Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Though it shames me a bit to say, on the surface I sort of sympathize with the first set of guests in today’s Gospel for not wanting to go to a wedding. I’ve never been a big fan of them myself. I don’t begrudge those who enjoy them, and even less those who have them. I just prefer quieter, more low-key events, where there’s less pressure to have fun, dance in uncomfortable shoes, buy gifts, and make witty toasts. Unlike at funerals, which I find generally do a pretty solid job with the food, wedding fare always hits me as pretty underwhelming – usually only a choice between dry chicken and flavorless fish, and always with a side of overcooked asparagus. And while I have been genuinely impressed by the construction of certain wedding cakes, I’ve never found any of them to be particularly tasty.
There have been the odd exceptions, of course. In Pittsburgh, for example, and really throughout western Pennsylvania, both the entrée and cake play a distant second fiddle to the virtually ubiquitous Cookie Table. There, wedding banquets are remembered – indeed they are judged – for the variety and deliciousness of their cookies.
First, there must be many kinds of cookies – Italian wedding, lady locks, buckeyes, lemon, pizzelles, chocolate chip, those peanut butter ones with the Hershey’s Kisses squished into the tops, snickerdoodles, thumbprints, glazed sugar, to name just a few. And, equally important, they must be good. Like, really good. Guests make multiple trips to the cookie table, piling their plates with its bounty before returning to their seats to compare favorites. Grandmas and great aunts – often the bakers of many of the cookies – continually scan the church or fire hall, critically evaluating people’s cookie choices and keeping score of whose cookies are ‘winning.’
Second, there should be an abundance of leftovers, which are taken home in great bundles by the guests. Parents of the happy couple bring at least a small assortment into work on Monday morning, ostensibly as a little treat for their coworkers, but, in reality, just as much a flex on how awesome a wedding banquet they hosted for their kids. Criticizing a cookie table – or, worse, refusing to partake – is a public and unforgiveable affront to a family’s honor, and everybody knows it. Doing so might not get the offenders destroyed or their city burned down but, then again …
Of course, the Parable of the Wedding Banquet really isn’t about unenthusiastic weddinggoers and offended hosts. It’s actually about the very human tendency of placing our own interests and desires above others’, even going so far as rejecting Jesus’ invitation to take our places in the kingdom of God, the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb, and the tragic consequences that always result – namely, broken relationships with God and one another.
Jesus makes no mention of a cookie table in the Parable. But it’s clear the host – in this case, a king – has laid on the first-century equivalent of a pretty good one. When he sends his slaves around to call those invited to the banquet, he tells them to make sure they mention the oxen and fat calves he’s slaughtered in preparation for them, so they understand how big a deal this is. But as we’ve heard, the guests don’t come. They don’t care about the big dinner and all the work the king has put into to making it special. They don’t seem to give any thought to the fact that a place has been set for them, and that their presence is expected and important to the king and his son. It seems ridiculous to them that they should step away from whatever it is they’re doing to enter into the joy of their own king; they have farms and businesses to run, after all. What actually does seem to matter is simply whatever will benefit them in the here and now. It’s typical human selfishness, and, unfortunately, it’s something we all do.
I genuinely wonder what is it that lures us humans into this way of thinking and acting, to decide we are better off trying to make and serve our own banquets rather than God’s; that we, who are ourselves created, can somehow know better than the One who creates us. It’s nothing new, though. As we heard in the reading from Exodus, more than a thousand years before Jesus told the Parable of the Wedding Banquet in Jerusalem, the Israelites, impatient for Moses to return to them from speaking with God on Mount Sinai, decided it would be better for them to become gods themselves in order to make other gods, which in turn they would then worship, an exercise in absurdity even Albert Camus would appreciate. The result? Nearly destruction, if Moses hadn’t interceded for them. And, of course, two thousand years on this side of the parable, the compulsion to deify ourselves is alive and well as ever – along with the inevitable brokenness and suffering that always results from it. People really don’t change. But fortunately for us, neither does God.
