Thursday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
We’ve been to a couple of weddings this summer. I like having the occasion to dress nicer than my everyday clothes, even dressier than my typical Sunday church clothes. As I tell my kids, it’s a special occasion, one that calls for being “fancier” in order to celebrate the marriage of the bride and groom. Even the less formal outdoor weddings call for making a special effort to look nicer than if you were working in the garden or going to a baseball game. But, certainly, no one is going to turn you away from the church or the reception if you aren’t “dressed up”.
Today’s gospel reading, which is Matthew’s account of the Parable of the Wedding Feast (22: 1-14), sounds rather harsh, especially at the end when one man has appeared at the banquet not dressed in a wedding garment. The king in the parable has his attendants bind him and throw him out into the darkness “where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
I remember being perplexed by this parable as a young girl. I couldn’t understand why the man would be punished so harshly for not wearing a wedding garment. It didn’t fit with my understanding of a loving, welcoming God who wouldn’t turn someone away based on how they were dressed. What I didn’t understand then was that the “wedding garment” was symbolic of the repentance and change of heart and mind that are required of us to enter God’s kingdom. It isn’t about how he was dressed; it is really about him not being prepared. It’s about whether or not we have gotten “cleaned up” and put on Christ in preparation for meeting our God and Savior.
In today’s first reading (Ezekiel 36: 23-28), we hear how God has promised to restore the house of Israel by cleansing the people of their sins and giving them new hearts. The ancient Israelites understood the human heart to be the center of intelligence, feelings and will. So it is quite a significant change being referred to in verse 26 when God says, “I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts.”
When I think of a heart of stone, I think hard, rigid, inflexible, impenetrable, incapable of growth or change. So, if God removes our stony heart and replaces it with a “natural” heart, then we will have hearts that are soft, flexible, penetrable, able to grow and change, which also makes us open to repentance.
Like the wedding guests of today’s gospel, we are called to put on a garment of repentance and change of heart and mind. Chances are, since we’re taking the time to read and reflect on these scriptures, our hearts are not completely “stony”, but perhaps there are some parts that have become hardened that we have been ignoring or avoiding. Let us ask God to soften the stony parts of our heart and place a new spirit within us, that we may be ready when we are invited to the feast of the Kingdom of God.
Eileen Miller