This Sunday’s parable has a lot of similarities to the one we read last Sunday. Do you remember what last Sunday’s parable was? It was about the vineyard. A master planted the vines, tended them, dug the wine press, and then lent it out to tenants. When he came to collect the fruit, they wanted to keep it for themselves. They murdered all the servants, and then he sent his son. I think we can understand the thinly veiled analogy being made there with Christ himself. They killed him. And then the master took the vineyard and gave it to others.
This parable has a number of similarities. Here it is the same thing: they kill his messengers and servants. And then, in this case, he comes and destroys them, and he gives it to someone else. So there is this common theme of being given something — an opportunity or some sort of blessing — and either not recognizing it, not appreciating it, feeling entitled to it, or wanting it for yourself rather than giving it back to God in some way.
Again, in all these cases, there is an emphasis on stewardship: everything you have is a gift, and you have it not for yourself, but to give away to other people. In this story, a wedding feast is given. It is prepared, and guests are invited, but they do not take it seriously. They are busy and distracted with other things. They do not see the value in it. They do not recognize the value.
I think this is a great warning for us. How many times throughout each of our days are we given invitations to the wedding feast that we do not take because we are distracted, or we are busy, or we do not think that it is actually a valuable thing? We can see this in these guests who are invited. They turn it all down and reject it, and then they are destroyed. And the other people are invited to the feast.
There is a funny little line in it. It says all were invited. There is another parable similar to this where it says to go to the highways and the byways. It does not say that exactly here, but there are a lot of parables that are very similar, or that are duplicated across the various gospels. In this one, it says to go out and invite everyone, both good and bad. It is a funny little phrase. You think, “Wait a second, what is going on? Everyone is invited to the marriage feast?”
But then Jesus is great like this. One second he is so inclusive and generous and kind, and the next second he is harsh. He is constantly upsetting your expectations. Sometimes people have this image of a “buddy Jesus,” like he is just a soft, gentle, nice guy. I think you should go back and read the Gospels. He is confusing. He is upsetting all of the expectations you might have about who God is.
This is an important point. You see it with the Pharisees, but also through the lives of the saints — the fools for Christ are a great example. We are terrible at recognizing God when we see him. We are terrible at recognizing an invitation to the marriage feast.
And what is the marriage feast? Ultimately, it is the end of time, when all things have been consummated. It is the full union of all of creation, together with mankind and with God, in a perfect harmony. It is this wedding feast. I preached a little bit about this at the wedding we had this past weekend. Human marriage is a reflection, an image, of the cosmic divine marriage between God and all of creation. Opposites are united. This is why marriage is given to us as this great, beautiful image and foretaste of the universal marriage to come with God.
This great opportunity that these servants have — we often do not recognize it when it is breaking through. And so the Eucharist that we celebrate is an enactment and a participation. We believe that the Divine Liturgy, the celebration of the Eucharist on this table, is the wedding feast. This is the celebration of a great union together.
The goal of each of our lives is not simply to come to the Divine Liturgy and celebrate the Eucharist here. The point of it is to turn all of our life into the Divine Liturgy. The goal of all creation is that all of creation becomes a never-ending Divine Liturgy, celebrating the wedding feast between God and man. Our goal as Christians is to be priests of creation, to go out into all the world and turn everything into the Eucharist, so that all things become moments and objects of communion.
This is the invitation. This is the invitation that these guests missed. They did not think it was valuable or important. They thought their lives were their own, that they could use and spend them on themselves, and that things like loving your neighbor or responding to the spiritual life were silly fairy tales, things for children, something to be disregarded.
So we have this great warning from Jesus. Yes, everyone is invited, both the good and the bad. But then the man gets caught there without his wedding garment. He is not ready and prepared. This is a message that is both encouraging and disconcerting. Everyone is called; nobody is excluded. Everybody has the potential and the opportunity to be transformed, to be invited to the wedding feast and to be found with their wedding garment.
