All we’re about this morning at Mass, set within the tumult of the world including Israel-Palestine, is preparation for the end of all things when God will be everything to everyone at his wedding banquet. Blessed are those who are called to his supper!
Out of the puzzle of today’s Gospel we can distil such joy and hope!
Matthew 22 IS a puzzle. You need bible scholarship to make sense of it. Things like invited guests killing servants who bring their invitations, a man hauled unexpectedly from the streets expected to have a wedding garment! Fortunately we have four Gospels we can look at side by side, as well as knowledge of the circumstances in which St Matthew wrote his edition, especially the Jewish War with Rome that ended with the Jerusalem’s destruction in 70AD. If you look at the parallel version in Luke Chapter 14 you see a more life-like parable of people making excuses after being invited to a great dinner. Matthew, writing primarily for Jews who’d rejected and put to death Christian evangelists, shades Our Lord’s original story with an allegory that presents Jerusalem’s loss as judging their rejection of Christ. That expansion explains the un-Jesus-like sound of today’s Gospel. As for the man without a wedding garment, it's a separate parable about the need to be ready for the Lord’s invitations Matthew’s stitched onto the banquet parable. Also, whereas Luke’s banquet is given by a private person Matthew’s is given by a king for his son, the element I’m picking up on, and that’s an interpretation of Jesus’s original parable in the light of his death and resurrection.
Like St Matthew we read the teaching of Jesus Christ in the light of what followed. Most religions centre on their founder’s teaching but Christianity has a different focus.
The Buddha gave his teaching but Christ gave his life as well. When you enter St John’s you see no Buddha but a Crucifix above an altar. Here Sunday by Sunday, day by day we recall Christ’s parables whilst going on to plead his sacrificial gift revealed upon the Cross. I often point out in sermons here the permanent sermon in our two small west windows of the Cross and the altar. They explain that St John’s was built for the pleading of Christ’s sacrifice by a priest with bread and wine upon this altar.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son given on Calvary who, by the Holy Spirit, is gathering through history the scattered children of God to his banquet. History is about the purification of God’s children in anticipation of full union with the Blessed Trinity when we shall see God as he is and become like him. In the gift of the eucharist we eat and drink of Christ veiled in the sacrament to anticipate his unveiling when God will be all in all.
In his book Corpus Christi (show) Anglican theologian Eric Mascall writes ‘there is only one Mass, offered by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the Last Supper, on Calvary and in heaven… ultimately we do not celebrate masses or attend mass; we celebrate mass and attend mass. For every earthly mass is simply the Church’s participation in the one heavenly Mass… the Eucharist makes accessible to us (human beings), at our different points of space and moments of time, the one extra-spatial and supra-temporal redemptive activity of Christ, ‘who ever lives to make intercession for us’.
As we sing in Bourne’s great hymn: ‘Paschal Lamb, thine Offering finished once for all when thou wast slain, in its fullness undiminished shall for evermore remain, cleansing souls from every stain’. Sacrifice is about love and not death, Christ’s once for all death is part of his perpetual love offering seen at Mass. As Thomas Aquinas wrote 900 years in a lovely summary of the meaning of the eucharist: ‘O sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace and we receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours’.
My family have been to the cinema in Burgess Hill a time or two over our 22 years living in the area as its the nearest one to us. Do you know those clips we see in the cinema before the main film to give us a preview of forthcoming attractions? What we’re about this morning is like a cinema trailer - the Eucharistic meal is a forward looking taster of the full thing, the heavenly banquet no less, ‘a pledge of the glory that is to be ours’.
‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to his supper’ - in this meal we see the sacrificial gift of Jesus opening heaven to us under the veil of bread and wine. We eat and drink expressing our hope and our joy, in anticipation of heaven which scripture and sacrament depict as a supper.
The whole of history is headed towards this banquet at which Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride. And, yes, we will indeed need garments for the wedding, the garments of humility and confidence in God, both qualities to be expressed in the beautiful and challenging prayer we shall make in a minute or two: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed’.
Picture from Shanghai Museum visited 2017.
