Gordon McPhee
Matthew 22: 1-14
GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME!!
Introduction:
Our Gospel reading this morning begins, “Jesus responded by telling still more stories.” He had just compared the religious leaders to farmhands who had stolen the land and murdered the owner’s son, the heir. Jesus then set himself up as the stone the builders rejected and the religious leaders desired to jail him but were afraid of the reaction of the people.
Jesus continues with one of his many “God’s kingdom is like” stories. There are 13 of these in the Gospels, particularly favoured by Matthew. Often, however; we find these parables difficult to understand, we have to go through mental contortions to apply them to our situations. And I believe this happens when we look at them the same way we do Jesus' teaching stories. We search for the “this is what I need to do” part of the parable. We ask, “Who in the story is God?” Who is me? the good guy of course, and “Who is the other person? the bad guy.
But the “Kingdom of God” stories, like the one in our Matthew reading today, aren’t about what you should or shouldn’t do. They are describing the environment we live in. We, and others, look at the world through our own understanding, which is usually quite out in left field from the truth. Jesus tells these “Kingdom of God is like” stories to help refocus our understanding of the world we live in. To bring into focus how things are actually working in a universe in which God is sovereign. To help us see how things really are despite our limited understanding. So today, we’re going to look at one aspect of how this world really works, and maybe that will help us understand how God is at work in our lives and the world around us.
Sermon:
"Jesus responded by telling still more stories.” As if it wasn’t enough that the religious leaders would have happily jailed him or even stoned him if they could. Jesus adds a little grist to the mill telling the story of a king who held a wedding banquet for his son. The invited guests wouldn’t come. They invented excuses or simply showed their utter contempt for the king by killing his messengers. So, the king destroyed them and leveled their cities.
Jesus’ audience is now assured that this is a perfectly normal world in which justice is functioning normally, or at least as they would expect. No good king would not stay in power long if he allowed that kind of contempt for his authority and kingdom to go unpunished. Then comes the twist. The King won’t allow anything to interfere with his celebration of his son’s wedding so sends his servants to invite anyone and everyone they can find to fill the banquet hall. At this point Jesus’ listeners are a little incredulous, the suggestion that the king would just go out and round up anybody is a bit over the top. But some are probably saying the king is just Scottish and doesn’t want to waste the food.
Finally, Jesus lets the other shoe drop for his waiting audience. The King enters the hall and espies someone not dressed in proper clothes for the occasion. “Friend,” the king politely calls him friend and then declares, “how dare you come in here looking like that!” And the listeners take a deep careful breath, holding it silently in anticipation lest they attract the king’s attention to themselves.
Something to note here is that the man must have really stood out from the crowd. The king espied him immediately upon entering the ostensibly very large and very well-populated hall. Which implies that everyone else was most appropriately dressed. The man had no excuse. All he needed to do was look around and know he wasn’t properly dressed. His inaction in not dressing properly was an affront, not a mistake.
This leads us to the second item of note; “The man was speechless.” He had no retort, no reason, no excuse as we said. He knew exactly what was up, and exactly what was wrong, and exactly what he’d done. So, when the king tells his servants, ‘Get him out of here—fast. Tie him up and ship him to hell. And make sure he doesn’t get back in.’ Jesus’ audience would all agree that this guy's life was toast, but that it was his own fault.
A great story that Jesus ends by saying “That’s what I mean when I say, ‘Many get invited; only a few make it.’” And like his listeners at the time, we all put ourselves in the place of the properly dressed attendees who were invited from the streets and busy intersections. There was obviously a large crowd, big enough to include all of us and thankfully there was only one singled out as improperly dressed. So the first thing that comes to my mind is, what does Jesus mean by “ … only a few make it.”
Invariably every commentary I read had a similar interpretation and mapping of roles. God is the king, and the kingdom is this world. The first to be invited, twice, are the Jews who reject the celebration for the king’s son and are subsequently killed and their cities destroyed. This is mapped onto a horrific early Christian, anti-Semitic panorama of the rejection of Jesus as messiah and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. This is a parable Jesus told with a single point concerning the many and the few, not an allegorical prophecy in which we map out who's who so we can figure out what’s going to happen and more comfortingly, how we can plug ourselves into it as the good guys.
