“YOUR TRINITY TOASTS YOU IN THE SONS BLOOD”
Saint Matthew 22.1-14
Twentieth Sunday after Trinity: 25 October Anno Domini 2009
J. W. Watson S.S.P. pastor
When the Lord tells a parable it's not like Aesop writing or handing down a fable. The Christ's stories are more than mere proverbial wisdom and common-sense aphorism. Jesus is God. The parables of the Lord are TRUTH placed out into the air and vibrated into the heads of His children. The same Truth Who took on flesh and blood is the TRUTH who speaks with His tongue truths about Himself. Each parable of Jesus not only reveals something "about" Jesus, but each parable IS JESUS! His words create the living Presence of THE WORD.
Heaven is not so much a place as a state of being, not a location as much as an "IS." To spend eternity in heaven is not being fixed on a particular cloud or sequestered in a limited dining hall, as it is to BE IN THE BEATIFIC PRESENCE OF THE CREATOR OF THE COSMOS, and the SAVIOR OF YOUR SOUL. But Jesus doesn't just save your soul He saves your body, your personality, your materiality. "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come."
The "Kingdom and the King" are synonymous. God is your king. This doesn't establish dogmatically that God will have to sit on a physical throne like Charlemagne, but that the essence of kingship, Lordship, that is, rule and mastery, are part and parcel of Christ's omnipotence.
Your relationship with God is not something of your own choosing or design. You can't have it your way. You can't do it your way, according to your schedule or your sensitivities. This is not "romantic," silly, self-centered American love (love American style truer than the red, white and blue), this is an arranged marriage. Your connection with the King is something that He established before He made the universe. You were predestined to heirdom and royalty before you were ever conceived and born.
The reason Saint Paul compares the relationship between a husband and wife as something which, in reality, testifies to the greater reality between Jesus and His Church, is that nothing is so intimate, so Godly in original design (going all the way back to pre-fall Eden and the first couple), so complimentary as the sexual union of husband and wife; as the spiritual union of man and wife, and as the emotional union of husband and wife. That husband and wife become ONE FLESH is, ultimately, the most beautiful AND TRUTHFUL way that God could use to describe the great one-ness of Jesus and His Bride: the Church.
This status of being betrothed comes by the action of the Groom not the bride. The Groom does all the work of obedience and then gives the benefits of his sweat and compliance to His wife-to-be. The Groom wins all the merits so that He can adorn His Bride with the Red Jewels which shine and sparkle with Whiteness. The reality of being One with THE ONE who is with the Father and the Spirit ONE GOD in THREE PERSONS comes to fruition, to consummation by the death of the Groom. In His Body broken on the tree His Bride is given a new body, one first of cruciform shape, but then another one of Good News which belongs to the Bride by Faith. In His Blood shed from the tree the Bride receives her ultimate wedding toast-for only His life flowing for her, will allow her to live in Him, now and forever.
The servants that the King sent to call his guests, which in a mystical way, would have those very wedding guest becoming the Bride themselves, was by using the Hebrew Prophets to broadcast His wedding summons. From Abel to Zechariah, they were treated horribly by their intended audience. Many died and all suffered. The only, the only reason one is not at the wedding banquet is because one has REFUSED to come. The only reason one does not end up spotless, cleansed, and virginally pure is that, that one REJECTS the Groom.
Christ's parable is referencing the end of time when the things belonging to the "rejectors" will be destroyed and their cities, their mammon, will be burned-burned in hell.
The ones who have their cities burned in the parable are the non-believing Jews that spurned Jesus; the non-believing Hebrews who ignored Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micaiah.
But the Good News is that God is so good that even when the ones that the Love and Grace first came to didn't want it, God widens the embracing arms of atonement (which He had always planned to do, in His own way, in His own time) to include all the non-Jews. Those on the highways are the Samaritans and the uncircumcised Galileans. It matters not whether one is a sinner (bad) for when one is gathered by the Lord's servants, His apostles, disciples and pastors, then that one becomes good by virtue of the Groom's imputed virtue. When the Groom marries you, you take His Name: Good/Perfect/Right, and put off your old name, your old Adam bloodlines. You have a new bloodline because you drink the blood of the Ever-Groom.
The ending of the Lord's story is hard, but it too is totally true and yes, Good. You don't "crash" the Lord's Wedding with demands or disrespect. If the 'anti-madonna' and the other Hollywood "types" can chase away and ban paparazzi from attending their multiple weddings, why cannot the Author of Life, the author of the binding together of flesh, require those in the Wedding Hall to be there in faith? The man who is found without a "wedding garment" in the parable is simply a way for Jesus to say that no one climbs in through the window to elope or steal or misappropriate the bride, no one will rape the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church which has been purchased in Blood. The way to wedded bliss, forgiveness of sin, is only through the Door. That Door is Jesus; that Door is daubed in crimson both on the frame + and the lintel. Only he that is Baptized in Christ, into Christ; only He that wears the Christening gown of Jesus, the Lord's own Word Made Flesh, Word Made wet, can inherit the Groom.
You have been called. You have been chosen. Today we celebrate you marriage. Come forward to the head table-there is a toast to be made: This true Body and True Blood of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ strengthens you both in body and soul until life everlasting.