Today is the Apodosis, or ‘leave-taking’, of the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God. As we mentioned on that feast, it is a great mystery that God, He Who cannot be contained, willed to be contained within the frail vessel of the Most Pure Virgin. And this condescension of God toward mankind continues to be offered to us, as He deigns to enter into the temple of our bodies through the Body and Blood of our Lord, and through the interaction of the Holy Spirit within each human heart.

Our life is lived within this context of the call of God to Mankind… He calls out to us, He wishes to come and abide in us, He stands at the door of our heart and knocks.

Today’s Gospel provides us with the parable of the call of God, illustrated by the wedding feast. A king arranged a marriage for his son. He prepared a great feast and sent his servants out to invite all of their friends and family. But what happened? Those invited were too busy and had endless excuses to not attend. When the king heard this, he struck out at these negligent people and instead went out into the highways to invite anyone who they came upon. He clothed them in wedding garments and brought them into the feast.

God calls out to us… but do we hear Him? Do we respond as we should? The parable of the wedding feast emphasizes to us that God will not force His Kingdom upon us, if we are negligent, if we prefer our selfish interests above the things of Heaven, we shall be passed by.

There is another important lesson to be learned from today’s Gospel. We see that among those invited and attending the wedding feast, there was a man who was not properly clothed in the wedding garment. The host called him on it and said “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” And the man was speechless... The king then had him ‘bound hand and foot, taken away, and cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen’.

This is a very sobering passage and one which should cause us to stop and think seriously about what it means to us. The thing is, every encounter with God is a moment of crisis and judgment for the soul… But that does not need to be a cause for despair!

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote following:

 “We must recapture an attitude of mind which, usually, we cannot conjure even out of our depth, something which has become strangely alien to us – the joyful expectation of the Day of the Lord – in spite of the fact that we know that his day will be a day of Judgment. It is striking to hear in church that we are proclaiming the Gospel, the gladdening news, of Judgment, but we are proclaiming that the Day of the Lord is not fear but hope and, together with the Holy Spirit, the Church can say: ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly!’ As long as we are incapable of speaking in those terms we are missing something very important in our Christian consciousness. We are still, whatever we may say, pagans dressed up in evangelic garments. We are still people for whom God is a God outside, for whom His coming is darkness and dread, whose judgment is not our redemption but our condemnation, for whom a meeting face to face is a fearful event and not the hour we long and live for.”

How is it that we might be called before God, Who is Most Pure, Who is All Light… that we might anticipate this encounter with joy despite our impurity, our darkness…

What does Christ’s Gospel parable tell us today? The invited guests of the king were clothed in wedding garments… What is this wedding garment that we are to be wearing when we come to the feast of Christ?

It is the white robe of purity, repentance, and selfless love. St. Paul speaks of this robe when he says, ‘For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ’ (Gal. 3:27). At baptism we are cleansed of sin. We are made pure. Yet it is not only at baptism that we put on Christ; if we are true and struggling Christians, we are to put Him on every day. Every day we are to clothe ourselves with His compassion, His kindness, His lowliness, His meekness, His patience, His forgiveness, and above all His love, which binds everything in perfect harmony (Col. 3:12-24).

Our great need today is to wrap ourselves up in the grace of God regularly through faith, prayer, reading the Holy Scriptures, the Sacraments and the total relinquishment of our life into God’s hands. The person who daily wraps himself up in the grace of God covers the nakedness of his soul, and is ‘clothed’ with a security that fears neither illness nor death. In the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us.’ (Romans 8:35-37).

May this be our prayer, may we be good stewards of the blessings given to us by God, may we hear and heed the generous invitation of God to come to His feast, taking care to wrap ourselves in the garment of salvation through heartfelt prayer, sincere repentance, and selfless love. And may the peace and joy that God gives so generously, dwell in our heart all the days of our lives!