We're Told to Be the Part, Not Dress the Part

28th Sunday of the Year

When the pandemic came and the world shut down and our churches closed, I was sent to live at a parish out in Baltimore County. I didn’t know the parish or its parishioners, and I didn’t really know the priests who lived there. When the seminaries closed, the folks at the Office of Vocations went to work finding us parishes at which to stay, and there was no real method to the madness. A priest would say ‘Yes, I can take a seminarian,’ and then a random seminarian would be sent to live there. So, about the middle of March 2020, I found myself living in a new parish belonging to people I did not know and would not meet.

I was a deacon at the time, but when the live-streaming of Masses started, I asked the pastor if I could sit in the pews during the liturgy and receive the Eucharist off-camera. I did not like the image of me, a stranger to the parish, receiving the Eucharist each day while everyone else remained trapped at home watching me. The very idea made me feel privileged and entitled. The pastor told me that these were good people who would understand that I’m a deacon, a seminarian still, in formation for the priesthood, and would not think of me as a privileged, entitled stranger at all. He told me that these parishioners would want me to continue with my formation, and that the parishioners would understand that formation for priesthood requires access to the sacraments.

My feelings of self-conscious privilege and entitlement only intensified once a parishioner, a member of the Hispanic community there, started coming to the parish for Mass each day. He would not come into the church. He knew that was against the rules. But the church had big glass windows at the back end of the narthex, maybe 10 feet tall, and from the courtyard outside the church you could look straight into the sanctuary. Every day this man would come at the start of Mass, take his place outside of the big windows, and kneel down while we prayed the liturgy inside the church.

He would kneel for the whole Mass, watching us, praying with us. He came each day, no matter the weather: cold, rain, wind, it did not matter, the man came and prayed outside the church during Mass. Finally, after weeks of witnessing the man’s devotion under strict instruction to not reward the man’s faith, the pastor broke down. ‘I just can’t take it anymore,’ he told me during Holy Week, watching the man kneel for hours outside in the dark. So, the pastor went outside and gave the man the Eucharist. He probably should have done it weeks earlier.

I wanted to tell you that story because it is the one time in my life that I know with absolute certainty that I have seen a person of faith come to Mass offering everything they have to the Lord in reverent, wholehearted worship. That is the one time in my life that I know I have seen real Eucharistic devotion. And I don’t mean that none of the rest of us believe in the Eucharist or are wholeheartedly devoted to Christ. That is not what I mean. I just mean that it is very hard to know what is going on inside of a person’s head and heart at any given moment. I also mean that sometimes circumstances conspire to help us see better. Taking the Mass away, closing churches, telling people to stay home—those protective measures gave me a chance to see something with a depth of clarity that I probably would never have noticed in ordinary circumstances.

In the Gospel today, Christ gives us an image of the Eucharistic banquet. The Father has prepared a feast in honor of his Son, and those who want to belong to the Kingdom are invited to share in the celebration. In our First Reading from the Book of Isaiah, we are given an image of a time of peace and restoration, a time beyond death and corruption, when the peoples of every nation will come to the Lord in worship and devotion. The First Reading gives a broader context to the Gospel, and the meaning of the readings is clear enough: the Father wants everyone, anyone, to come to the banquet, to share in the celebration.

But there are two problems.

The first problem that the Parable makes clear to us is that many will reject the invitation. Some refuse to come. Many people, we are told, refuse to come because they are preoccupied with other good things—these people have work to do, businesses to run, farms to manage, and so they refuse the invitation. Others are offended by the very thought of interrupting their lives for a wedding feast, and so they beat and murder the messengers.

You don’t have to do too much thinking to see the parallels between the image that Christ gives in the Parable and the world in which we find ourselves today. Many people are preoccupied with other good things in life—work, family, business—and they refuse the invitation to share in the Eucharistic banquet. Others are offended by the very thought that they are invited to live differently, interrupt their lives for some king, and so they direct their anger and frustration at the Church. And that is you and me. We are those messengers sent out by the king, and if we are doing our jobs well, we are inviting lots of people to a wedding feast and sometimes getting beaten up for it.

But our work matters. No one in the Parable finds out about the wedding feast at all without the work of the messengers.

The second problem that the Parable makes clear to us is that some will accept the invitation but come to the wedding feast casually, comfortably, on their own terms.

But when the king came in to meet the guests,
he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment.
The king said to him, 'My friend, how is it
that you came in here without a wedding garment?'

The teaching here is as much for us inside of the Church as for those outside of the Church. And there is a bad way to understand Christ’s meaning. He is not telling us that the solution to our problems in the Church is that everyone who comes to the Eucharistic banquet must wear a fine dress or an expensive suit, shoes shined, maybe a nice hat. Christ isn’t telling us that real devotion, real gratitude for the invitation, means looking a certain way, dressing a certain way. We have spent enough time in the Church allowing external appearances to conceal corrupt and broken interior realities. Looking a certain way may or may not reveal the truth of someone, and that was as true for the scribes and pharisees of Christ’s time as for the scribes and pharisees of our own.

What Christ is telling us is that real devotion and real gratitude means bringing your best, everything you have to offer, to the wedding feast. We need to take the invitation seriously, as though the invitation to the Eucharistic banquet is the most important event to ever take place in our lives—because it is.

Whatever your best is, whatever your everything is, that is what you need to bring to Christ. We take life so casually at times. We take the most important parts of life for granted sometimes. There is a decent chance that most of us, at least once in life, have taken some other wedding and some other wedding feast for some other person more seriously than the Wedding Feast of the Lamb to which we are invited each Sunday. And there is our problem, and there is the reason why Christ needs to give us this Parable.

We need to be reminded sometimes to bring our best, our everything, to Christ in devotion and thanksgiving.

What does that look like, to bring your best and your everything, to Christ in devotion and thanksgiving? I think those are questions that we can only answer for ourselves. You are the only person who can know if what happens in this Basilica on Sundays is the most important moment of your week, if that is even the framework by which you try to make sense of your life. These are not easy questions to answer, and it might take us a lifetime to get it right. But that is why Christ gives us the Parable. He wants us to know what matters most. He wants us to see with perfect clarity what is happening with our liturgy and our worship and our devotion and how our lives need to look different because we have accepted the invitation to the wedding feast.

I know that at least one time in my life, I have seen a person bring his best and his everything to Christ in devotion and gratitude. Circumstances conspired to let me see the faith of that man with perfect clarity. His life looked different because of his faith, because he had accepted the invitation to the feast, kneeling there outside in the rain just hoping to catch a glimpse of Christ in person.  

Homily preached on October 15th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary