“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?”
There is a violence in today’s Gospel parable (from St. Matthew) that may shock us. It’s about the king’s matching the violent treatment of his couriers by the invitees to his son’s wedding feast – by himself marshaling an army, destroying those murderers and burning their city. That hardly makes the generosity of his subsequent invitation to street dwellers, the nobodies of the world, a trustworthy deed. He seems to be a man of moods – violent swings from benign to dangerous and back again! As a metaphor of God he makes me nervous.
So it’s nice to have an alternative version of this parable in St. Luke’s Gospel: 14:16 ff. There the host is not a king and the banquet is not a wedding feast for his son. The host does get angry over the excuses made to refuse his invitations. And who wouldn’t be upset over something like that? But there is no retaliation except that he has his servant bring people in from the city streets, alleys, from the countryside – to include especially the poor, crippled, blind and lame. Nor does he toss anybody out for not being presentable – as Matthew’s version does.
Biblical scholars attribute the differences between Matthew and Luke to Luke’s being an earlier version, closer to the gist of what Jesus originally taught – while Matthew’s probably dates from after 70 AD after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem – hence the allusion to the king’s burning the city of the violent invitees. All of which shows how the Gospels are the product of much fluctuating oral transmission before being fixed in manuscript form. Of course the important thing is that the parable speaks to us today – as it did to me not so long ago.
I refer to Matthew’s version where a fellow shows up carelessly dressed. It was when Jane and I visited the Sacro Speco (the Holy Cave) in the mountains outside Rome where St. Benedict founded his famous order. The cave has been enhanced with three chapels from 1100 AD – arches and slender columns, a marble altar covered with gold, blue and crimson mosaics. Each was a jewel with ancient frescos of Gospel episodes covering every square foot of wall and ceiling. And what’s more, there was a wedding taking place as we entered – family and guests so beautiful and so beautifully attired. (But after all, they were Italians who know something about fashion.)
Bellezza! Beauty! That’s what summed up for me the whole experience of that place and moment. Beauty. And after all, isn’t that what religion is ultimately about: becoming beautiful, perceiving and creating beauty everywhere, behaving beautifully and not just puritanically? And look at me! in khaki trousers, sports shirt and hiking boots, your standard American tourist! It was then I thought I might be approached by someone like the king in the parable who would ask: “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?
And I thought, “By golly, I’ve got to acquire a change of wardrobe. Not only literally but spiritually. I’ve got to divest myself of all the sourness and whining and grinding of teeth, the resentments, anxiety, excuses – the things that perpetually mute my beauty. I’ve got to get more joy, faith, love, vision, grace – in a word – more beauty into my life if I am ever to become eligible to share the world of Christ so beautifully reflected at this wedding within this Gospel saturated Sacro Speco of Subiaco.”