Ancient Church

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a marriage feast.” This is a common enough image in the Scriptures. We find it in several places, and hear it on more than one occasion during the year. While we normally think of a wedding as a joyous occasion, however, when we see it in the Gospels it is almost always accompanied by sobering lessons. This is the dilemma we see in today’s gospel. Our Saviour describes for us a joyful setting, and then injects elements of doubt, uncertainty and even fear. Jesus’ parable has some challenging aspects to it, important meanings that we need to understand, and to think about.

The image of the wedding feast is an important one for the Church. Generally speaking, it refers to the bond, to the union of Christ and his Church. As members of the Church, we are guests at the feast. By virtue of our baptism and chrismation, we have become members of the family of God or, as St. John the Evangelist says, we have become the children of God. We are family members come to celebrate a great event. In a sense, Liturgy every Sunday is a feast, as we come to the Lord’s table and partake of what He has prepared for us. In a broader sense, the wedding feast continues for all time, and in heaven itself. There, we will, as the prayer of Thanksgiving after communion says, “attain to the everlasting rest, where the voice of those who feast is unceasing, and the gladness of those who behold the goodness of Thy countenance is unending”. Whether here or in heaven, the feast is an occasion of joy and celebration, a mark of the enormous love which God has for all of His children.

Yet we also know that simply being within the Church does not guarantee our salvation. We do not belong to the “once saved, always saved” camp. St. Gregory the Great reminds us that both good and bad are mixed together in the Church, and we see the truth of that in our own times. The Church has men and women of amazing sanctity, and it has others – lay people, clergy, even occasional bishops – who harbor within themselves soul destroying passions.

Now, of course, none of us is immune from the passions; from greed or lust or anger. Most of us are between the two extremes of good and evil. If we are serious about our faith, we are striving to work out our salvation. We consciously struggle with the sins and temptations in our life. We fervently seek to root the passions out of our soul, through prayer, through fasting, through confession, and through partaking of communion. As our life continues, we gradually shed more and more of these blemishes of our spirit, as we draw ever closer to God. It is that cleansing, that conscious effort to follow the Lord, that creates our wedding garment, the one that we wear to the feast.

You see, when Jesus tells us that the man was confronted for not wearing a wedding garment, it is not clothing He is talking about. As long as we dress modestly and with an eye toward honoring the sanctity of the Church, what we wear is unimportant. This is no beauty pageant!

But our spiritual garment – our wedding garment – is of the utmost importance. It is woven of the virtues we have cultivated, and of the love we have expressed. The Church Fathers tell us that our wedding garment is woven on a divine loom, from the twin strands of love of God and love of neighbor. It is what tells the world that we are indeed Orthodox Christians. Not in a showy fashion, where we proudly speak of how much we fast or pray or read the Fathers. Nor is our garment apparent if we speak critically of other Orthodox Christians, and attack them for some presumed failure in praxis or what we view as faulty tradition. This is self-justification, it is puffed up pride. St. Paul spoke to his own spiritual children, saying this:

“Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as some others, epistles of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you? You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men…written not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.”

Or listen to Jesus, speaking at the Sermon on the Mount:

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.”

Do you see? Coldness and pride in our hearts separates us from God. We must have love for each other, love for those who visit us in our homes and in our parish, love for those who we meet in the byways of life. If we secretly cherish pride or resentment, we do not show the love of Christ. Instead, we show the disdain of the devil. That is the garment of the Pharisee, and there is no love in it.

In the parable, we are told that the man not wearing such a garment, utterly unable to defend himself, is cast into the outer darkness. What is the outer darkness? It is separation from God. In the parable, where the king represents God himself, we see the man bound hand and foot and consigned to the darkness. It is a spiritual reality that if we nurture our resentment or pride we may find ourselves cast into the eternal darkness, separated from the light and the warmth, from the joy of the feast. The soul is bound, for it is no longer able to help itself, to show charity or love. And while that is a judgment of God, it is one we have authored ourselves. We choose to love or to hate. To blame or to forgive. To grasp or to give. We have been admitted into the kingdom. If, like the man in today’s parable, we find that we have been ejected from it, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

That is why we are told that many are called, but few are chosen. The truth is that we are all called. It is not a question of whether God wants us. He wants all of us to be saved. Rather, it is a question of whether or not we want God. Those who are chosen are those who wish to be chosen. While we cannot save ourselves, we must, in the first instance, make up our mind to pursue God. Our life, indeed, our entire being, must ceaselessly focus on the task we have begun, in cooperation with God Himself, of weaving our wedding garment. We cannot let ourselves be unprepared for the great wedding feast that we will all attend.