"Parable of the Wedding Guests"

This parable is about a wedding feast a king prepares for his son. When all the arrangements are made, he dispatches servants to escort the invited, “but they refused to come.” A second effort is met with both indifference and vehemence — “some ignored the invitation and went away” but others “laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.” Just as last week, after the wicked tenant farmers kill the owner’s son-heir outside the vineyard, so these wicked guests, too, are “destroyed,” their city “burned.”

Having a banquet surplus but a deficit of guests, the king then literally has his servants beat the bushes, “invit[ing] to the feast whomever [they] … find” so that the reception hall is “filled” with “bad and good alike.”

Once the banquet is underway, the king comes to meet his guests. As he makes his way around the hall, “he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment.” He stops and asks the man why he came inappropriately attired to a royal wedding feast. “But he was reduced to silence,” i.e., he had nothing to say for himself. So, the king orders him cast out, bound hand and foot, “into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

The short form of the Gospel reinforces the message: the dereliction by Israel’s politico-religious establishment of its duties towards God. Jesus spoke of that establishment in terms of the obsequious son who fails to keep his word and the wicked tenant farmers who seek to expropriate the owner’s vineyard for himself. This week, the establishment is the invited guests who have better things to do than attend the royal wedding of their king’s son. They’re either indifferent or downright hostile.

In the Church’s tradition, the wedding feast  can be seen as an analogy to the Eucharist, the “bread of heaven,” a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. In his antiphon for Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the Blessed Sacrament as “O Sacred Banquet, where Christ becomes our food! The memorial of his passion is renewed, our soul is filled with grace, and we receive a pledge of the glory to come!”

The lack of a proper wedding garment was understood as the lack of sanctifying grace, an irreverent or even unworthy reception of the Eucharist.