On Sunday, 6 September, the parable of the marriage feast of the king’s son (Matthew 22:2-14) is read at the Divine Liturgy, the Gospel appointed for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
A king makes a marriage feast for his son and sends his servants to call those who were bidden, and they will not come. He sends word a second time that the table is ready, and still they do not come: one goes off to his farm, another to his business, while the rest lay hands on the messengers, treat them shamefully and kill them. The king then sends his armies against the murderers, and commands his servants to go out to the highways and call whomever they find. The wedding hall fills with guests. And when the king comes in to look at them, he sees among them a man who is not clothed in a wedding garment. He asks him how he came in so, the man is silent, and he is cast out.
The call reached everyone on the roads. After the hall was full, the King came in to examine those who had entered, and one of them was found without a wedding garment. Here lies the weight of the parable: this man had not stayed outside. He had been called and had come in, like the others.
Those bidden first
Some of those bidden first do not resist out of hatred. One has work at his farm, another has business to see to. Tilling the ground and trading are lawful things, and necessary ones; they ruin a man when they are set before the call of God. The king was calling them to a marriage feast, and they had no time even for that.
The same reasons are heard today, said differently. A man puts off prayer until he has finished what he has to finish, puts off confession until a heavier season has passed, puts off coming to church until things settle. Nothing that holds him back is evil in itself, and for that very reason the delay comes easily and goes unnoticed.
The indifference of the beginning does not remain indifference. The rest do not stop at avoiding the servants; they rise against them. These servants are the prophets and the apostles, through whom God made His call known down the ages, and many of them were killed by those to whom they had been sent.
Out to the highways
The hall does not remain empty. The servants go out to the roads and gather all whom they find. In this wedding hall we may see the Church and, through her, the call to the Kingdom of God: men of every kind are gathered, “both bad and good”. The call is not payment for a worthiness a man possessed beforehand.
Saint John Chrysostom asks why Christ names this summons a “marriage”, and answers that in this way God’s loving care for men is shown to us, and the gladness of what He has prepared. This is why the end of the parable is so grave: the call is a gift, and the gift asks for an answer.
The marriage, however, means more than a banquet. The Bridegroom is Christ and the Church is His bride, and the same saint brings forward here the witness of the Apostle Paul concerning the great mystery of Christ and the Church. Saint Gregory the Dialogist carries the image as far as the Incarnation: our Maker came as a Bridegroom to unite the Church to Himself. The call, then, is not merely an invitation to come to a place, but a call to union with Christ.
Why the first did not come
The difference does not lie between men who were working and men who were idle. Nowhere does the Gospel say that those at the crossroads had nothing to do; it says only that they were found on the road. Saint John Chrysostom, in his sixty-ninth homily on Matthew, points to the cause elsewhere.
Those bidden first knew of the marriage beforehand. The king is not calling them then for the first time; he sends word to “those who were bidden” and “those who were called”, that is, to men who had received the news long before. The saint dwells on precisely this detail and says that it makes their guilt heavier. They had been called through the prophets, then through John the Baptist, then by the Son Himself, who called to Himself all who labour and are heavy laden.
The second thing that sets them apart is that they had something to weigh against the call. “I have work at my farm” is a weighing: the call was set beside something else and came out the lighter. Saint John Chrysostom does not accept the excuse. The reasons they put forward look sound, he says, but when spiritual things call us no human business can compel us to stay away; and those men were covering their negligence with them. The Gospel says it as briefly: it was not lack of time that held them, but that “they made light of it, and went their ways”.
Those on the road receive the call unexpectedly. The Gospel does not say what they left behind, nor whether they had fewer cares than the first. It says only what matters for the parable: they came. And Saint John Chrysostom adds a word that cuts down all pride: they received at once, with no worthiness of their own, what had long been prepared for the others.
The parable does not say, then, that poverty is a worthiness and work a fault. Two details stand against such a reading: those gathered from the roads are “both bad and good”, and the man without a garment had come from the crossroads as well. The crossroads gives no one anything; it only fails to hold a man in place.
What the parable shows is something else: the man who already has something he holds dearer does not come. It is not the farm that keeps him, but the price he has set upon it. In expounding the parable, Saint John Chrysostom sets beside it the word of the Apostle Paul to those who would not receive the preaching: seeing they judge themselves unworthy of everlasting life, he turns to the Gentiles (Acts 13:46). It was not the king who first counted them unworthy. They counted themselves so, by the way they answered.
The interpretation does not stay in the past. The saint turns to those listening to him and bids them remember whence they were called: from the road, lame and halt in soul, which is worse than any maiming of the body. The man brought in out of mercy has no worthiness of his own to produce. What remains to him is to wear with honour the gift he has received.
The man without a garment
The Gospel does not explain what the wedding garment is, nor where the man called from the crossroads was to have got it. Just here the interpretation of the Fathers begins. They do not look first for an explanation in some custom of the weddings of old, but in the state of the man who has received God’s call.
And they do not all answer alike.