We enact this when we do baptism. After you get baptized, what do you put on? A white gown, a robe of some kind. This is a wedding garment that you put on after you have become a new creation. And then the baptism that you engage in gets consummated in a celebration of your marriage to Christ at the wedding table, which is the altar.
The danger is that everybody is called and everybody is invited, but not only does not everyone come, not everyone accepts that invitation from God. And sometimes people do not use that invitation rightly. The goal is not just to be invited; we are called to be participants. We are called to give something back.
If you are called to the wedding feast, you need to dress up. You cannot go there in shorts and flip flops. And neither should you come without a gift for the bride and groom. There is something that costs you as well. In the same way, in this analogy, the man was not ready. He was invited — maybe he was even bad when he was invited — but he did not do anything with that invitation. He was found to be unworthy of it.
So the warning to each of us is this: How many times throughout our days are we given invitations for moments of communion with God and with other people? That thing that we think is an interruption. That person who is just a thorn in our flesh. The misfortune that comes our way. The suffering that we are dealt. Those things are often the invitations to the wedding feast — an opportunity to see God in another person, to see God in that space, to have real human connection, to forgive someone who has wronged us, to have real intimacy with someone else, to have relationships that are actually built on honesty and trust.
These things take work. These are things you need to put on your wedding garment to do. They are invitations, and we can rise to them in our lives. We can have moments where we realize that the liturgy we are in on Sunday is breaking through and infecting all the parts of our lives.
Consider what happens in a Divine Liturgy. We come and we offer bread and wine. But before they were bread and wine, they were gifts of the earth — wheat and grapes that God gave to us. We took the things God gave us and transformed them into something more. We turned wheat into bread and grapes into wine. Then we take these things that God has given us, which we have improved in some way — this is the putting on of the wedding garment — and we give it back to God. We offer it and set it on the table, on the altar.
And then what does God do with that gift? He transforms it into his very body and gives it to us. And what do we do with that? We take it, we eat it, and we become transformed. We become God in that way.
So you can see that this is an exchange of gift-giving. This spirit of generosity and reciprocity, going back and forth, is a constant elevation and transformation of who we are. That gift-giving, that sacrifice, that openness, that constant responding to the invitation and giving back — the response causes a change in us, a transformation. That same Eucharistic exchange that we enact in this Divine Liturgy can be enacted in every moment of our life. Every moment can be Eucharistic.
This is the wedding feast. The wedding feast is not just something at the end of time, far off. It is not just something restricted to this most supreme ritual that we engage in. It is something available to us now, in the most ordinary moments of our lives. They are invitations to be with God.
And we can miss it. We can be like the characters in this parable. We can be busy with our businesses and run off and not think it is very important. The problem is that we do not recognize the invitation — the same way people did not recognize that it was Jesus, that Jesus was actually God, that the God and creator of all the universe was standing right before them, and they did not see it. We do the same thing. God stands before us in the faces of our neighbor, and we do not see it.
These characters are us, every day. But our hope, and our reassurance, is that God sends invitations into our lives every day, whether we are good or bad. We have the opportunity to respond to the invitation, to show up to that wedding feast ready, with our garment on, ready to celebrate that joy.
That is what the invitation is. It is an invitation to connect, to commune, and to be one with both God and our brother. And more than that, it is to be united and reconciled even with our enemies. That is the vision of this wedding feast. It is the triumph of love. And we are invited to that love feast continually throughout our days.
One of the reasons we show up here to the Divine Liturgy is to practice it — to practice living a Eucharistic life, so that we can go out into our marriages, our lives, our friendships, and our workplaces, and be ready to meet the sufferings and hardships that Christ and the apostles met. We can do it with love and faithfulness. We can turn tragedies, hardships, and sufferings into wedding feasts. We can take a sacrifice, we can take something like a cross, and we can turn it into a resurrection.
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