In the days that I regularly traveled from the Monastery to the rural clinics, the car radio was a good companion. One of my favorite programs featured local comedians whose humorous tales were often about family members. The way tales were told was often funnier than the happenings they relayed. One woman’s story was about a family reunion in a rural community: “On Sunday, we always go together as a family to the church where granddaddy used to preach-and cousin Clara-she thinks she is so sophisticated because she has a job in the city now-she had the nerve to wear a red pants suit to Church!! You can just imagine how that went over with the old aunts!”
Last Thursday, I was doing Lectio on the Gospel of the day: Matthew 22:1-4. This is the story of the king who gives a wedding banquet for his son. All the invited guests refuse to come and some of them mistreat or kill the servants sent to summon them. The enraged king then sends his servants to the “highways and byways” to gather everyone they find, “the good and bad alike,” and bring them to the feast. The king finds one guest at the feast without a wedding garment and questions him. The guest does not answer and ends up being put outside. The story is familiar enough, but it has always puzzled me, especially the part about the guest and the wedding garment. So, I went and consulted the Jerome Biblical Commentary and the Collegeville Biblical Commentary. Both of these indicate that the parable is showing that all are invited to the banquet of the Kingdom, “the good and bad alike”, but those who come must do their part-sinners must repent and all must follow what Jesus is teaching-the wearing of the wedding garment is the indication that the individual is trying to do this.
Sometimes I think that I am like cousin Clara in her red pants suit or the wedding guest without the garment- I make it to the celebration, but don’t quite fit in. Looking elsewhere in the Gospels, just three chapters further on in Matthew 25:31-45, we come to the description of the Last Judgement. In this text the King says to those on his right, “in so far as you did this to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me.” The wedding garment, then, can be donned every day when we reach out in love to those that Providence brings to our lives. As St. Teresa of Calcutta wrote: “We cannot all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”
By Sister Eileen M. Gallagher, OSB