The hard question about the wedding guest in Matthew 22 who shows up without the wedding garment is: What exactly does he do wrong?

Today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 22 is about the guest, invited at the last minute (or so it seems), who shows up at the wedding not wearing the wedding garment. Far from being chided for not knowing the proper etiquette, he is singled out by the king, confronted and questioned, and then bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness. Embarrassing as it might be to admit, this rather terrible story has a comic tinge for me because of our own wedding an alarmingly long time ago. On that hot summer day in Irving, Texas, one of the guests in the small chapel was a student in the creative writing program who showed up wearing jeans and a red checked shirt. I’m sure they were his best jeans—maybe even his best shirt. I thought it was funnier than my wife and (especially) my father-in-law did.

Jesus is speaking to “the chief priests and the elders of the people,” and the context makes it clear that this parable about inviting people to the wedding feast for the king’s son is about the history of God’s dealings with Israel, including the history of maltreatment of the prophets and now the rejection of Jesus Himself. The invitation comes to those who might seem most appropriate for it, and they scorn it. Why? Because they possess high station and the esteem of others, the things that matter to them. Secure in what they think they know and what they have, they react violently to the radical intervention of real grace, the offer of something magnificent beyond their ken. They disdain the extraordinary generosity of the invitation and are themselves disdained. Those who had not been especially prepared and privileged become the beneficiaries of the king’s invitation. Clearly, Jesus means the Gentiles, including most of those who might be reading presently.

But the hard question is about the wedding guest who shows up without the wedding garment. What exactly does he do wrong? I associate him with our clueless friend—but perhaps I simply need to admit that his attire wasn’t funny at the time. How hard is it to find out the proper dress for a solemn occasion? Reading the parable, we have to speculate about the motives of the wedding guest, but they are not hard to guess. He thinks there should be plenty to eat and drink in the rich man’s house. And, hey, showing up at all should count for something—right?—especially since all those other people didn’t want to come? See, I’m here for your boy. He’s doing the king a favor. Why should he change clothes? He comes as he is, ready to party.

This presumption draws a punishment almost as fierce as the obliteration of the first refusers of the invitation. Out he goes. Our own wedding guest escaped being tied up like a rodeo calf and thrown into a cactus, but now that I think about it…. Analogies multiply, of course, from a parable like this one, which is about the call to salvation and true conversion of the heart.

It’s good to remember what’s really being called for, and especially good to remember it at the beginning of another school year here at Wyoming Catholic College. There have been students in my experience—rarely at WCC, but not infrequently elsewhere—who did not wear what we might call the wedding garment for the life of the mind. They wore whatever and slouched in their seats, as easy to spot as old Jimmy was at our wedding. They thought they were doing you a favor by poking around a little in Homer or Plato or the Bible—giving the old stuff a chance even though nobody else wanted it these days.

God help them. I won’t pursue the analogy. I’ll just say the unimaginable magnificence has to be earned, first of all by showing up with humility and honoring the occasion.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s weekly newsletter.

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The featured image is “A Boyar Wedding Feast” (1883) by Konstantin Makovsky, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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