Saint Julian of Norwich, by Gracie Morbitzer, who visited St. Paul’s earlier this year. Prints of Morbitzer’s Julian and several other saints are on the walls of our offices.
Alright. Here’s how I see things. We could do this the easy way, or we could do this the hard way.
Saint Paul is the good cop. He offers us a carrot; he kills us with kindness. He invites us to join the challenging mission and ministry of Jesus Christ with warm greetings and sanguine encouragement. He says that we are his “joy and crown,” that he “loves and longs for” us. He wants us to “stand firm” and he encourages us to “think about” good things like “whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable.” These are bracing exhortations! But he challenges us to do all of that while blanketing us with his gentle affection.
And he sings us a song that has sounded down the ages:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
My mother loved this passage of Scripture. She stressed two words in particular: “with thanksgiving.” “Do not worry about anything,” she would say, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” She loved that “thanksgiving” bit. We pray for things with thanksgiving, as if our prayers have already been answered. She believed this. She encouraged it. She did not survive her affliction with ovarian cancer, and yet I believe she thought her prayers were nonetheless answered. She received the healing she truly needed. And she gave thanks for that.
So that’s the “good-cop” version of today’s Good News. Paul certainly loses his cool in other places in his letters, but in his letter to the Philippians, our patron is a cozy down comforter, stirring our souls to go from here to love and serve the Lord, all of it with tenderness and kindness and compassion. It’s a lovely vision, an encouraging approach, a good way to proclaim the Gospel.
But then there’s the bad cop.
“But when the king came in to see the [wedding] guests,” Jesus thunders in his dark parable, “[the king] noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
How harsh! How unnerving. How rude. How can this be Good News? We will have to unpack it. We will have to spend some time with the hard words of Jesus if we want to understand what he is saying, and saying with such passionate urgency.
First, the wedding robe. We need to know what the wedding robe might be, what it might represent. And Saint Julian of Norwich offers us an answer. Many of you know about Julian, but in case you aren’t quite sure, she was a fourteenth-century woman whose actual name is unknown to us. She lived alone in a hut attached to Saint Julian’s Church, and so, without knowing her actual name, we call this nameless solitary woman Julian.
I think you would love her. She appears in icons with a cat on her lap. Legend says she would stick her hand through a small hole in the wall to receive Eucharist from the priest in the adjoining chancel. She had visions, and her ecstasy in the presence of God was intense and joyful.
Julian wrote with feverish excitement about God as our clothing, and about us as God’s clothing. The Lutheran scholar Gail Ramshaw, a contemporary of ours who visited St. Paul’s Seattle earlier this year, says that “Julian wrote of Christ as having taken on our human tunic.” He put on our humanity, a rough tunic “‘dyed with the sweat of his body, close-fitting and short and threadbare.’” Julian then wrote that we have “received, in a merciful exchange, the cloak of Christ, that wraps us round with endless love.”
Ramshaw then writes that “Julian… moves one step more with her image of clothing. Not only do we enjoy wearing Christ, but ‘we are his crown’; that is, Christ is wearing us. Not only are we wrapped round with the cloak of Christ, but Christ is arrayed with us.” And finally Ramshaw shares this lovely quotation from Julian: “‘Our good Lord is our clothing that, for love, wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.’”
Imagine Christ as a terrycloth robe enveloping you in soft warmth. Or Christ as your favorite sweatshirt, cozy and comfortable, inspiring you to stretch out under a blanket (the blanket: that’s Christ, too) for a quiet afternoon nap. Christ as our clothing, “embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.”
Now take one more imaginative step. Christ is your wedding garment, your best outfit, the dress that makes you look healthy and lovely, and sets off your eyes; the suit that subtly complements your earrings or your necklace… or if your tastes run masculine, your boutonnière or your pocket square. Oh, you look so good in this wedding outfit! You’re dashing; you’re dazzling; you’re a knockout.
We Christians have, for centuries now, proclaimed the theological idea of Christ as our clothing in the baptismal garment, the white robe. The insider word for this robe is alb. Your altar servers wear albs, a word that simply means “white.” The alb is a sign of our baptismal identity. When we hold the cup to your lips, our white albs are our Christ-clothing, our Christ-robe, our Christ-sweatshirt, our Christ-blanket. But I hope you also take notice of this: the work we do in our Christ-clothing is the work of a servant.
And now we’re ready to return to the hard words of Jesus in today’s Good News. He scolds the wedding guest for not wearing the wedding robe, casting him out to the place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It sounds harsh! It sounds mean and angry, not very “Jesus-y.” But this is the insight; this is the meaning of the harsh words: this wedding guest was rejecting the servant identity we share in Christ. His refusal to wear the robe rejects the challenging mission and ministry of the Risen One.
“‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’” Jesus quotes the enraged king saying, and you can just hear how dangerous and ironic he sounds when he utters that word ‘friend’. (Matthew uses the very same Greek word for ‘friend’ later on when Jesus says to Judas, who is about to betray him, “Friend, do what you are here to do.”)
Confronted by the angry king, the underdressed wedding guest is rendered “speechless.” He has nothing to say to explain his refusal, or his rejection, of the Gospel. He is no better than the first people to be invited to the banquet who “made light” of the invitation, and even attacked the king’s slaves when they went to them to call them to the feast.
Clearly, the community that gave us Matthew’s Gospel is struggling with people who rejected the movement, who belittled the call to discipleship, who “made light” of the Good News. So the “bad cop” approach of Jesus today, as off-putting and even upsetting as it might be in our hearing, starts to make a little more sense. The mission matters. The Gospel is urgently needed. Jesus — and the community behind this Gospel passage — they are passionate that the Good News be proclaimed far and wide. There was so much to do. There was injustice across the land. The mission was critical.
And this remains true today. We need not wear the clothing of Christ, as lovely as it might be, and as lovely as it might make us. We might want to RSVP to this invitation with a “No, thanks.” But the world is crying out for servants richly clad in the mercy of Christ. The world is desperate for the Good News, proclaimed by people who bear on their bodies the garments of salvation, the clothing of justice, the crown of peace.
Wearing Christ as our clothing: this is a serious thing to do. The robe of Christ will change us, shape us, form us. The cloak of Christ will draw our shoulders back so that we can see and serve a person in extreme need, rather than gazing ever inward at our own needs and worries. The shoes of Christ will clasp our feet and carry us into the valleys of human suffering.
And the crown of Christ — well, I suppose if we follow Julian’s guidance carefully, the crown of Christ will be not what we wear, but what we become. We will rest on that wounded head, torn bloody with thorns. We will be worn by him.
Nothing is more urgently needed in this world right now. This is why the king is so animated and incensed by his blasé wedding guest, a poor sod who didn’t bother to don this lovely but daunting robe of righteousness. Paul and Julian sing the Good News to us in lovely tones of reassuring encouragement. Jesus in Matthew takes a much harder tack. But I believe all three would agree that our choice to put on the clothing of Christ, versus our choice to set it aside, is a choice of immense importance.
Will we wear this lovely but heavy garment? Will we become, in our own lives of prayer and service, the crown of Christ?
Even now this invitation is being extended to us by the Risen One, who “took on our human tunic, dyed with the sweat of his body, close-fitting and short and threadbare.”
To clarify and further extend this gracious invitation, I want to reframe the enraged king’s response to the underdressed wedding guest he sarcastically called “friend.” I want to soften the king’s words, in the spirit of those honey-tongued saints, Paul and Julian.
I want to soften them into this: Wear the colorful, beautiful cloak of Christ, or understandably set its daunting, difficult heaviness aside. What will we choose, my good friends?
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Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23A), October 11, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14