ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis,
Sunday 17 September, St Andrew’s Holborn, London

Matthew 22: 1-14.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we heard the parable of the marriage of the king’s son. All of Christ’s parables invite us to enter into the story and to try to find ourselves in it. But in order to find ourselves in a parable, we have to try to understand who the various characters are, the roles they play. And so we have to ask ourselves: who is the king? who is the son? who are the guests? and what is the nature of the banquet? I will leave aside this morning some other very interesting questions: who are the servants? who are the king’s armies? what is this ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’?

As far as the parable in its broad outline is concerned, the king is God himself – God the Father – and the banquet and the wedding are prepared for his Son, Christ our God, one of the Holy Trinity. And the guests invited to the banquet are quite clearly, in the first instance, the old Israel, those who are invited but somehow manage to find something that prevents them from attending. The second series of guests is the new Israel. They are, as we learn from the parable itself, simply brought in from the street. They are the ordinary people, the rabble even, whomever you might find in the market place. ‘Everyone, come! Come to the banquet! You are all invited!’

And what is the banquet? The banquet Christ speaks of here is the feast of the Kingdom, prepared for mankind, as Theophylact says, ‘from the foundation of the world.’ It is union with God and entry into his life and his joy, to the extent that this is possible for a created being. And that joy is occasioned by Christ himself, the Bridegroom, to whose wedding - and into whose joy - we are all invited.

But the parable goes on to make it quite clear that when the King then comes to inspect the banquet and see how the feast is progressing, he finds that some of those who have been invited do not have the right clothes on. They do not have on a wedding garment. Yet surely, when they were let in through the doors, they were properly dressed for the feast!

What is this  ‘wedding garment’? We should think of it as the ‘robe of gladness’, the robe that is provided for us in Baptism. This morning we had a Baptism, the clothing of a child in the grace of the Holy Spirit. That ‘robe of gladness’, that wedding garment, is given to each baptised Christian by the Spirit of God. It is the gift of the Spirit in Baptism and Chrismation.

As we apply the parable to ourselves, we need to bear in mind that the guests do not know when the King will come to inspect and see what is going on. They don’t know when he will arrive. It could be at any time. Some are probably not even thinking about him at all. And so there is a close similarity here between the coming of the King and the Second Coming of Christ, which will usher in the consummation of this world and its transition to the world to come.

What Christ is trying to tell us in this parable is that at the moment of visitation some of us will no longer have our wedding garment on us, in spite of the fact that we have been admitted to the feast. This is a hard saying. The clear implication is that we should make every effort to preserve our wedding garment throughout the feast. ‘Many are called’, Christ says, ‘ but few are chosen.’ The parable reminds me of a saying of Christ which does not appear in the Gospels, but which circulated in the early Syrian Church: ‘As you are found, so you will be taken.’

Those who have been invited to the feast of the Kingdom, who have been blessed to share in its joys, should be ready at any moment to meet their Creator, Christ the Son of God, God himself. In any situation, not just here where we are gathered to pray together in church, but at every moment of our lives.

And what is the indication that we have somehow managed to preserve that wedding garment intact? For ourselves, here, in our present circumstances, a significant indication will, in fact, be inner peace. The peace that Christ came to give us, the peace that he gave to his disciples after his Resurrection – and therefore after his Crucifixion. This is very important. Christ’s peace is a peace that comes to us through crucifixion and resurrection, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God. It comes to us ultimately as a gift from God, a God who has experienced crucifixion and resurrection.

So in the end we find that we are all members of that second group of guests, those brought in from the highways, from outside the city, to enjoy what others had refused.

Let us strive, therefore, to preserve our wedding garment, the ‘robe of gladness’ that has been given us, and let us take as an indication of its presence that peace which Christ came to give us as well, the peace that comes through resurrection from the dead in Christ himself. Amen.