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Matthew 22 – Hamas–Israeli War
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In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Every week, as I read the texts of our Gospel passage, our Old Testament
reading, our Psalm and our Epistle, preparing to write a sermon, I try
to read them in the context of whatever is happening in our
world. But this week I wasn’t sure I could do it.
“There are no words,” I thought, “that will bridge the
gaps between the evil attacks Hamas committed this week against the
people of Israel . . . and a Christian
Gospel story about a wedding feast . . .
with the Muslim people of Gaza caught in between. Surely, God is
still in charge,” I thought, “but where is there even a
shred of good news, a glimmer of light in the face of these dark
attacks, these barbarous actions we’ve all been stunned by,
disturbed by this week?”
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That’s what’s been going through my mind these past few
days — the incongruity between a service of praise and thanksgiving
this morning here in our church and the war that’s still
threatening in the Middle East. When I tried to come up with words
of hope for our world and our church this morning — in the context
of a Eucharistic service of praise and thanksgiving — I
wasn’t sure it was even possible.
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But suddenly, I remembered something that Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust
survivor, once wrote. He said that when a wedding procession
encounters a funeral procession in the street, the mourners must
halt — to allow the wedding party to proceed. “Surely
you know what respect we show to our dead,” Wiesel
continued, “but a wedding – a symbol of life and renewal,
a symbol of promise, too – must always take precedence.”
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And with that encouragement in mind, I began to find those signs of life
and hope that are actually embedded in our Gospel story this morning.
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You see, this morning Matthew is not offering us an actual eyewitness
account of a specific wedding reception. He is offering his
listeners a parable that will help them make sense of what they have
just been through. And what the early Christians of Matthew’s
day had just been through is not unlike the dark events you and I have
witnessed this week in the Middle East. For in the days when
Matthew wrote his Gospel, Jerusalem had just been leveled – not by
terrorists and aerial bombs but by Roman soldiers. And the people
of Israel who lived there had all been displaced – driven from
their homes and dispersed all over the Middle East – and
beyond. So, Matthew offers us all – the first century
Christians and the 21st century Christians —
this parable to help us make sense of what we have seen.
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He is telling us that God the Father, represented by the King in the
parablev, has invited us all to the wedding feast of his Son, Jesus
Christ. In fact, his invitation has been on offer for at least
3,000 years, as we all await the great wedding feast of the Lamb of
God to his bride, the Church, at the end of time Early on, the
King sent his servants, the prophets, to invite Israel to the
celebration But Israel rejected those messengers They
scorned some of them, abused others and finally killed the last
one. But God the Father didn’t give up. He then invited
everyone – not just Israel but everyone – to the feast.
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There was just one catch. Everyone who accepted the invitation was
expected to put on a proper wedding suit, a certain garment that the King
himself would supply — by his grace. It wasn’t enough,
you see, to arrive at the feast, ready to eat the fine foods we fancied,
ready to drink the wines we most enjoyed. Everyone was to arrive
properly attired in the robe the King himself promised to give us.
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So, what is that robe? How do we get it? It
isn’t just a cover–up. Instead, it’s the
evidence – the outer evidence — of a transformed life
within, a life transformed by Christ himself. That transformation
begins for Christians when we are baptized, when we commit to being
recreated in the very image of God. When the process is complete
it will show in the kindness of our eyes and the gentleness of our
smiles. But in the meantime, you and I play an important role in
the weaving of our own wedding garments.
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First, we have to understand that the weaving of each garment will take
time. But we contribute to it, we add to it every time we choose
to begin our day in prayer, asking for God’s help in everything
we have to do that day. We help to complete another couple of
stitches every time we say, “Thy will, not mine be
done” — and mean it. And we contribute even more
whenever we say – along with Saint Francis – “Let me
be an instrument of thy peace – that the world may see the love
of God in me.” And finally, we contribute to our own wedding
garment again every time we come here to this church – choosing
to praise God choosing to thank him for all we have learned this
week – even though we don’t entirely understand all we
have seen, all we’ve been through. For the Lord is honored by
our praise, our trust, our faith. The woven garment, you see,
comes from within, from our hearts – a gift by grace to each
one of us from the Father and the Son themselves.
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And it’s hardly – exclusively — a Christian
thing. I was touched to my depths this week by an interview I
saw on CNN of a Jewish father, a factory owner in Gaza, who had just
learned that his teenage daughter had been found and identified among
the dead at the site of the dance where the Hamas gunmen had first
attacked — a dance that was meant to be a celebration of Peace
and Love. He and his family had received that devastating news
less than an hour before – and had just begun to sit shiva for
her, to mourn her death. But when the interviewer asked him to
comment on Hamas, he said,
“I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk
about peace. I want to talk about all the Palestinians we have
employed over the years in our factory, treating them exactly as we
have treated our Israeli employees. For when all this is over,
that is the world we are hoping for and working toward – a world
where we can all live together in peace.”
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That is the spirit we are celebrating here this morning. That is
the light of Christ already emerging, already breaking through the
profound darkness that has threatened our world this week. And
that is why we can come together this morning to sing. To God
be the glory!
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Amen.
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