In today’s Gospel reading (Mat 22:1-14) our Lord presents another parable designed to help us understand what the Kingdom of Heaven is, and how we are to pursue a life within it.
He begins once again by placing the Father squarely at the focus of the parable—the ‘certain King.’ This time He also placed Himself within the parable as the focus this King’s action—He ‘arranged a marriage for His Son.’
As Americans, most have probably never encountered a person who has undergone an “arranged marriage.”
In our society, at any given wedding, the bridegroom is almost irrelevant. It’s all about the bride, isn’t it?
Not so in cultures where the marriage is determined by the parents, who pick a lifetime partner for their son and/or daughter, and wherein the young people are committed by the promises of the parents to be joined in marriage, sometimes never having met each other beforehand. I had a young man from India who worked for me for years, and he went home to India to meet his wife and to be married to the woman selected by his parents for him.
In today's parable, our Lord doesn’t speak of the Bride. There certainly is one, and we recognize Her as the Church. But she was selected by the Father, the ‘King’ in the parable. In our case, she was created by the Father, Who gives her to His Son in the way that we as Orthodox people pray all marriages are ordered—sacrificially, the Bridegroom giving Himself sacrificially for the sake, for the well-being, and in our case, for the salvation of His bride!
And the King announces the event, the Feast is prepared. The words of our Lord give the clear implication that none of those who were invited chose to accept the invitation. Worse than refusing to come, they became violent, and the servants sent to issue the call (the prophets) those invited treated them spitefully, and killed them.
The King destroys these people, along with their city (Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD), and orders His servants to issue the invitation to any others who can be found (many are called). St. Matthew records that these servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. This is always a comforting thing for me to read, for if both the bad and the good are invited, there’s still hope for me!
It’s only after this that we encounter the man who came without a wedding garment, and who had no explanation as to why he was there and unprepared. It is this unpreparedness that causes the King to expel him, casting him into outer darkness. And it is this casting out that brings our Lord to the parable’s ending phrase, For many are called, but few are chosen.
How many are in “many”? How much less are contained in “few”? “Many” carries the implication of being a majority—more than half. “Few” must be a minority—less than half.
Where am I inside of these two groups, one that is at the Lord’s left hand as goats at the Judgment, and one that is at His right hand as sheep? None of us will know with certainty until that final call to Judgment. But inside the world in which we live, isn’t the call of the world to be part of the majority? Be popular. Be “in with the in crowd,” to use an expression from a generation ago.
No—I’ll choose to go the non-conforming route, please. There may be trouble for me within the world if I don’t conform, but there’s security in eternity if I go against the grain. Put me with the few, please.
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