Homily for the Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

October 15, 2023
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, Texas

Isaiah 25:6-10a
Psalm 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6
Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20
Matthew 22:1-14

The readings that the Church offers us for our reflection on this Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time present us with two symbolic examples of garments. There is the wedding garment from Jesus’ parable and there is the veiling of death (a shroud) from the first reading from Isaiah. These two garments represent two possibilities for our decision that the Lord offers us along with His invitation to follow Him. They represent two pathways: the way of life and the way of death. They call to mind the option presented in the thirty-first chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, “I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing, and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.”

Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast was addressed to the chief priests and elders of His day. A wedding is not simply a private event between two individuals. A wedding involves the commitment through vows between a man and a woman who in so doing agree to establish a household. A wedding is also a communal celebration because in the exchange of vows between a husband and wife, two families come together and are united through the couple.

The wedding celebration given by the King for his son and his son’s bride represents the wedding between Christ and the Church. The Church is the communion of the baptized and fully initiated sacramentally. Christ is fully human and fully divine and His marriage to the Church, His Bride, unites divinity and humanity in perfect and sacrificial love.

Parables tell us something about God more than they tell us something about ourselves. This parable speaks of God’s generosity in giving His Son and in offering us a share in His divine life that requires us to be washed clean of sin and to turn away from an old life. Jesus addresses this parable to us, but His first intended audience of the parable was the religious leadership of His day: the Temple Priesthood, the Scribes, and the Pharisees. They are represented by the indifferent who do not even acknowledge the invitation to the wedding let alone attend. Then there is also the example of the person who is not dressed in his appropriate wedding garment, the baptismal garment. That person represents the presumptuous who are present at the celebration but only on their own terms.

God’s generosity through the wedding of His divinity with our humanity through the grace of baptism in the Church is celebrated with humility by full and active participation in the Eucharist, His banquet. We are to be on guard against indifference and presumption in our own lives. We are present at a wedding banquet, not just a commitment party.

The message of the parable is that God respects our freedom entirely because He is the source of the gift of our freedom. He draws us to Himself in authentic freedom that is intended to bear fruit with unconditional love and lasting peace. This freedom and love come with the enlightenment and illumination of baptismal grace, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the infused moral and theological virtues that bestow upon us the capacity of the moral character of Jesus Christ. The clean and pure baptismal garment covers us with illumination and a new life that is selfless.

It is through Baptism and the subsequent sacraments by which God fulfills His promise articulated by the prophet Isaiah in our first reading: “On this mountain He will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, The web that is woven over all nations. He will destroy death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces; The reproach of His people He will remove from the whole earth; for the LORD has spoken.”

Either our indifference or our presumption of God’s generous love in the gift of His Son, who paid for our salvation from sin by the shedding of His Blood, is a choice, even a passive choice, to remain shrouded in death and sin. It is a choice to settle for temporary survival to stave off the inevitability of death, instead of accepting the gift of new life which only requires our gratitude and our willingness to follow the Lord’s commands and example of humility. In a sense, the indifferent and presumptuous within the Church simply prefer mere co-existence or cohabitation with God without any permanent commitment to give oneself exclusively in love with openness to the new life that only God can give. God offers us generously the gift of our willing and free cooperation with Him in bringing about His plan for our eternal happiness.      

We need not look far, but without fear, at the veil of death with which so many people and nations choose to shroud themselves with indifference and presumption. The veil of death ensnares those who wear it and obscures God from the sight of those who wear it, by compelling servitude to the emotions and the dominance of political ideology for self-interest. The veil of death can be seen in our avoidance of resolving our social problems by instead choosing to kill people — through abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and war as a political tool, thereby closing the door to forgiveness and the restoration of peace which Saint Augustine defines as the tranquility of order. Thus, at the root of terrorism can be found not a cry for justice but contempt for human life. In turn, self-defense is justified towards the restoration of peace, but not the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants and the innocent.

Today as we accept the King’s invitation to the banquet of His Son, we must do so without indifference or presumption. We must do so with a desire for peace in our hearts asking God for the grace of a willingness to forgive as we have been forgiven. We ask to be instruments of His love and peace in this world on His terms not our own. Then we can live in the House of the Lord all the days of our life.