This morning’s Gospel reading is Matthew 22:1–14:

Jesus again in reply spoke to the chief priests and elders of the people in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the feast, but they refused to come. A second time he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those invited: “Behold, I have prepared my banquet, my calves and fattened cattle are killed, and everything is ready; come to the feast.”’ Some ignored the invitation and went away, one to his farm, another to his business. The rest laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.

The king was enraged and sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come. Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.’ The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests.

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?’ But he was reduced to silence. Then the king said to his attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’ Many are invited, but few are chosen.”

How many of us actually have planned a wedding? It’s a massive undertaking, at least in American culture, to pull off a “traditional” wedding — by which we mean a traditional wedding reception. Except for the bride’s dress, the actual wedding is a piece of cake — sorry! — that usually requires the least attention to logistics.

The reception, in our culture, is another matter. One of the best, if off-scale, representations in cinema about this is the 1991 Father of the Bride remake with Steve Martin. He spends a fortune (I calculated at the time ~$150K) and completely remakes his house while undergoing tension over the list of invitees. It’s a ruinously expensive and disruptive event even with the supposedly limited guest list. Although the film doesn’t draw any attention to this point, one is left with the impression that everyone in the movie is missing the point — which is the wedding and marriage, not the party. (In fairness, that’s because Father of the Bride is a light comedy of manners. Lighten up, Francis — er, Ed.)

But if I’d gotten an invitation to a party like that, you’d better believe I would have attended it. I would have had enough sense to dress for the occasion, too, although I can’t guarantee that I could have lived up to the standards of San Marino, the tony LA Foothills neighborhood in which the film was set. I would have known better than to show up in cargo pants and a T-shirt as a way to show my gratitude for the invitation to the $250-a-plate party.

One imagines that the same would have been true in the time of Jesus — both for normal weddings and royal feasts. Jesus tells this parable, as He often does, drawing on the lives and values of His audience to underscore the lessons. The imagery of a wedding is core to our faith, as we expect to join the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the next life, where we will become one with Christ in eternity and enjoy the feast forever.

That analogy is quite clear, but another comes to mind as well. What does the king tell his servants to do with the man who couldn’t be bothered to respect his hosts? “Bind his hands and feet and cast him into the darkness outside,” the king says, “where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” That itself is a curious phrase, one that has an echo in the description of demonic possession in Mark 9:17-18, just after the Transfiguration:

17And one of the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a mute spirit; 18and wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.”

The phrase “gnashing of teeth” comes up more often, and again in the context of those cast out of God’s presence. In Matthew 13:41-43, for instance, Jesus explains the parable of the weeds by telling the disciples that the Messiah and the angels will send all evil and evildoers into “the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus uses the same phrase again while explaining the Judgment in the parable of the talents, the Narrow Door, the unfaithful servant, the three parables of the kingdom, and so on.

What does this mean? We can look back to the Old Testament, where the meanings get more explicit. In Sirach 51 and in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the “gnashing of teeth” came from entities about to devour the writer. In Psalm 37, we hear that “the wicked plots against the righteous, and gnashes his teeth at him.” This goes all the way back to Job 16, where the imagery of devouring is subtle but present:

9He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me. 10Men have gaped at me with their mouth, they have struck me insolently upon the cheek, they mass themselves together against me.

The lesson here is that it’s not just the darkness that the damned will be lamenting, and it won’t be their teeth that are grinding and gnashing. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis paints a much more explicit picture of that part of the afterlife. In Letter 8, the senior demon instructs his junior tempter about the order of the spiritual battle, and the meaning of their purpose:

To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. … We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

Lewis returns to this explanation a number of times in this book, still one of the best treatises on spiritual warfare we have. In Letter 30, near the end, Screwtape sends a very pointed warning to his junior-tempter nephew, after hearing excuses over a serious setback involving his target:

What is the use of whining to me about your difficulties? If you are proceeding on the Enemy’s idea of ‘justice’ and suggesting that your opportunities and intentions should be taken into account, then I am not sure that a charge of heresy does not lie against you. At any rate, you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.

Jesus alludes to the dangers of rejecting the Father’s love and hospitality not just here, but repeatedly. The prophets do the same. The Lord grants us unlimited mercy, but we still have to choose for ourselves whether to accept it and repent. The table will always be set for us, but we have to choose to attend.

This puts the choice in Jesus’ parable in the starkest of terms. The Lord has laid out a banquet fit for kings and invited everyone to the wedding feast of all ranks. Indeed, at this feast, the guests are the bride and Christ is the groom, with a union that will make everyone family and bring eternal abundance. We can either choose to prepare ourselves and come to His wedding feast — or we can choose to be the meal for the demons.

RSVP soon, one way or the other. Chomp chomp.

The front page image is a detail from “Institution of the Eucharist” by Gerard de Lairesse, c. 1700. On display at the Louvre. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.