”  This expresses a beautiful idea that is hard to keep in mind.  God gives to each of us a story.  We share the story of Christ; we all have the same vocation to his grace and life, but our individual paths to that life will features obstacles, burdens and blessings that are different from those of others.  As we look at the lives of others it is easy to imagine that others are spared the hardships that we are asked to endure.  God has provided for us a path that is all our own, and we must remain confident that God has provided it to us out of his generosity.  

The stories of others often seem easier than our own and so more attractive, but it goes the other way as well.  My friend referred to that quote from C.S. Lewis within the context of a discussion concerning homosexual marriage.  Our culture presents romantic and physical intimacy as the highest of all goods, and so the suggestion that there are certain persons for whom this is not a possibility seems like it is too much of a burden.  It seems unfair that there would be those who are excluded from what others enjoy.  But on the other hand, there are those who deal with material deprivation that others do not face.  There are those who deal with diseases from which others spared.  There are those who grow up in a stable home that life does not grant to others.  We each have burdens to bear that others do not.  These are as much a part of our own story as our personal identities.  And as such they ought to be understood as an essential aspect of God’s generosity, even if we experience them as difficult or even at times bitter.