Reflection
The Strange Safety of a Stony Heart
There is always one guest at a wedding who feels slightly out of place.
He stands near the wall, holding a drink he has forgotten to taste, watching other people perform the mysterious rituals of belonging where to stand, when to laugh, what to do with their hands. Everyone else seems to have received instructions. He has been invited, certainly. But an invitation and a sense of belonging are not quite the same thing.
Perhaps this is what is happening beneath today’s readings. God opens the door, and still we hesitate in the hallway.
Ezekiel tells us that God will remove our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. This sounds wonderful, provided we do not think too carefully about it. Flesh bruises. It trembles, grieves, blushes, and remembers what someone said eleven years ago at dinner. Stone, for all its limitations, sleeps rather well.
Perhaps we hold on to our hardness not because we love it, but because it has been useful. It got us through something. It kept us standing when tenderness seemed like a luxury we could not afford.
Then Jesus tells of a wedding banquet. The original guests refuse to come, so people are gathered from the streets the good, the bad, and probably a few who came mainly because there was food. The kingdom of heaven, it seems, has a rather untidy guest list.
Yet one man arrives without a wedding garment.
The story troubles us because we prefer a God who welcomes us without rearranging anything. We want the feast, but we would like to attend as the person we have learned to be: capable, agreeable, invisible, never needy, always fine.
Sometimes we resist love not because we doubt it, but because we suspect it might see through us. God does not despise the armor that once kept us alive. But armor becomes awkward attire at a wedding. A heart of flesh is not safer than a heart of stone. It is simply more alive.
What might you be ready to remove, if only for an evening, and come farther into the room?