Saint Cleopa of Sihăstria binds the wedding garment to Holy Baptism and says that this garment is Christ Himself: “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). The Christian does not enter the new life naked; he receives a gift he cannot give himself: union with Christ.
This interpretation is not merely a beautiful image. It stands within the service of Baptism itself. There the Church prays that the one baptized may preserve “the garment of Baptism and the earnest of the Spirit undefiled and blameless in the terrible day of Christ our God”, and after he comes up from the water she clothes him in a white robe with the words: “The servant of God (N.) is clothed with the robe of righteousness”. The bond between garment, Baptism and judgment is therefore no late construction of preachers: it stands in the very prayer by which the Church receives a man into the new life.
Saint John Chrysostom looks at the same garment from the side of what follows Baptism. He says very plainly that the garment is a man’s life and conduct. The call is a gift: no one earned his place at the table. The cleansing is a gift as well. But once a man has been called, God asks that his life not remain the same. The man with the defiled garment, he says, is the one who departs from this life with his soul still uncleansed.
Here one sees why the name of Christian, or a visible entry into the Church, is not enough. Grace calls him, cleanses him and works in him, and the man answers freely and labours together with the grace he has received.
Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid says concretely what this garment is made of: the man who is not clothed in mercy, kindness and brotherly love is like the one found without a garment at the feast. He had been called and had entered, but his life had not come to resemble the life of Him who called him.
Saint Gregory the Dialogist lays the weight on a single word: love. A man may be inside the hall, may have faith, may be reckoned among those called, and yet remain without the garment, if he has no love for God and for his neighbour.
These interpretations are not identical, and they must not be forced into a single definition. They look at the same image from different angles. Saint Cleopa reads it from the side of Baptism: the garment is Christ, with whom we have been clothed. Saint John Chrysostom reads it from the side of ascetic labour: the garment is a man’s life and conduct. Saint Gregory the Dialogist goes so far as to say that the garment cannot be Baptism or faith, since these are already presupposed by entering the Church at all; for him the garment is love.
The image of the garment thus takes in the whole road of the Christian: Christ received as a gift, the life changed by grace, and the love by which that life is made visible.
This is why the man in the parable is not condemned for having been found at the crossroads, nor for his poverty. All had been called from there. His guilt begins after the call, for he is not a pagan left outside the feast, but a man already within.
The king’s question does not concern the road he came from, but the manner of his coming in.
The parable says something troubling: it is possible to have answered the call and yet not to have let it change your life. The first part of the parable warns those who refuse the call; the second warns those who have received it.
“And he was speechless”
The man defends himself with nothing. He who has something to say, says it; this man had nothing.
His silence is the heaviest part of the parable, for nothing had been refused him: he had received the call, and the door had been opened to him. Here each of us should stop, for this question will be put to us as well.
“Bind him hand and foot”
The punishment is not confined to being put out from the table. The king commands: “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness”.
Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid sees in the binding of hands and feet the end of the time in which a man may still work at the amendment of his life. Here we can still repent, forgive, give alms, rise after a fall. After the judgment there begins no second life in which to mend what we would not change here.
Saint John Chrysostom says the same briefly when he shows what it means to come in with a defiled garment: to depart from this life with one’s life unclean.
This is why the call to repentance is urgent. Not because God would ever cease to be merciful, but because this life is the time in which our freedom can answer His mercy.
How the garment is kept
The garment received at Baptism can be defiled by sin, but a man is not left without a way of return. Saint John Climacus calls repentance the renewal of Baptism.
The cleansing is worked through repentance, and the Mystery of Confession is the place where sin confessed receives absolution. Repentance does not end with the confessing, however: it goes on through the change of life, the struggle with the passions, prayer, fasting and almsgiving, reconciliation with those we have quarrelled with, and the guarding of the mind.
The guarding of the mind is what the Fathers call watchfulness: attention to what stirs in the heart. The thought received today becomes tomorrow’s deed, and he who guards his thought guards his garment as well.
Saint Cleopa recalls the duty of those clothed with Christ: to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light (Romans 13:12), that is, tender mercy, kindness, humility, meekness and longsuffering, and above all these, love (Colossians 3:12-14).
The garment is not paid for to the King with a set number of akathists or days of fasting. Fasting, prayer and akathists are means of repentance and of drawing near to God, not a coin with which to persuade Him. The garment is cleansed by repentance and shown in the life of every day, in the word we speak and in the way we treat the one beside us.
“Many are called, but few are chosen”
The parable ends with a heavy word: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).
This word does not say that God appoints beforehand who is to be saved. The call went out to the crossroads and took in all who were there, without distinction. The choosing passes through the answer each one gives: who comes and who stays at his farm, who keeps the garment and who casts it off.
The wedding is ready
On Sunday morning this call is made to be heard again. “Come to the marriage” is not a word left behind with the men of long ago; the King’s servants go out to the crossroads today as well, and the table is prepared.
As long as a man lives, the door of repentance stands open. The King does not ask where you have come from, but what you have done with the call you received.