PUTTING ON THE NEW MAN

 A SERMON FOR THE 19TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Both Epistle and Gospel today touch on the same idea, that of making sure we’re dressed right.  We need to be dressed appropriately for whatever we’re doing.  Our Lord gives us the parable of the man who wasn’t dressed properly.  He’s a guest at a wedding feast, not just any old wedding feast, but a royal wedding nonetheless, to which he has been invited by the King himself.  Even an ordinary person’s wedding is a solemn occasion, an important milestone in a person’s life.  In accordance with this solemnity, the bride wears a beautiful white gown, with silk, lace, often with a veil and even a long train.  The groom and his best man are dressed in formal attire too, dress uniform if they’re in the military, or black tuxedoes and bow ties.  In more civilized times, any other kind of dress would have been unthinkable, although sadly, in these modern “enlightened” days, people have become accustomed to pushing the limits of modesty, or even experimenting with other silly ideas, with irreligious music and even fancy-dress based on their favorite movies.

A wedding, though, is a formal occasion, and the clothing of the guests is meant to reflect this.  For us to show up in jeans and a t-shirt would not only detract from the formality of the occasion, but would in fact be an insult to the newly-weds.  This goes for any wedding, let alone a royal wedding such as our blessed Lord describes in his parable today.  The King’s son is getting married.  In England, it’s a big deal when the heir to the throne gets married, and the whole nation unites to celebrate the great event, decorating their villages and organizing special tea parties and dances.  A royal wedding is a hugely solemn affair.  But in today’s Gospel, the King looks around at the guests and finds one man there who just didn’t bother to get dressed up for the occasion.  The King is so furious he can barely speak.  He just manages to sputter out the question to the guest, “What the heck do you think you’re doing, showing up dressed like that?”  Then he turns to the servants, and orders them to drag him out in chains, out into the outer darkness where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

Ouch!  That seems like a rather severe punishment for not making sure your socks match.  But of course, it goes deeper than that.  It’s a parable, so isn’t meant to be taken literally.  What’s our Lord really getting at here?  Does it perhaps mean he’ll punish us if we don’t dress appropriately for church on Sunday morning?  If the men aren’t wearing a jacket and tie, or if the ladies show up in a pant suit?  To be sure, we should dress for Sunday Mass as befits the solemnity of the occasion.  And even though we don’t have a beautiful old gothic cathedral here, with dozens of altar boys and a choir to rival that of the Mormon Tabernacle, the Mass is still the Mass, and we should be in our Sunday best for it.  Certainly, we should not insult the King of kings by coming to his wedding feast dressed in our everyday clothes.  But as I said, it goes deeper than that.

St. Paul explains it more fully.  “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” he says, “and that ye put on the new man.”  It’s not the clothes that matter so much, not what covers the body.  What is important is the soul inside that body of ours, and how we clothe that soul.  St. Paul reminds us that we need to dress our soul in the image of God, “a new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”  When we show up for Mass on Sunday, and even more importantly, when we show up for Holy Communion at the communion rail here, we must ask ourselves, is our soul dressed appropriately, in righteousness and true holiness?  If we’ve arrived at the wedding feast in the spiritual equivalent of jeans and t-shirt, we need to go to the men’s room and change into our tuxedo there.  We need to go to the confessional and put on the new man, to dress our soul in the fresh, clean, and crisply pressed suit of righteousness and true holiness.  Because if we were to go to Communion, God forbid, in the state of mortal sin, then we would call down upon us the condemnation of the King of kings, and would be worthy indeed, by our act of sacrilege, of being cast into the outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Now we know how to dress properly for Mass, how can we enforce this spiritual dress code of holiness on others?  The truth is, we can’t.  Parents can certainly enforce frequent Confession, daily prayers, Mass attendance, and catechism lessons on their children.  But when they become adults, it’s up to each individual to take care of his own soul.  In this sense, we are truly not our brother’s keeper.  We traditional Catholics sometimes find it frustrating that we can’t make other people see where they’re going wrong, and we tend to over-compensate for this frustration by being overly zealous about their outward appearance.  I’ve been in churches where the ushers stand at the door before Mass, armed with tape measures and long shawls, imposing the letter of a long-obsolete law on the innocent victims of today’s modern culture.  I’ve known elderly gentlemen to be forbidden Holy Communion because they’re not wearing a tie.  Is this truly what we’re all about?  Is the value of a man to be based on a tie? 

It’s a dangerous approach to the faith, and on so many levels.  So many have been scandalized by such behavior, so many souls, I fear, lost forever by the display of pharisaical and judgmental hypocrisy that goes on in some traditional churches.  Just as we should not judge a book by its cover, nor should we judge a man’s worthiness to enter a church by the clothes he wears.  Just as on the deeper level, we should not deny entry into our churches to sinners.  Because aren’t we all sinners, after all? 

And yet, the King in today’s Gospel most certainly did judge the wedding guest by his clothes, so what’s our Lord telling us here?  Is it the opposite of what I’m saying?  That we really should judge a man by what he’s wearing?  No, obviously not.  Don’t forget, we’ve already determined that his clothes were chosen out of deliberate disrespect for the King and his newly-wed son, or at least out of inexcusable negligence.  The sin lies not in the actual clothes so much as in the attitude we have in wearing them.  And sinners may come to church and attend Mass, but if their intention is to receive Holy Communion sacrilegiously, as, for example certain pro-abortion Catholic politicians do, then the sin is so great as to merit God’s eternal wrath.

So let’s dress for the occasion!  And let’s not judge others on how they’re dressed.  Sure, we might notice that a fellow-churchgoer he hasn’t bothered to comb his hair, or polish his shoes or wear a nicely pressed shirt.  We might even think to ourselves that he’s a slob!  And maybe he is.  But slobs can go to heaven.  Meanwhile, the impeccably clothed Pharisee, dressed to the nines, might not.  It’s not the clothes that merit eternal life, but, as we noted, the honorable and righteous state of holiness that clothes the man inside, the soul.  The external details can never give the full picture of a man’s worth.  And as we know, no one except God himself is capable of judging the internal state of another man’s soul. 

Likewise, we shouldn’t dress for church to impress our fellow parishioners.  And certainly, we shouldn’t wear our “holiness” on our sleeves either.  Holiness means loving God constantly, at all times, and with our whole heart and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we should always be showing off our love to anyone watching.  Love is something that is shown by our willingness to sacrifice, not by our eagerness to impress.

The ultimate moral of the story is that we must use our prudence, to know not just what clothes to dress in, but also how to act in all things.  Always with righteousness and holiness, but once we’ve got that figured out, the means by which we act with that righteousness and holiness.  If we’re not offending God, there’s a time and place for everything.