It's no surprise, then, that in the sixth century, when Saint Benedict wrote his rule for monks, it was the same familiar story. The western Roman Empire had effectively destroyed itself through centuries of pride and excess, and now the whole place was being sacked by pretty much everyone. Benedict was determined not to let his monks fall into the same disordered chaos he observed around him. They must be in communion rather than competition, seeking to serve God through one another in the monastery. Right up front, at the top of the Rule’s Prologue, he tells those listening that if they’re serious about doing God’s will, they’d better be ready to put aside their own: “The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience,” he counsels. “This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.”
So, relying solely on our selfish wills leads to destruction, while offering ourselves in joyful obedience to God leads to life. The choice seems like a no-brainer. But how, actually, do we reorient ourselves wholly to living in the love of God rather than earthly gain? As the desert mothers and fathers knew all too well, abandoning the will and freeing oneself from human passions is not easy. After all, we are, it would seem, programmed to chase what we like. And the world certainly rewards us for pursuing things such as wealth, power, status, influence, respectability, and whatever else it deems ‘success.’ But for Saint Benedict, the key to true happiness is obedience to God through humility, the self-emptying of the pride we feel toward our own abilities and accomplishments. This is so we can make room for Christ to dwell more and more within us, allowing us to become the hands, feet, mouths, and ears of Jesus here on earth.
Of course, we all know that, realistically, to be able to survive in the world it’s necessary to ‘play the game’ to some extent. But using our experienced judgement and wizened reasoning to solve problems isn’t pridefulness. Nor is applying our God-given skills to grow professionally and provide responsibly for our families greediness. And enjoying the pursuit of hobbies, art, and even cookie-craft certainly isn’t a rejection of God’s will. It’s no sin to thrive and enjoy life, and that’s not what got the original wedding guests into trouble. For them, the issue was using their will to choose selfishness over self-emptying and reject God’s better Way. That’s why I’d like to suggest that none of this is really about eliminating our own will – in fact, in pursuing such a goal, I think we may well run the risk of becoming increasingly captive to it. Rather, I have a hunch it's more about choosing to use our freedom to allow God to align our imperfect human will and desires more and more to the Divine Will from which they flow.
Again, Saint Benedict offers a way for us to see if we’re actually doing this. He counsels the monks to test the spirits of newcomers to find out if they’re from God. We, too must check in with our own spirits every day to make sure our motives and actions are from God. “Who am I serving?” we might ask. “Is my happiness and ability to live comfortably more important to me than someone else’s?” “Do I reject the invitations of others to be in communion with them because I don’t consider them worthy of being in communion with me?” And, perhaps even more challenging, “When I do good things, is it purely out of love for God and others, or am I kind of hoping I might get noticed and rewarded for it?” For my own part, I do find that my motives for performing good works are often at least a little mixed. Does that invalidate them? Probably not, but it is a reminder that aligning my will to God’s is a life’s work.
If it all seems a bit daunting, we can return to the wedding banquet and notice who actually does end up joining in the feast. They aren’t the ones who were originally considered ‘worthy’; those people made the choice to use their privilege to self-exclude from the banquet in favor of serving themselves, with the usual disastrous consequences. Instead, those gathered in were everyone else, both the ‘good and the bad,’ echoing what Jesus had declared to the self-righteous chief priests and elders in the temple just a few verses before today’s Gospel reading. “Truly I tell you,” he warns, “the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” They were indeed. And you know something? They still are; I’ve personally seen it happen time and time again, when those labeled as utterly unworthy have shown forth the Gospel to others in ways I’ve rarely, if ever, seen the self-proclaimed “worthies” do.
The banquet is ready, and Christ the Bridegroom has indeed prepared a place for each of us. May we find ourselves and everyone we love there, and may God’s peace be with us today and always. Amen.
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