I don’t know what Fr Willie McFadden said to you last week about the parable of the tenants who killed the landowner’s son, but I would like to back for a moment to what I said myself just before that. Three weeks ago, having heard the parable about those coming to the vineyard at the eleventh being paid the same as those who had been there all day, we reflected on the nature of a God whose love is pure grace. There’s nothing we can do to earn it or deserve it, increase or diminish it. There are no deals’ no quid pro quos. It’s given freely and without conditions.
Then two weeks ago, presented with the two sons, one of whom said he would go into his father’s vineyard but didn’t and the other who said he wouldn’t go but did, we reflected on the other side of this mystery of grace, the freedom we have in our relationship with God. Infinitely free in himself, the idea that God could force anyone into anything is a contradiction in terms. Love is, by its very nature, freely given and freely received. And so we have a God who offers us everything but leaves us free to choose it or reject it. And herein, as we have said so often, lies the drama going on deep within the life of every human being.
But what does this mean? How do we make this choice? Well, in an attempt to answer that question I would like to return to today’s Gospel and the story, not so much of the wedding feast itself, but of the man who turned up without a wedding garment, a completely separate parable, scripture scholars tell us, which, over time, has got tangled up with the other one. At first sight, of course, what happened to the poor man seems very unfair and completely at odds with the image of a God whose love is free and unconditional. But a closer look at an older rabbinic parable on which this one is based can help us understand better what Jesus version of the story is really about.
I have a nephew getting married in February and one of the things my sister talked about as we wandered around the shops in Malaga the other day was her outfit. But in the rabbinic story this would not have been an issue, in that, strange as it seems to us, the King, when he sent the invitation to the wedding, also sent the wedding garment to be worn at it. This man’s crime, therefore, was to have received the garment and turned up at the wedding without it, a powerful image, it seems to me, of what it means to have been offered everything by God and chosen not to accept it. God has given us the wedding garment we are to wear at the great wedding feast which is the kingdom, so beautifully described by Isaiah in the first reading, and the message of the parable is that if we turn up without it, then there can be no place for us at the banquet. But what is this wedding garment we have all received? Well, I would like to offer you one answer to that question which has struck me quite forcibly as I have reflected on the story over the last two weeks.
Essentially, as I have come to understand it, the wedding garment God has given to each one of us from the first moment of our existence is our unique individual self. No two of us are the same. From the beginning of time we have existed as unique individuals in the mind of God, each of us with our own gifts, our own personalities and our own particular part to play in God’s great dream for his creation. It’s so easy to say but so difficult to grasp; that there’s something each one of us brings to creation which no other person can bring – ourselves - and that if we fail to bring it creation itself and everyone in it is the poorer for that failure. We are called to be, in other words, who we are and, by being who we are, in all our fullness, like a great work of art, give glory to God, the artist who made us. And fundamentally there’s only one thing that can stop that happening. It’s the mortal enemy of everything God longs to do in the world. And its name is fear, the same fear which made a man in another parable bury his talent in the ground rather than develop its potential. And so when he turned up at the wedding feast there was no place for him at the banquet either. But what is this fear, and what makes it so destructive and deadly?
Well, in its most basic form it’s the fear that all the things we have just said about ourselves and God are not true. And so, while faith tells us that we are loved by a God who has created us in his own image and likeness, another voice, deep within us, tells us that this cannot be true; that there is something wrong with us; that whoever God dreams of us being we cannot be that person; that whatever God is calling us to do in our lives we cannot do it, because - and here is the root of this great lie - we aren’t good enough, a way of thinking which misses the whole point about the mystery we call grace which is that, yes, left to ourselves we can do nothing and, in that sense, are not good enough, but that, with God, all things are possible. And can you just imagine the impact we could have on the world if we really believed that.
And so the fear of not being good enough, the fear that we cannot be the people faith tells us we are called to be, traps us in mediocrity. Like the people in the first parable we make excuses for not attending the great wedding feast and busy ourselves with things of no lasting value. We become more and more afraid to take risks, try new things or think in new ways. We settle for what we have, what we know, what is familiar to us and slowly but surely, as the gifts and talents we have been given lie more and more dormant, the spark of God in us, the dream God has had for us since the beginning begins to die and we become mere shadows of our real selves, the people we have always been and always will be in the mind of God.
And if this becomes permanent in us... no wonder there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The Church has been described as a sleeping giant. Called to make the teaching of Jesus a living reality in society, it has so often throughout history lost sight of this vision and adopted instead the values of the world around it. And so we pray for the Church at this time, that it will finally embrace the process of renewal begun at the Second Vatican Council, put on its wedding garment and become what it is called to be, a beacon of light for a world on its journey through history.................Lord hear us
As the financial markets tumble and fall about our ears, the world is living through a moment of profound shock. For years now we have worshipped at the altar of the goddess money and lived by her commandments, the laws of the market-place, dismissing as some kind of deviant anyone who dared to question these laws. But now the world is seeing the goddess money for the idol she always was and we pray that this experience will prove to be a turning point for us all....................Lord hear us
Humanity in every age longs for something better. We dream of a more just world. We long for the day when there will be no more war. We allow ourselves to imagine humanity dressed in its wedding garment. And yet, at the same time, something in us prevents us believing that these things are really possible. We have swallowed the lie that we are not good enough, that we ‘cannot do it.’ And so we pray for a deep sense of the fact that, with God, all things are possible................Lord hear us
Young people in every age can seem brash and aggressive and, since the beginning of time have been criticised by the adults around them. The truth is, however, that what lies behind these sometimes unpleasant ways of behaving is the most profound insecurity and feeling of not being good enough. And so we pray for young people today that, in a world where society bombards them with images of who they should be, we and they will be happy with and rejoice in who they are.................Lord hear us
To become the people we are capable of being, the people we already are in the mind of God, will always involve moving from where we are now to a place God will show us. It will always involve risk. It will always involve doing new things, embracing new ways of thinking, overcoming our prejudices, confronting our fears and in every sense moving out of our comfort zones. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see what that means right now and the courage to do it.........Lord hear us
There are few pains in life to compare with the pain of regret, the sense of what could have been had we not been so foolish and spoiled things; the ‘if onlys’ of life. And so we pray for the grace we need to live every day to the full now in such a way that, when the end comes, as it will for each of us, we are free of such regrets with no need to indulge in any weeping and grinding of teeth............Lord hear us
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