The terrifying warning of the parable of the wedding feast
The 'wedding garment' and the command to come to the wedding feast give this parable, told in the Temple in Holy Week, a different meaning to the similar one told before.
The ‘wedding garment’ and the command to come to the wedding feast give this parable, told in the Temple in Holy Week, a different meaning to the similar one told before.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge shows us…
How this parable reveals the terrifying seriousness of being called to the marriage feast
That Christ warns of the Church’s rejection by those who kill the messengers and scorn the feast.
Why even among the guests, some are found unworthy: judgment reaches within the Church itself.
Our Lord expands on the parable of the great banquet, told earlier in his ministry, to show that the Gospel invitation, though full of promise, comes with judgment for those who reject it – and even for those who accept it outwardly but fail in inward obedience.
For more context on this chapter, see Part I.
The Wedding of the King’s Son
From
Passiontide, Part I
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1886, Ch. VI, pp 91-114
St. Matt. xxii. 1-14; Story of the Gospels, § 137.
(Read at Holy Mass on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost)
A new part added
‘And the king went in to see the guests, and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment. And he said to him, Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having on a wedding garment? But he was silent. Then the king said to the waiters, Bind his hands and feet and cast him into the exterior darkness—there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
‘For,’ our Lord adds, ‘many are called, but few are chosen.’ This then is what we gather from a comparison between the two parables, and we have now to explain the several truths which may be found set forth in them.
We need make but little question that the banquet to which the guests are here invited is the feast on the Gospel blessings, which is set forth by God in the Church. This involves, for those who enjoy it lawfully and profitably, the further banquet on the ineffable blessings of the Heavenly Kingdom.
But it is something present, which is to be accepted and entered upon here and now, as is evident, if from nothing else, from the exclusion of the unworthy guest, and the declaration with which our Lord concludes His teaching, that the called are many, but the chosen or elect few. In the former parable our Lord had spoken to the guests at an entertainment to which He was Himself invited, and when one of those present had been apparently so moved by His gracious conversation that He could not refrain from exclaiming, ‘Blessed are they that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God!’
Here there was no such invitation to speak. But our Lord seems to have desired to teach the privileges of the Gospel banquet, and He does so in language which goes beyond what He had before used, both, as has been pointed out, in the matter of the magnificence of the occasion, for it is the wedding of the king’s son of which He now speaks in which all the guests seem to have been provided, or to have provided themselves with fitting robes, and in the obligatory character of the invitation on those who had received it.
Comparison with the former parable
Thus, then, in the earlier parable there is no punishment beyond the exclusion from the banquet for those who were so foolish as to despise it, and when they did so it seems to have been with a certain air of liberty and equality between themselves and their inviter which is altogether wanting in the later parable. There would be something rude in saying to a king, ‘I pray thee hold me excused,’ on account of ordinary employments.
Our Lord then adds this further line to the teaching which He had already delivered, by making it the command of a sovereign which is neglected or despised. This teaching implies the truth that the acceptance of the Gospel privileges is obligatory, although it is left within the power of the human will to turn away from them when they are brought home to it, for we are responsible to our Maker and Judge for the choice which we make, although He does not now force us to make the choice that is right.
For we are His creatures and belong to Him by an absolute dominion, which has no parallel in creation, and we have no right, though we have the power, being free, to disobey His commands, even if they were hard and unprofitable to ourselves. On the other hand, we see in the comparative magnificence of the banquet in this last parable some allusion to the truth that now, after the Day of Palms, on which the great Sacrifice of our Lord was practically and formally begun, He speaks of the wedding feast of the King’s Son, and seems to invite our thoughts to dwell on all the riches and splendours of grace that are laid before us in the Church, all of them flowing from and being applications of the fruits of that Sacrifice.
Advance in doctrine
We seem to see a further advance in the doctrine of this parable over that of the former, in the measure that is dealt out by the great justice of God to those who decline His invitation, and thus put themselves in the position of rebels against Him.
It seems a strange thing that persons invited in the way here mentioned, and to so great an honour and blessing as the sharing in the wedding supper of the son of a king, should not only neglect the invitation and treat it with indifference, but should go on further to heaping insult and contumely on the messengers, and even still further, to the putting them to death. There is nothing of this kind in the former parable.
There the neglectful guests allege the excuses that have been mentioned, and these are so framed by our Lord as to embrace the three great concupiscences, which are the springs in human nature of everything that debases and degrades it, and turns away the mind, which is given to man to feed on the things of God, down to the lower pleasures and the interests and ambitions of this world.
A feature from the Wicked Husbandmen
In the second parable our Lord takes a feature from the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, and adds it to the picture as drawn before. The great work of Redemption has been begun, the time is come for the Passion of the Son of Man by which that Redemption is to be wrought. The message which invites mankind to share in the Gospel feast necessarily includes the acceptance of the Gospel revelation of the great mercies of God through Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.
It involves the obligation of obedience to His Law and the following of His example, as well as the enjoyment of the privileges won by the Precious Blood. It involves, therefore, faith, submission, obedience, humility, mortification, penitence, a life above the world, a trampling on all that the world and the flesh hold dear. It is a message, therefore, which the natural man hates, which the world abhors and makes war upon, because its own fallacies and impostures are exposed thereby.
So it is true, in the actual history of which this parable is the figure, that the messengers of the great King are not only disregarded and neglected, but insulted, ill-treated, or even slain. And now that our Lord has just spoken of the execution of the terrible sentence upon the Jewish nation for the guilt which it was to incur by His own murder, it is natural that He should no longer hold back this truth, even though, under other circumstances, it might have seemed out of place in this parable.
He adds, therefore, both the circumstance of the ill-treatment and murder of the messengers of God, deputed to bring to men the glad tidings of their salvation, and also the judgment that would fall on those who so dealt with them, in their temporal punishment even in this world. This seems to be the explanation of the King sending his armies, destroying the murderers, and burning up their cities.
Warning conveyed
The direct course of the parable is interrupted by our Lord for the purpose of introducing the outrages inflicted on the messengers of the King as well as the punishment of the offenders. It looks at first sight as if this might be merely a reminiscence of the Parable of the Husbandmen, inserted by our Lord for the sake of connecting the two in the minds of the hearers.
But we can see that it is not merely a reminiscence. It is also a warning. And it will surely be wisdom not to pass over this lesson in considering this parable, not to forget to call to mind the truth that the good message of the Gospel, with all its graciousness and beauty, its fair promises of ineffable happiness and strength and recompense, must always find in us, as long as we are in the flesh, something which is stirred up by it to hostility and rebellion.
For it is not only a message which nature does not care for, as something spiritual and too high for us, but also which speaks with authority and enjoins obedience, and implies mortification of all that is natural in submitting to it, and threatens, moreover, chastisement if we do not yield it obedience. To strive against the stream of the world while we are in it, and to fix our gaze on the things which are heavenly and eternal while we are beset by the things of sense, which pass away—this requires an effort and a continuance of exertion by which our natural feebleness and inconsistency, our need of novelty and variety, are overtasked.
And if our Lord seems to go out of His way to introduce this feature in His teaching, still it is in truth a necessary feature in any accurate picture of our present condition. Our Lord is preparing us beforehand for the feature of the ‘man without a wedding garment.’ There is therefore something more than a history of the past in the chastisement of these first offenders against the King, who refused his invitation.
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The Wedding of the King’s Son
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