28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined.

The American journalist H. L. Mencken is perhaps best known for his reporting, for the Baltimore Sun, of the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution in schools, which he dubbed “The Monkey Trial”, as it has been known ever since. On a quotient of quotability, he ranks beneath only his hero Mark Twain, whose quips are so much the stuff of legend that many of the one-liners attributed to him on the Internet are not, in fact, his at all. 

Mencken’s strongest genre is probably the satirical definition, whose pithiness lends itself to quotability. Representative democracy is, for example, “the worship of jackals by jackasses”; and conscience is “the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking”; and Puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

The historians amongst us might observe that this is actually quite unfair to Puritanism, as useful as the trope may be as a foil in sermons in a place like this. In truth, when it comes to a theology of pleasure, Puritans and Anglicans, Protestants and Catholics are not as far apart as we might like to think, in our indulgence in the vanity of small differences. 

We all share a doctrine of creation in which creation is good—indeed, it’s hard not to, seeing as it’s right there in the Book of Genesis. And we also retain the old idea of there being properly and improperly ordered goods, and therefore also rightly and wrongly enjoyed pleasures. Our problem with certain vicious cravings and their fulfilment is not that they are too pleasurable, but that they are not pleasurable enough: they fall short of the supreme joy that God intends for us.

And this is not just the hackneyed and frankly unpersuasive teetotalling thing of “getting high on Jesus”, which pits godly and worldly pleasures directly against one another. For Puritans as for us—indeed, for all Christians—delight in God must be mediated by delight in the world. Being creatures, there is, for us, no creatureless access to God.

It is not for nothing that the language Isaiah employs is deliberately, even gratuitously, decadent. A feast of fat things, full of marrow; a feast of wine, well-refined. With apologies to vegetarians (like my wife), if you have never had roasted bone marrow before, spread on thick crusty sourdough, you might not quite be able to appreciate what Isaiah is doing here. The spiritual and the material are not at all opposed here, but co-mingled; the hedonistic is embraced into the eudaemonic. 

There is much to dislike about the old Jerusalem Bible, but when we eventually replace our copy of the Weekday Missal, I will miss the use of the word “happy” instead of “blessed” in places like the Beatitudes and that bit of Revelation 19 that gives us our Ecce Agnus: happy are those who are called to his supper. It is a real pity that we’ve moved away from the everyday language of happiness, the language of everyday happiness, in talking about spiritual joy.

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This is a very weird parable, not least in its surreal violence. There is a royal wedding, and the king has spared no expense: not only oxen on the barbecue, but veal on the grill as well. And yet the guests refuse to come; returning instead to their desks and dairies, their sheepfolds and spreadsheets. And to add injury to insult, they shoot the messenger. There is retaliation of course, but it seems very far from being a proportional response: there is a massacre, and a razing. 

That’s not even where it ends. Strangers are then invited, no longer from the aristocracy, as we might imagine the original guests were; but from the streets—both bad and good, we are told—the ruffians and ragamuffins alongside the respectable. And this would be a perfectly sensible place for the story to end [as our lectionary asserts] but that’s not all: the king himself sees a man wrongly dressed: his bow tie is a clip on, he is in a morning coat for an evening meal. And instead of offering him more appropriate dress, the king loses his mind altogether: the guest is bound up and chucked out, his eyes weeping and teeth gnashing, his soul full of sorrow and rage. 

No one comes out of this unsullied. No one seems to understand how to behave at a wedding feast; everyone seems really bad at having a good time. The guests prefer work to play, which of course makes them very dull indeed. And, for no discernible reason, they turn to violence. The king also seems afflicted by some kind of psychotic mania; now obsessed with filling the pews, now pedantically policing dress codes. What Jesus himself makes of this tyrannical behaviour is hard to say from the text itself, but even if the king is intended as a flawed character, an antihero, he is nevertheless an effective vehicle for the point compellingly made that unconditional invitations generate obligations all the same, and responsibilities of those who accept them. Grace is free-of-charge, but not cheap. But that’s for another sermon, on another day. 

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For today, let us consider the proposition that for Christians, fun and pleasure—feasting—is serious business.  We are called to be happy, even made for it, our chief end being to enjoy God forever, and that must include a proper participation in God’s rich gifts to us. And we are called also to make such happiness possible for one another: to throw open our doors, and invite in all comers, sharing with them the goodness of God. 

This is, of course, why we do what we do here the way we do it. It is not an accident that the Solemn High Mass is such a sumptuous affair. (We must, by the way, reclaim the word “solemn”, a solemnity for us meaning a joyful feast.) It is also why we stay for coffee and tea and biscuits and cake after Mass; and why we gather at the pub after that. It is why, on the slightest provocation, we pop open bottles of bubbly here. None of this is incidental to the Christian life, but integral to it.

What we do here on Sunday mornings is itself an exercise in learning to delight in good things, and learning to delight in them together, sharing with one another in the gratuitous goodness of God. This is the life of the kingdom of heaven, which is a wedding feast; and so is the Christian life, which is the joy of newlyweds. Whatever else that very weird parable might mean, it surely means that. 

Happy are you who are called to his supper.