The parable which began Matthew 22, our Gospel lesson this morning, is a parable that can really bug people. It’s shocking and disturbing and I have found over the years that people complain about it because of how harsh it is.
It also serves as a good way for us to better understand how to approach the Bible.
When we are trying to share with others about God, and his love for us, people will often get hung up on things like, “What about Cancer and suffering in this world? What about Hell? If God loves people, why send people to Hell?” And people get stuck, and won’t listen to the Gospel.
In our lesson, we have a king who gives a wedding banquet for his Son. The king is throwing a Great Feast, so he sends out messengers to invite people, and they say “No I can’t come. I’ve got this, I've got that…” So then a second time he sends out messengers and this time, not only don’t they come,… but they kill the messengers. The response of the king then is overwhelming. He sends troops to kill those murderers and burn down their city.
At this point the king says now invite ANYONE! Go find people sleeping in the hedgerows, just find anyone. They all come in and finally the King joins the party and sees a man there without a wedding garment and has him thrown out into the darkness where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Many people today will find this parable odd. It’s the kind of story atheists like Richard Dawkins use in debates to support their conclusions that the God of the Bible is some sort of psychotic tyrant who falls in and out of emotional snits and who overreacts. God invites people to a party, and he kills them for saying no? No one would want to be around a God like that.
So, first things first. Parables are not literal events. You don’t lose credit for believing in the Bible when you say that parables are simply made-up stories. Jesus constantly exaggerates situations for the point of storytelling and getting the point across.
Let’s modernize it and try not to spiritualize it yet. Tomorrow morning, six beefeaters show up at your doorstep. Those are the palace guard from Buckingham Palace, the ones in red with the big black hats who never smile. They are all dressed up, and they say to you that King Charles would like you to come to his coronation service next week as a special Guest, escorted by the guard.
And then, your response is, “Sorry, I can’t go to London, I have to see a movie with my friends next week.” Now, both of those are silly, comic exaggerations: both the invitation (why would he invite you?-don’t spiritualize), and the turning down. And that’s the point in the story. Then it gets worse. King Charles sends more palace guard to invite you to the coronation, so you murder them all. Then King Charles nukes all Atlantic City.
That may seem crazy and imaginative, but that would be the same story in a modern setting, so you see, it is supposed to be over the top. So, how do we see it. Without literalizing it, we can look on it as a reflection of the history of Israel. God, not just an earthly king, but the King of Kings, the king of the Universe, has personally invited Israel into an intimate communion with him.
Now stay with the wedding imagery and move to the New Testament, and who is the son but Jesus himself, who has come as the Bride Groom, a name Jesus gives for himself in every Gospel.
The Father has sent an invitation to come to the wedding banquet through the Old Testament prophets, many of whom were killed for bringing God’s truth to his people.
It’s meant as a wake up call for those listening, Do you have any idea what you are doing when you refuse the divine invitation, what you are saying NO to. The story is meant to grab you by the shoulders and shake you into an awareness.
After their rejection, the king sent out other servants…Both this parable, and the parable just before it at the end of the previous chapter, of the Wicked Vinedressers, emphasize God the Father as a frequent sender.
God’s kingdom is open to those who accept his invitation, and wear Christ’s righteousness. This is not God, looking for people to make suffer in hell, but God seeking our redemption.
And for the second parable in a row the offended Lord makes Himself low and vulnerable. “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.” In the previous parable, the landowner sent his son to the Vinedressers saying “surely, they will respect my son.”
So many times God has shown us that He first seeks out, rather than first wipes out, those who have rebuffed His gift.
Even after the Jewish leaders put Christ to death, the Gospel again comes to them… this time by Peter and the rest of the Apostles, whom they continue to attack and curse.
It is only after this persecution, and the scattering of the church, that the Gospel invitation comes, to the Gentiles, and Jerusalem was sacked and burned down as the parable foretold.
The last part of our parable brings us to another tough subject, the guest without a wedding garment. In the parable, as the King came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment.
Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Is this right? Is this our king throwing this invited man out into the darkness? Certainly it would seem rude to the host to show up at a wedding feast dressed as a slob or a vagrant, but isn’t there another alternative? The answer is, we don’t dress ourselves.
At a wedding this big, at Jesus time, no one would have had garments good enough. The King would have been the one supplying the garments for the guests when they came in.
To attend the feast, we must put on… the Lord Jesus Christ, just as at that time most kings would supply the wedding wear for their guests, gowns more elaborate and beautiful than the guests would have been able to afford. We must appear before the King “not having our own righteousness, but that which is through Faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.”
We are invited, with great Joy and Blessings, to the Lamb’s great feast in Heaven. And we are now invited to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the feast which he gave us in this world as a picture of his blessed union with us in Heaven. We come before His throne, to His Table, to be fed by Him, in reverence of His awesome Kingship, and with Joy because of the great blessings which he imparts to us, the righteousness which he gives to us as a mantle to wear in His presence.
A special thank you to John Campbell for the seed of this message from a message of his several decades ago.
