A reflection on the readings of Sunday, October 15 — the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In last week’s Gospel, we heard the parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard. Not only did they withhold from the landowner the share of the harvest that was his due, they mistreated and killed the representatives he sent to collect it. The tenants then outdid themselves by killing the landowner’s son, and in doing so ensured their own demise.
While it didn’t work out for those tenants, we can kind of understand their motivation, which looks a lot like greed. They started by wanting simply to keep all of the harvest, but in killing the heir, they thought they could keep the vineyard as well. If we’re to understand the landowner as God and the tenants as his chosen people, the tenants’ killing of the representatives – that is, the prophets God sent – and the son becomes less about greed and more about hardness of heart and the desire to control.
The share of the harvest God wanted was thanksgiving and giving, gratitude to God for his gifts and a sharing of those gifts with the people in their midst and the people of the world. Jesus was calling out those religious authorities who laid claim to the gifts and refused to share them. The parable Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel tells the story in a different way and then adds another layer to it.
We have an analogous cast of characters: The landowner is now a king, but he has a son and he has representatives he sends out who get mistreated and killed, and the perpetrators of that evil meet a terrible end. In both parables, the ungrateful who thought themselves insiders are replaced by those they disdained as outsiders. But today, in the wedding guest who is cast out, we see that the second set of the chosen don’t get a free ride either.
It seems like we could view last week’s parable of the vineyard as Old Testament focused, while this week’s parable of the banquet introduces a New Testament element, just as the New Covenant builds upon the Old.
The vineyard tenants occupied a carefully and lovingly prepared place that they presumed to claim as their own, just as the Scribes and Pharisees asserted their claim over the law and people of God to the exclusion of the creator of both. The penalty for that is that they will be replaced by people who will bear, and share, good fruit.
Those new people are the people who show up at today’s banquet. The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests. As James Joyce said of the Catholic Church, “Here comes everybody!”
If we imagine ourselves as among the people who got scooped up from the highways and byways to come to the king’s son’s banquet, we have a choice of how we regard this place we find ourselves. We can be astounded at our good fortune and act accordingly, or we can adopt an attitude that being invited and accepting the invitation is enough.
Jesus tells us today that everyone is invited, but that doesn’t mean all you have to do is park yourself in a chair and scoot yourself up to the table to be served. In accepting the invitation, you must agree to everything the banquet means. The banquet isn’t a trough that you lower your head into to feed yourself, it’s a celebration that’s centered around the guest of honor. You have to be attentive to your host, to listen to his words and join in the toasts. That platter set before you is meant to be passed along, not consumed by you alone. And as Jesus points out, we have to be clothed appropriately.
It seems to our sensibilities that it’s totally unfair that a guy who just got pulled in off the street to attend the banquet should be punished for not wearing the right clothes. But Jesus’ audience at the time knew that a wealthy person like a landowner or a king would have the means to provide wedding garments for the guests. That was the tradition. Maybe it was something as simple as a scarf or a shawl, but it would be something freely provided to everyone who came in so that all could clothe themselves in the same way, a symbol of unity of purpose in celebrating, but at the same time an acknowledgment of their host’s generosity.
The man who was cast out of the feast wasn’t singled out for being poor or dirty or annoying. We have to remember that he, like us, was but one of scores of people who got pulled in off the road and from the town square. Everybody else was potentially poor or dirty or annoying, but they all accepted the host’s grace of a wedding garment, while our guy appears to have believed that he didn’t need to change in order to sit at the table and enjoy the banquet. We see how that went for him.
Okay, so here I am, a professed Catholic Christian, here I am at church, here I am at Mass. Am I properly attired? Saint Augustine helps us with that question in a sermon:
Whatever can this wedding garment be, then? For an answer we must go to the Apostle [St. Paul’s 1st letter to Timothy, 1:5], who says: “The aim of this instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.” There is your wedding garment. It is not love of just any kind. Many people of bad conscience appear to love one another, but you will not find in them “the love that springs from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a genuine faith.” Only that kind of love is the wedding garment.
That wedding garment is the attitude of love of Christ who we were joined to in our Baptism. Saint Paul tells us in the second reading that God will fully supply whatever you need, and God does just that when we became his guests at the banquet in Baptism.
After we’re baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the priest or deacon places a white garment on us and says “You have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ. See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity. With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.”
It is Christ who is our garment. As long as we live in him and live his virtues of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and above all, love, we will be ready for his promise of a place at the table in eternal life. And if in our weakness we fall along the way to the feast, our merciful God gives us a remedy in the sacrament of confession. We need only approach him and ask for his mercy.
God wants nothing more than for each of us to be seated with him at the banquet of eternal life. He gives us everything we need to get there if only we will accept it. And he gives us a foretaste of that banquet at this and every Mass, where the Lord comes to us in his Eucharist and is here in our midst.
If we accept the invitation and prioritize our lives accordingly, we can make our reality the words we just spoke in the psalm: I shall live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.
Deacon Steve O’Neill was ordained for service to the Archdiocese of Washington in June 2013 and serves at St. Andrew Apostle in suburban Maryland. After four years in the Marine Corps and three years at the University of Maryland (where met Traci, now his wife of 30+ years, and earned a degree in English), he has worked as an analyst with the Federal government. Deacon Steve and Traci have two sons and two daughters and three grandchildren.
Popular Posts