Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the parable which we have just heard our Lord telling the Chef Priests and the Elders is troublesome; not merely problematic or difficult to interpret, but disturbing even when its curious apparent inconsistencies are taken into account.
Let me briefly give you an account of those elements which seem difficult to explain:
First, when the king sends his servants to summon those who had already been invited to come to the feast as it was ready, they did not simply refuse to come; nor did they either ignore the messengers or send back excuses. They were not interested, says our Lord. So why, then, do they seize the messengers, maltreat them and kill them?
Then the king in his wrath despatches an army and puts the ungrateful citizens who had behaved so wickedly to death, and sends his servants to invite a completely new crowd of people: everyone the servants find in all sorts of unprepossessing places, the sort of people who lurk on street corners, and bad folk no less than good. Indeed, it is implicit from the story that it is a matter of complete indifference to the king whether those invited now are bad or good; only that his banquet shall be filled.
We are not told what happens to this motley crew when they arrive, but then all of a sudden the king turns up and begins inspecting everyone at his banquet. Why is it significant that one has no wedding garment? We weren’t even told that wedding garments were required vesture! Is it meant to come to us as a horrible shock (let alone to the man without a garment) to learn only now that he should have had a garment?
Now of course this is only speculation, but I do begin to wonder if our Lord was basing this account on something we will all find familiar. I wonder if you have ever dreamt, perhaps, that you find yourself in the middle of a great event. You don’t know how you got there, but you become aware that you are about to be presented to somebody terribly important, like the Queen, and suddenly you find to your horror that you are still wearing your pyjamas, and there is neither a place nor time to change, nor are the smart clothes you need actually available to you anyway.
And then there is the fact, again rather like what happens in the world of dreams, that there is only one man without a wedding garment. Why only one among all that curious crowd? And the parable goes on in this strange manner: as we saw, the king has arrived and seen this one man without something all the others, good and bad alike, remember, are wearing. He speaks to this man, and note that his question is not harsh: ‘my friend’, he says reassuringly, ‘my friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ Why then is the man silent? What is the significance of this? And why then does the king react so violently? ‘Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!’
Finally, there is one more mystery still to mention: what exactly is the link between all this and our Lord’s summary words: ‘many are called but few are chosen’? For at the end of the parable it seemed to be the other way about: the many were in the banquet, presumably with their wedding garments, and the one man, rather than representing the ‘chosen few’ of the final statement, is exactly the opposite, he is the condemned man.
Well, that is a brief summary of the questions that this parable raises: now to try and resolve them. First, the parables are not always allegories – they do not always have a strict correspondence between the image and the reality. There are those that do, like the parable of the Sower and the parable of the harvest as an image of the last Judgment. But this one is not like those. It seems that in this one our Lord is aiming to evoke certain reactions in His hearers. As with the parable of the wicked tenants we heard last week, this one was told to the Chief Priests, and would have been understood by them to mean that they were the ones who refused the king’s invitation and maltreated his servants, that is the prophets, even to the point of killing them.
Just as the wicked tenants were brought to a wretched end, and the vineyard leased to new tenants, so here the original invitees prove themselves unworthy of the invitation and are replaced by others, by no means so distinguished in rank. That much will have been clear to the Chief Priests. But what of what follows? Here the strangeness increases. Here it seems that our Lord is extending the meaning further than simply to teach the Chief Priests about their punishment for rejecting God’s messengers.
Now He turns to consider those who take the place of the original invitees. The many are all chosen by God, and they comprise good and bad alike. In this way the parable begins to resemble some of the other parables of the kingdom, such as the dragnet which brings in fish of every kind; or the parable of the wheat and the tares, where both good and bad grow alongside each other within the same field until the day of the harvest, when they will finally be divided up; or like the sheep and the goats of the other familiar parable, who will only be sorted and set apart from each other at the judgement and not any sooner.
All these images are meant both as a reassurance and as a warning. They reassure us that God does not give up on anyone in this lifetime, even the wicked are not lost yet, and that includes all of us who constantly need repentance and absolution. But these parables also warn us that God’s patience, though infinite in generosity, is not without certain limits.
What, then might such limits be? Here I think our man without a wedding garment comes into the picture. The wedding garment, as St Augustine explains, is not anything that any person, good or bad, might have. So for him the wedding garment is not a sacrament, not even the one which this garment most easily suggests, baptism – in which the newly-baptised are clothed in a white garment signifying their new status as children of God cleansed from sin. The man without a wedding garment is not an unbaptised man, says Augustine, but rather one who lacks what only those who are made good have: love or charity. If there is one man without a wedding garment, then of course it follows that everyone else has one? If he is condemned, then it must be for something of which he is culpable. Take, for example, the characters in another parable: the wise and foolish virgins. For in that parable it is clear that the foolish virgins who have no oil, ought to have acquired some while they had the chance, and failed to do so. Here the man without a garment ought to have acquired it and failed to do so. Perhaps he had assumed that simply by virtue of having been brought into the banquet, he had no need to justify his presence there. So too, the virgins had all known they needed oil for their lamps, but only the wise ones had made sure to acquire it before it was too late.
Being too late and being culpable is at the root of the predicament of the man without a wedding garment. We should not feel sorry for him if we see him in the same light as the foolish virgins. This is also the reason why he says nothing, when asked to justify himself. He has no answer. He has failed to prepare as the others had done. The king condemns him out of his own mouth, or at least out of his inability to explain himself.
So all this applies to all of us. We should never assume that just because we have been invited to the banquet of the Lamb of God, that we will take part in it. We also need to exercise ourselves to acquire the garment of charity. God alone knows how much we do to work at this in our hearts. It is on this that we will be judged, not on whether we have been called, but whether we have grown in charity. And for this, too, the parable has a message. ‘Few are chosen’, says our Lord. ‘Strive to enter by the narrow gate’, He says in another parable, because many will seek to enter and will not be able.’ And remember that Our Lord said those very words in answer to a question: ‘will many be saved?’
As always, our Lord refuses to say who will and who will not be saved, but on several occasions He leaves us in no doubt that it is deeply unwise to assume that any particular person will be saved, including our own selves. Now St Peter undoubtedly heard these parables from our Lord’s own mouth, and also His explanations in private like that of the parable of the Sower, and in his first epistle he says: ‘if judgement begins with us, what will be the end of those who do not obey the Gospel of God? And ‘if the righteous man is scarcely saved, where will the impious and sinner appear?’
Even so, this is meant not to make us despair, but to keep us sober and vigilant. Salvation is not a lottery which only one or a few persons can win by mere chance. Our Lord’s teaching is quite different. We all contribute to our salvation, or as St Paul puts it in the Letter to the Philippians, ‘we must work out our salvation in fear and trembling’. Now that letter, from which we heard an extract as our second reading just now, is actually a joyful, positive and hopeful one throughout. God will certainly supply all our needs, but we must constantly and repeatedly ask Him for them in prayer and humility. We cannot be complacent, but neither should we despondent. We trust that God longs for us to be saved and will do all in His power to help us, but we must do all in our power to cooperate with Him, and to unite ourselves with Christ so as to work out what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, not only for our own sakes, but also to assist in the work of salvation of so many who do not take account of this teaching. God wants to save them as well. May our sacrifices of love be a furnace of charity to awaken their hearts and warm them with the love of God, and the desire to acquire the garments of salvation necessary to enjoy the everlasting heavenly wedding feast.
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