In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading from St. Matthew is the parable of the wedding feast. And the juxtaposition of today’s readings – from Matthew, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and from the Prophet Isaiah – invite us into the in-between time of the Kingdom of God, the borderland between time and eternity. In short, they invite us into the divine society which inhabits in a preliminary way the peace of God, and which proclaims that peace by proclaiming its author and instrument, Jesus Christ and him crucified.
The reading from the prophet Isaiah is one of my favorites. Isaiah, making himself the mouthpiece of God, announces the coming age of the Messiah, and the work that God will do through the instrumentality of the Messiah. After speaking of judgment – of God’s casting down the citadels of earthly power and self-assertion – Isaiah speaks of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless. The prophecy builds to a beautiful, apocalyptic crescendo, in which Isaiah speaks of what God will accomplish on mount Zion for all people: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.”
Isaiah is speaking of Jesus and his cross, the means of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless, and his provision for his people – the instrument of his victory over death forever, and the gift of immortality for all who desire it. And of course he speaks of a feast, of good wine and rich food. This no doubt is why this prophecy has been placed alongside today’s Gospel reading in our lectionary.
And there is no question that we, as Christians, are invited to read Isaiah in this way: of speaking of the SAME feast of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel reading, the feast which we learn is nothing less than the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Kingdom of heaven itself, into which many indeed are invited – the many, that is, for whom Christ died (Matt. 26.28), and to whom the King has sent his servants, saying “invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.” “So the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
There are two main questions to be asked about this imagery: why a wedding? and why a feast?
When the Pharisees asked Jesus about marriage, he quoted the book of Genesis: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19.4ff & Gen. 2). As with almost everything the Lord says, this teaching, while it seems to be about one thing, is really about another. It seems to be about marriage, and in a sense it is: the Lord is situating the vocation to marriage within the context of the differentiation and complimentarily God himself instituted between men and women at the beginning. But he is really saying something about himself: that he is the Bridegroom – the Son who left his Father (God) and Mother (Mary) and cleaved to a Bride: our human nature. God has joined his own nature and ours, the divine and the human, in the person of Jesus. The two have become one flesh. And what God has joined together, no one shall put asunder, for all eternity. As St. Gregory the Great said, “God the Father made a marriage feast for God the Son, when He joined Him to human nature in the womb of the Virgin.” And everything the Church teaches about the sacramental form of life in “Christian marriage”, including the Church’s moral teaching about human sexuality, is an outgrowth of the truth of what God has done in this most real of conjugal unions: the Incarnation of the Word.
It is a marriage FEAST because, by the Incarnation, God FEEDS US with the “one flesh” of Jesus. It was this union that was consummated on the cross (“consummatum est” – Jn. 19.30), and at every mass we call this “our Passover”, saying “therefore let us keep the feast, alleluia!” because only God can satisfy our hunger and slake our thirst – and he does this with the Body and Blood of his Son, which we are enjoined not merely to behold, but to take and eat.
The love of God in Jesus Christ – the love that overflowed first in the mystery of creation, and which reached a crescendo on Calvary and the renewal of all things – this love, God’s own love, is the form of life we inhabit in our rediscovery of ourselves, as beloved disciples (Jn. 13.23), in the bosom of the Body of Christ: loving him and keeping his commandments – as St. Paul says: “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13).
This form of life, the life of divine love, is the “wedding garment” (cf. Origen and Gregory the Great) Jesus speaks of in today’s parable, the dress code of the feast. For without LOVE, no one can recognize the voice of the Beloved – without love, no one can EXPERIENCE the love of God as anything but judgment and exclusion, because love must be mutual if it is not to become bitterness and resentment.
But when we put on love then we find ourselves nourished by God. We find our home in him, and the peace of God that transcends circumstance. This is “the secret” Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle reading: “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” When we put on the love of God in Christ, as a garment, when we love and obey the Bridegroom of our souls, we find the satisfaction of our most fundamental desire. The Desire from which every desire springs, and of which every desire is a pale reflection. Finding the love of God in Jesus Christ therefore means having no anxiety about anything, but living in peace and contentment – as Paul says – knowing how to be abased and how to abound… it means being enabled to do “all things in him who strengthens me.”
This is what it means to live in the borderland between time and eternity: to draw sustenance from the eternal God for life in the temporal world. It means, as Paul says, “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving” letting your requests to be made known to God. And it means listening, really listening, with hope and expectation and OBEDIENCE to Jesus when he commands us to be of good cheer, to be at peace in every circumstance, because he has overcome the world (Jn. 16.33).
