Rsvp

I got an offer last week that I almost didn’t refuse. It was from a travel company who, in return for my coming to a one-hour pitch for their company, would give me 4 free days and nights in any one of dozens of different destinations, and if I came between Tuesday and Thursday they’d double the offer. As I said, I almost took them up on it. So we started trying to set up a time when I could come. This week was out. In addition to all the usual stuff, I did a wedding yesterday up in Sewell, and I also had to prepare for this afternoon’s musical tryouts. OK, next week. Well, this afternoon I’m driving up to NY to spend the Columbus Day weekend with my sister, and by the time I get back - well, you get the picture.

Everything I already have planned over the next 2 weeks is more important than a free vacation, and they wouldn’t schedule me out any farther than that. Oh, well. They’ll probably call back in a couple of weeks, at least they said they would, but I’ll probably be just as busy then.

If I had really, really, wanted that free vacation, I could have found the time to go listen to their sales pitch.

And that’s true for all of us, isn’t it? We find time for the really important things, the things that we care about. What is it that always gets done, around your house, or in your life? In a real time crunch, what goes, and what stays?

We’ve spent the last few weeks looking at some of Jesus’ parables, as retold by Matthew. Two of them appear in response to the Pharisees’ challenge to his authority. First we heard about two sons, one of whom said he would go work in the vineyard, but didn’t, contrasted with the one who said he wouldn’t go, but later did. And then last week we looked at the parable of the vineyard owner whose tenants refused to give him the profits from the harvest.

Jesus then adds a third parable - actually a two-parter - to the set. The first part concerns a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son, but the people invited make excuses and refuse to come. So the king, understandably miffed, scours the countryside for a more grateful bunch of guests.

This parable appears twice in the Gospels. In addition to the one we’ve just heard, there’s another version in Luke 14. And in that one the excuses take center stage. Where Matthew says only that the invited guests “made light of [the invitation] and went away, one to his farm, another to his business...” [Mt 22:5] Luke gives us a whole verse for each excuse. One has just bought a field, and has to go see to it, another needs to try out his new oxen, the third has a new bride and wants to spend time with her. The focus is on all the many things that get in the way of hearing God’s call - work, possessions, even good things such as family relationships can crowd God out right out of our lives.

But that’s not where Matthew is coming from. He skips right over the excuses and goes straight to the consequences. And scholars think that Matthew added verses 6 and 7 to give the story a whole new twist for the benefit of the Christians who were Matthew’s audience. Because, you see, Luke doesn’t include the bit about people being killed and the city destroyed. And indeed, it does seem to be a rather drastic reaction to a bunch of rejected party invitations. But it is likely, if not certain, that by the time Matthew’s gospel was put in written form that the city of Jerusalem had already been destroyed.

And so the message his listeners needed to hear was not that the Pharisees and all the others who didn’t listen to Jesus were going to be replaced as God’s chosen by the new Church. They knew that.

No, the emphasis in this retelling is on what happens to the second guest list. The replacements.

There they are, jammed into this churchly banquet hall, both good and bad, no doubt looking surreptitiously at one another, wondering “Who are these people, anyway?” and waiting for the buffet line to open.

At this point, however, something rather odd happens. The king himself arrives and surveys the hodgepodge collection of partygoers, only to spy a man not wearing a proper wedding suit. The king reacts harshly. “Friend,” he says to the man (and, in Matthew, the word “friend” isn’t very friendly; in fact, it’s positively hostile), “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” The man is left speechless, so the king orders the man booted, not merely out the door, but “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”