Matthew 22:1-14
Once more Jesus spoke to them in
parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a
wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been
invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other
slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my
dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is
ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away,
one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated
them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed
those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The
wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main
streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves
went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad;
so the wedding hall was filled with guests. “But when the king came in to see
the guests, he 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.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”
So, Jesus is on a roll! Following two parables where he
castigates the religious leaders of the day as those who will be at the back of
the queue for the Kingdom of Heaven and where he criticises them for failing to
heed both the prophets God has sent and now the Son, he’s having another go at
them. Remember, too, that this is all being played out in public during the
run-up to the Passover Festival when Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims. The
religious leaders knew that Jesus’ parables were about them and so did a fair
few of the ordinary folk who witnessed the exchanges. Matthew doesn’t tell us
that Jesus explained these parables but we’ve read enough in the past to
suggest that Jesus would have to those who genuinely didn’t understand what he
was saying.
Can you imagine the humiliation of the Pharisees as they find
themselves in the uncomfortable and unprecedented position of being publicly
called out? They’re not used to this and they don’t like it, but in last week’s
Gospel we heard that they were afraid to do anything because Jesus had the
support of the crowds and they were frightened of a riot if they tried to
silence him.
So they plotted.
Anyway, we‘re getting ahead of ourselves and we need a little
context for today’s parable: In Jesus’ day, it was common to invite guests to
the elaborate wedding festivities well in advance of the day. And then a
reminder invitation would go out just before the feast. To have been invited
not once but twice and then not to have attended would have already amounted to
a huge slight to the host.
That’s the background, but in Jesus’ parable that’s not the
worst thing that happened. The guests not only didn’t show up, in an echo of
the previous parable, they abused and even killed the king’s messengers when
they came with the reminder invitation.
Within the context of Matthew’s Gospel, this parable is rightly
read as a criticism of the Jews who had historically failed down the
generations to heed the prophets, characterised here as the King’s servants and
who also did not respond to God’s invitation to recognize Jesus as His
incarnate Son. Because the story is grouped with a series of judgment parables
that appear shortly before the suffering and death of Jesus, Christians
typically hear this parable as a judgment on the Jews that persecuted and
killed many of the prophets and then finally killed God’s Son Jesus.
Christians also typically see themselves as the ones that got
invited after the enraged King allowed the original wedding guests to be
destroyed. Those with an eye on the ancient history of empires generally see
the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jewish people in
70 AD as the reference here.
There may be a degree of truth in that understanding but it
raises the danger of an anti-Semitic view of events unless we are careful:
Christians can come over in a triumphalist light as the good people that
accepted the King’s invitation – unlike those that went before them.
The problem with reading the parable in that way is that
Jesus, his inner circle, and most of the early Christians were Jews. Jesus’
followers continued to gather for Jewish worship and observe God’s Law, not
only prior to the crucifixion and resurrection, but after the ascension of
Jesus and the birth of the Christian church at Pentecost. The separation of
Christian Jews from Jewish synagogues came much later than the events in Matthew’s
Gospel.
It’s very clear that within Matthew’s Gospel the rejection of
Jesus by Jewish religious leaders is a key part of the events leading up to the
trial, suffering, and death of Jesus and that’s an inescapable part of the story.
It is also very clear that within Matthew’s Gospel the contrast is drawn
between the joyous welcome given to Jesus on Palm Sunday and the bitter
rejection of Jesus by another crowd at His crucifixion. The Son, the
bridegroom, will soon be rejected and killed. The Scribes and Pharisees and the
ordinary people who followed them, those initially chosen, disregarded the
invitation to his kingdom. But Matthew doesn’t tell us this story in order to
build up Christian antipathy towards Jews. Jewish Christians were the most
significant part of the early church.
Remember that the Gospels were written sometime after the
events, certainly at a time when the early church was sufficiently well
established to need some advice on discipleship. I suspect that Matthew included
this parable to address a general problem of hypocrisy – calling oneself a
Christian and yet neither responding to the Lord’s invitation to His feast like
those that stayed away in the story, nor being ready for the feast when one did
show up.
Which brings us neatly to the man who turned up in the wrong
outfit. That’s an odd element in the story, but it won’t be there by accident:
nothing in a parable is there by chance. Some scholars argue that this wedding
outfit needs to be seen as a daily putting on of repentant discipleship;
repentant discipleship in word and deed and so this part of the parable is an
implicit warning of hypocrisy. What’s being identified here is the person who
claims Christ as saviour but doesn’t live that out in their daily life. God's
gracious invitation always comes to us as we are, but we need to come not as we
were. Grace is free, but it is not cheap. It involves change, what we’ve come
to know as a spirit of penitence. If that’s not our mind-set, we’re the man who
turned up in the wrong outfit.
This is a difficult parable because it seems to suggest on
one level a wonderful inclusiveness in the love of God: all are invited to the
feast and, of course, the feast is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the parable is
also clear that not all are willing to accept the invitation. The parable
becomes, then, a parable about transformation: changed lives through the grace
of God by the Holy Spirit.
But the Holy Spirit does not force: she whispers, she nudges,
she pleads, she persuades but she doesn’t force. In the end it is our own
free-will which determines whether we accept the invitation or not. You refuse
the invitation and you stay as you are. You accept the invitation and you put
on a new garment for the occasion and you’re transformed as you attend the
party: transformed to a new reality and a new way of life, the reality and the
way of life which is that of the Kingdom of God. A kingdom in which love,
justice, truth, mercy and holiness reign unhindered. These are the clothes we
need to wear for the wedding and if we refuse to put them on, we’re saying we
don’t belong at the party. That is the reality.
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