Hallowed be Thy Name

 

SERMON BY FATHER JONATHAN E MOORE - LINK HERE

28th Sunday of the Year 2026        Hallowed be Thy Name

The Parable of the Wedding Feast which we heard today can be hard to understand. In its present form it seems to present an image of God as demanding far more from us than we can hope to fulfil. I don’t know about you, but I always felt the man without a wedding garment suffered an injustice - how on earth could somebody just pulled in off the streets be expected to have his best clothes on? He may not even have possessed a “Wedding Garment” at all - how many gentlemen here actually owned the morning coat and top hat they wore to a wedding? I've heard that ladies have also been known to hire the big hats and wedding outfit - Moss Bros have made a fortune out of people’s need to dress up!

Taking this into consideration, how can the King have been so harsh in his treatment of the poor man? It seems very unfair. Unfair, that is until we understand that what we have here is TWO Wedding Feast Parables, not one. 

The first ends with the King’s servants bringing in everyone they can find “bad and good alike”. The second story begins with a King entering his banqueting hall and finding that one of the people there has not bothered to dress for the occasion. Now the meaning is changed - clearly, this man is showing great disrespect for his host. Even the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace in full Morning Dress to receive their MBEs! Maybe the man had “gatecrashed” the occasion, who knows? Anyway, the man’s careless lack of respect and dumb insolence result in him being unceremoniously thrown out.

In fact, the second story closely resembles a Rabbinic parable in common circulation at the time of Our Lord. In this version, the king has provided nice clothes for everyone to wear at his son’s wedding. Most of those invited take their nice new clothes home and put them away. One or two, however, including the local blacksmith (!) wear their new clothes to work. When the wedding day arrives, they are conspicuous in their grimy garments, and none of them is allowed in. Indeed, the king takes the garments from them, and sends their soiled finery away to be washed clean for someone else on a future occasion.

The two Wedding Feast stories in our Gospel today, and the Rabbinic one I just summarised, have this much in common: In all three stories there are guests who fail to show respect for the king, and all of them suffer punishment for their thoughtlessness.

You may have noticed that, over the past number of Sundays, I have discovered a link between the Gospel and the Our Father. You may have also noticed that we have been guided through the Lord’s Prayer from back to front. Today is no exception, for it brings us right back to the very first petition in the prayer Our Saviour gave us, which is “Hallowed be Thy name”.

When Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush, he was ordered to go and tell the Pharaoh in Egypt to let his Hebrew slaves go free. Moses, himself a pagan at the time, asked what he regarded as a sensible question: “What is your name”, and was told in reply “I am who I am”. In pagan religions, there are many gods, and so they all need to have a name so that people can gain their attention in prayer and worship. There is, however, only One True God. The God who called Moses was not just one more god among many. He gives Moses no name because God needs no name. “I am who I am” - God is the ground of all being. As we saw last week, we are God’s creatures, living in God’s world. We are not our own, the world is not our own. God makes the rules, our responsibility is to do God’s Will.

The Jewish people developed, and still have, a tremendous respect for the name of God. The name of God is represented in the Old Testament by what is called the “Tetragrammaton”, four Hebrew letters: Yod, He, Waw and He, more or less YHWH in our alphabet. In ancient Hebrew, there are no vowels, so nobody really knows how the word was pronounced, for no Jew will ever speak the word. If a Jewish person is reading the Scriptures, wherever those four letters are encountered, they are spoken as “Adonai” - “The Lord”. Christian scholars have from time to time tried to give an equivalent for the Tetragrammaton in their own language, at one time “Jehovah” was often used, in more recent translations of the Bible, the word “Yahweh” was more frequent. Either version causes deep hurt and offence if heard by Jewish people, and Pope Benedict asked that Catholics should not use either in worship. It will be interesting to see our new English Lectionary and Breviary when they are finally published. I myself tend to use the word “Lord”, and have done for years. I think we Christians need to re-learn the lesson of respect for the name of God.

“Hallowed be Thy Name”. According to the Lord’s Prayer that is the very first of all our duties as God’s people. The beautiful old hymn “O purest of Creatures” has one verse which begins: “Dark night hath come down on this rough-spoken world”. We are living in a culture (if indeed that is the right name for it!) where we are surrounded by the careless, thoughtless, use of the word “God”, and the most holy names “Jesus” and “Christ”.  Back home in Lincolnshire they used to say: “You live with folks, you get like them”. The Arab people have a rather more pointed saying: “If you lie down among dogs, you will stand up with fleas!”. It is so easy for us to become contaminated with that same lack of respect, isn't it? Catholics used to have a tremendous respect for the name of Jesus, and reverently bow their heads when they heard or spoke the name of Jesus Christ. How many of us still do? Are we trying to foster that kind of respect in the children? Catholics would bless themselves every time they passed by a Catholic Church, remembering that Our Lord was there for them in the Blessed Sacrament. How many of us still do? 

We dare to say Our Father. We do indeed need courage to pray when we truly reflect upon our daily lives, the bad habits we may have got into, the good ones we have somehow lost. That is precisely why we need to pray, taking courage not from our own selves, but from the reassurance of the Father’s love, patience and mercy. 

Before we finish today, can we go back again to the image of the people who were too busy about other things to remember God’s invitation, or who hadn't time to clean themselves up when the call came? I often find myself wondering what state I will be in when God calls, for call He will, and on a day and hour I don’t expect!