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading from St. Matthew is the parable of the wedding feast. And the juxtaposition of today’s readings – from Matthew, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and from the Prophet Isaiah – invite us into the in-between time of the Kingdom of God, the borderland between time and eternity. In short, they invite us into the divine society which inhabits in a preliminary way the peace of God, and which proclaims that peace by proclaiming its author and instrument, Jesus Christ and him crucified.
The reading from the prophet Isaiah is one of my favorites. Isaiah, making himself the mouthpiece of God, announces the coming age of the Messiah, and the work that God will do through the instrumentality of the Messiah. After speaking of judgment – of God’s casting down the citadels of earthly power and self-assertion – Isaiah speaks of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless. The prophecy builds to a beautiful, apocalyptic crescendo, in which Isaiah speaks of what God will accomplish on mount Zion for all people: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.”
Isaiah is speaking of Jesus and his cross, the means of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless, and his provision for his people – the instrument of his victory over death forever, and the gift of immortality for all who desire it. And of course he speaks of a feast, of good wine and rich food. This no doubt is why this prophecy has been placed alongside today’s Gospel reading in our lectionary.
And there is no question that we, as Christians, are invited to read Isaiah in this way: of speaking of the SAME feast of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel reading, the feast which we learn is nothing less than the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Kingdom of heaven itself, into which many indeed are invited – the many, that is, for whom Christ died (Matt. 26.28), and to whom the King has sent his servants, saying “invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.” “So the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
There are two main questions to be asked about this imagery: why a wedding? and why a feast?
When the Pharisees asked Jesus about marriage, he quoted the book of Genesis: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19.4ff & Gen. 2). As with almost everything the Lord says, this teaching, while it seems to be about one thing, is really about another. It seems to be about marriage, and in a sense it is: the Lord is situating the vocation to marriage within the context of the differentiation and complimentarily God himself instituted between men and women at the beginning. But he is really saying something about himself: that he is the Bridegroom – the Son who left his Father (God) and Mother (Mary) and cleaved to a Bride: our human nature. God has joined his own nature and ours, the divine and the human, in the person of Jesus. The two have become one flesh. And what God has joined together, no one shall put asunder, for all eternity. As St. Gregory the Great said, “God the Father made a marriage feast for God the Son, when He joined Him to human nature in the womb of the Virgin.” And everything the Church teaches about the sacramental form of life in “Christian marriage”, including the Church’s moral teaching about human sexuality, is an outgrowth of the truth of what God has done in this most real of conjugal unions: the Incarnation of the Word.
It is a marriage FEAST because, by the Incarnation, God FEEDS US with the “one flesh” of Jesus. It was this union that was consummated on the cross (“consummatum est” – Jn. 19.30), and at every mass we call this “our Passover”, saying “therefore let us keep the feast, alleluia!” because only God can satisfy our hunger and slake our thirst – and he does this with the Body and Blood of his Son, which we are enjoined not merely to behold, but to take and eat.
The love of God in Jesus Christ – the love that overflowed first in the mystery of creation, and which reached a crescendo on Calvary and the renewal of all things – this love, God’s own love, is the form of life we inhabit in our rediscovery of ourselves, as beloved disciples (Jn. 13.23), in the bosom of the Body of Christ: loving him and keeping his commandments – as St. Paul says: “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13).
This form of life, the life of divine love, is the “wedding garment” (cf. Origen and Gregory the Great) Jesus speaks of in today’s parable, the dress code of the feast. For without LOVE, no one can recognize the voice of the Beloved – without love, no one can EXPERIENCE the love of God as anything but judgment and exclusion, because love must be mutual if it is not to become bitterness and resentment.
But when we put on love then we find ourselves nourished by God. We find our home in him, and the peace of God that transcends circumstance. This is “the secret” Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle reading: “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” When we put on the love of God in Christ, as a garment, when we love and obey the Bridegroom of our souls, we find the satisfaction of our most fundamental desire. The Desire from which every desire springs, and of which every desire is a pale reflection. Finding the love of God in Jesus Christ therefore means having no anxiety about anything, but living in peace and contentment – as Paul says – knowing how to be abased and how to abound… it means being enabled to do “all things in him who strengthens me.”
This is what it means to live in the borderland between time and eternity: to draw sustenance from the eternal God for life in the temporal world. It means, as Paul says, “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving” letting your requests to be made known to God. And it means listening, really listening, with hope and expectation and OBEDIENCE to Jesus when he commands us to be of good cheer, to be at peace in every circumstance, because he has overcome the world (Jn. 16.33).
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment