The Lord of Hosts has made a feast for us, and for all peoples. Our Lord Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God is available to us in the feast of the heavenly banquet prepared for us. The guests are summoned to a table that is ready. The banquet is now, and the invitation is now. Participation in the heavenly reality outside of time and space happens now, within the conditions of time and space, and is always available to us. And being at the banquet is described by Paul in our Epistle: being filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The banquet, to put it simply, is the eucharistic life–remember, “eucharist” means thanksgiving. Being eucharistic is a way of life.
The feast God has made for us is a feast of Himself. God has made all things, and He has made all things through His Son that in receiving His Son we receive God. The feast of God is a feast of receiving Him—that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us. And He gives Himself to be received. “Take, eat,” Jesus says. “This is my Body, which is given for you.” And He says, “Drink ye all of this, for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you.” The transformation Christ seeks to initiate in the human heart and mind happens when the baptized are nourished by the eternal Bread of heaven. It is not an event, it is a whole life; it is not a gift of clothing worn once and discarded, or even worn one day a week. Christ transforms us when His gift to us becomes our everyday clothing.
We His servants are called to the marriage feast to receive His Body and to receive His Blood, to receive what God has made everything ready so as to give and be received. He has taught us how to pray, so as to make us ready to receive. He has taught us how to find Him in Scripture, so as to make us ready to receive. He has engrafted us in His Body in Baptism and given us His Holy Spirit, so as to make us ready to receive what the Father has prepared for us. He has made all things so that as our mind learns to see, as our mind learns to hear, we might behold the Light Who is the full expression of God—that in the life we are given as gift, in wearing eucharistic clothes, we have a eucharistic posture towards all of life, for it is through our eucharistic posture than we receive the gift every day and in all places.
Jesus speaks of a wedding garment. Wearing the wedding garment is, in this parable, the key to entering into the kingdom of heaven, the eucharistic life, which is already prepared for us. And then He says, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Many are called because the doors of the parish church are open to all, and within the sacred temple of the parish, the table is set. Parish worship is the arena of our encounter of God, of His disclosure of Himself to us. The chosen that Jesus speaks of are those who hear the call and respond with their heart: the chosen are those who live the eucharistic life within the parish: those who receive the world as a gift from God, and put on the wedding garments of participation (of not merely hearing the word, but being doers of the word, according to S. James).
In Christ’s parable, a man who had no wedding garment is cast out from the banquet. He is the person who is present in the parish building for its worship. He is not cast out because he failed to receive the invitation: he is cast out for treating the banquet as something he can attend without being transformed by it. Those who desire God and wear the garments of participation will be admitted; those that are not admitted are refused because they treat the call to the banquet as less urgent than the ordinary business of life, as an optional extra that can be postponed. The man who was refused had a non-eucharistic posture.
What is fundamental is to imitate the tax collector: that is, to yearn in humility for intimate relationship with the living Christ. The yearning for Christ and through Him a yearning for God is the very fabric of which the wedding garment is woven, and as we wear it, we participate in the heavenly realities of the heavenly banquet. Yet how often we are tempted away from wearing the wedding garment! How often we are tempted not to go the Altar in prayer, but rather to his farm, another to his business—that is, to allow other activities to take priority over the Liturgy, to allow other activities to take priority over receiving the daily Bread given to us from heaven through the Scriptures. How often we are tempted to ignore the voice of Moses, to ignore the voice of the prophets, to ignore the words of God’s Mother for Moses, the Prophets, and Mary all teach us about Jesus, all teach us about the heavenly realities beyond time and space, all teach us the true meaning of obedience, which is having a humble silence of wonder at the feet of God Who is always on His heavenly throne and closer to us than our breathing.
As Saint Paul teaches us, “The Lord is at hand.” And because He is at hand, let us give our anxiety and worry to Him, let all our requests be told by us to God, that we might have no anxiety about anything. Let us put on the wedding garments of humility, that Paul’s words may ever be our own: “I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me,” and through our participation in the holy life of our parish we develop a eucharistic posture toward the world and thereby continually receive the world as gift by means of Spirit-filled thanksgiving through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who lives and reigns with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
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