The justification for these far-flung imaginings comes from similarities to other New Testament allegories linking wedding ceremonies to the Messiah and salvation which do so legitimately but this “Kingdom of God is like” parable is not an allegory to be mapped into a supposed theology of salvation. Luke also relates this same story in Luke 14:16-24 but it's just a banquet, not a wedding feast, and the host is not a king, and the guests who refuse to come are simply ignored rather than killed and their cities burned. Matthew may have told the story from a different perspective than Luke but none of these eschatological illusions the commentators want to read into it would have registered with Jesus audience and were certainly not Jesus’ intent.
Remembering what we said at the beginning of the service, Jesus has just royally pissed off the Priests and the Pharisees saying in Matthew 21:43-45, “This is the way it is with you. God’s kingdom will be taken back from you and handed over to a people who will live out a kingdom life. Whoever stumbles on this Stone gets shattered; whoever the Stone falls on gets smashed.” And Matthew comments, “When the religious leaders heard this story, they knew it was aimed at them.” So we can assume that Jesus is adding insult to injury as no one could miss that the invited guests who rejected the invitation were the Priests and Pharisees who would be shattered and smashed by the stone they had rejected.
But then what of those invited from the streets and busiest intersections in town, “everyone [the servants] laid eyes on, good and bad.” Good and bad. That would be everybody else listening to Jesus speak. Curiosity seekers, pickpockets, charlatans, and prostitutes. Honest businessmen and dishonest ones. Everyone and anyone. and when you add yourself to the company of those invited to the wedding feast, who is to tell the difference? Well, the king is, isn’t he.
All the guests are there at the banquet hall with all the king’s servants and no one notices the guest that is improperly dressed except the king. I’ve read so many commentators’ contortions and speculations about how the badly dressed guest got past the servants, why no one noticed that the clothing worn was righteousness, and how this is a parody of the final judgment. When the truth is simple and obvious.
Who was properly dressed and who wasn’t isn’t their concern. The king didn’t tell his servants to make sure everyone was presentable, they were to fill the banquet hall, “to invite anyone you find.“ The guests, the good and the bad were to come and fill the banquet hall, nothing more. There was no requirement to change from bad to good or to even dress differently. They were called to come. They were one great wedding banquet hall of invitees, all on equal footing, there for the feast. No one but the king himself had any criteria or mandate or authority to decide who should be there, who was properly dressed, or not. The guests were invited at his command, only he could then reject them. Deciding one of the guests didn’t measure up wasn’t the place of another guest or even a servant to decide.
In the introduction, I said, “We’re going to look at one aspect of how this world really works, and maybe that will help us understand how God is at work in our lives and the world around us.” What Jesus’ parable teaches us about our world today is that we are all invited to the wedding banquet. Not just we who come to church or read the Bible or try to be good, but everyone, from everywhere, the streets and the intersections. That great sea of humanity out there is invited, and I dare say welcome. And we have neither the criteria nor the authority to decide who is properly dressed or not. In fact, as people who attend church, I’m very conscious that I could easily be lumped in with the Priests and Pharisees. That by judging others not quite well dressed enough, not quite good enough to make the cut I may be stumbling over the stone that is Christ the Lord and His love that invites all the world to His banquet. Jesus knows we so easily make things about them and us. But in this parable, Jesus makes it clear, that for you and me, there is only them, and we’re part of it.
And yes, you’ll say to me we are in the world but not part of the world, and that is true, but that applies to our daily life and decisions not our relationship with others around us. This is the same truth Jesus enlightened in the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13:24-30. The wheat and the weeds were to grow together because eradicating one would destroy the other. When we look at the people we meet day by day, we often see them, the ones who don’t attend church, as other than us. Jesus is calling us to see them as the same as us. Equally invited to the banquet. and they are here, attending the banquet but you don’t have the criteria or authority to decide if they are properly dressed or not. So, we need to treat them as guests, just like ourselves, because that’s what they are. Loving your neighbour as yourself means every single one of your neighbours, the ones that come to church and all the others who think you’re wasting your time. Jesus has made an open invitation so that “many get invited” but only He can decide if “only a few make it”.
Unlike the Priests and Pharisees in the story, I’m just an invited guest, like everybody else. I need to act like it.
Amen
