Dressed For The Banquet
Sermon
Sermons On The Gospel Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
This is an ugly story -- and the better you understand it, the uglier it gets.
Both Matthew and Luke record versions of this parable that Jesus told (Luke 14:16-24), and it is not a comfortable story no matter who tells it; but Matthew's version is downright harsh and, as we'll see, extremely inflammatory. Because, no matter what Jesus may have originally meant in telling it, Matthew has worked it into his gospel as a very fierce piece of anti-Jewish polemic. To understand why, we have to understand what was going on at the time.
Matthew's gospel was written fairly late in the first century, after a couple of major developments. The first was that, although Jesus' first followers were all, like Jesus himself, observant Jews, who had come to believe that he was the Messiah, that opinion did not come to be shared by Judaism as a whole; and eventually the Christians, who were also being joined by many non-Jews, were forced to break away from the synagogue. As is often the case with family feuds, it was a very bitter breakup. So in many communities, there was tension between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue; and that certainly appears to have been the case in Matthew's community, which was probably Antioch in Syria.
This tension was exacerbated by the second major development of this period: in response to a Jewish patriotic uprising, the occupying Romans had marched in full force to put down the rebellion, and while they were at it, they had razed Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Need I say that Jews and Christians had differing interpretations of this event? For the Jewish community, of course, this was a national tragedy on a par with the Exile six centuries earlier. For many in the emerging Christian church, however, it looked like a vindication of their claim that Jesus was the Messiah, and they held that the destruction was God's judgment on those who chose not to believe, a judgment in particular on the temple, which Christians believed that Jesus had replaced with his own body and sacrificial death.
These events, and the Christian reading of them, are clearly visible behind the parable as Matthew tells it. "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' " (Matthew 22:7-8). In other words, God has rejected the Jews.
Whether Jesus intended the parable to be read this way we can never know for certain; but it is altogether too clear that Matthew read it that way, and he made sure the point was not lost on the readers of his gospel. If you had been part of Matthew's church in Antioch, you'd have had to be sound asleep in the back row not to get it.
Matthew begins by putting the parable very late in Jesus' ministry, during the highly charged final week of Jesus' life, when he had entered Jerusalem to messianic acclaim, and when all the gospels show him in mounting conflict with the religious authorities, culminating in his execution at the time of the Passover. Luke, in his gospel, has Jesus tell the story of the wedding banquet at an earlier stage of his ministry, as one of a series of sayings and stories about the nature of the kingdom of God. Not Matthew. Matthew has Jesus telling it -- or perhaps retelling it, we don't know -- as one of a series of increasingly pointed parables told in response to the questioning of his authority by the religious leaders. And there is no missing the hostile tone. Jesus is aware that the time of crisis is approaching. He seems to be drawing lines in the sand and insisting that people choose sides, even as he uses his stories to lay out his own interpretation of history -- or perhaps his followers' interpretation. We are unfortunately not always sure in the gospels whether it's Jesus himself speaking or the community that grew up after his departure -- faithful, Spirit-filled people, to be sure, yet fallible humans nonetheless, who may have been swayed by the passions of the moment as well as by the wind of the Spirit.
So here's the story as we have it in Matthew. Unlike most of Jesus' stories, this is not actually a parable, it's an allegory. A parable is a realistic story, often one with a surprising twist, which makes one main point. An allegory, on the other hand, is a story where every piece stands for something: each character in the story is a mask for someone in the real world, and the events of the story are thinly disguised references to events known to the audience. Because of this "coded" character, allegories often end up not being very realistic on their own. For instance, in this story, you have a wedding feast put on hold while the king sends his troops out to destroy his enemies and burn down their city. Hardly the kind of realistic story that Jesus usually told!
But everyone listening to this story would have known what he was driving at. "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son" (Matthew 22:2). He makes it clear right off the bat that he's picking up a very common Jewish image for the reign of God: the Messiah's banquet where the redeemed will feast with their God. Remember how many times the prophets spoke of Israel as God's bride? And that place in Isaiah where it talks about God spreading a feast for all peoples on the holy mountain? (Isaiah 25:6 ff).
Here we have the Messiah bringing Israel to the altar, and the great celebration afterward. Oh, but there's a problem! The people who were invited -- Israel, the chosen -- decided not to come. They'd been expecting this wedding for a while, but when the servants went out to tell them the feast was ready, "... they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business" (Matthew 22:5), just as people had often shrugged off the words of the prophets in times past. But where Luke just has people ignoring the messengers, and the king therefore sending the messengers out to round up other guests, Matthew digs the knife in a little deeper: He has the king send out other slaves to summon the original invitees again -- "other slaves" probably meaning the Christian church. And these messengers, he says, have been mistreated and even killed (Matthew 22:6).
Now, it is true enough that, in the ugly divorce between synagogue and church, there were some nasty moments, and it was not unusual for people to be shunned by neighbors and even family members, sometimes actively persecuted, rarely perhaps killed, just as Jesus had been. And Matthew wants his listeners to know that this makes God angry. So angry that God sent his troops -- and I'm sure Matthew's hearers would have understood him to mean the Romans stamping out the Jewish state -- to destroy "those murderers" who had killed Jesus, and burn their city, Jerusalem. Only after this act of punishment did the invitation go out to others who would be willing to come in -- Samaritans, Gentiles, people from the ends of the earth.
With 2,000 years of distance on the events of that time and place, and 2,000 years of maturing under the ongoing tutelage of God's Spirit, we may be more dismayed by Matthew's glaring anti-Semitism than by the synagogue's rejection of Jesus. Or not. Much depends on the presuppositions with which we come to this story. But it may serve as a cautionary tale to us to remember our human sinfulness and fallibility at the same time as we take seriously our claim to guidance by the Spirit of the God who works in human history.
We do not in fact know what God is going to do about the reality that substantial numbers of Jews did not and do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Neither do we know what God is going to do about the fact that many Christians did not and do not respect Jews as their elder siblings in the household of faith -- as Paul put it, the cultivated olive tree onto which we wild olives were belatedly grafted (Romans 11:17 ff). We all certainly have our theories; but in the end we would be wise to admit that, no matter how honestly we try to listen to God, we are not in fact God, and there remains always some room for doubt concerning opinions we hold in God's name. Just because we're in the door does not always mean we're in the right.
This is approximately the point of the end of Jesus' story, that odd little trailer about the guy who got in without a wedding robe. This is unique to Matthew, and there has of course been no end of discussion about what it means. It appears that guests were expected to wear some kind of festive garment,1 or perhaps just ordinary clean clothes; in any case, it seems that this fellow came as he was without bothering to clean up. The allegorical implications become clear when we understand that the parable is about the last judgment, and when we remember that within Judaism good deeds were seen as the passport to the Messiah's great feast. Indeed, the Mishnah said that "he who fulfils a command gains for himself an intercessor" before God.2 Our actions speak for us, the rabbis recognized, announcing in a voice louder than words whether we are children of God. And in this story, someone who had been welcomed into the feast had no actions to speak for him, and so, Matthew tells us, "he was speechless" (Matthew 22:12).
In Matthew's story, this probably means that the Christians, and perhaps particularly the non-Jewish Christians, who had had the good sense to respond to the invitation and follow Jesus into God's kingdom, should not get up on their high horses too quickly and look down their nose at those who had rejected the Messiah. Just because you're in the door, warns Matthew, doesn't mean you'll get to stay there. As Jesus had warned in other parables, the kingdom can and will be taken away from those who fail to bear its fruit.
And that perhaps is the most fruitful place for us to engage this prickly story. Whether we believe that Jesus is the only way, and those who reject him reject God, or whether we believe that God has many ways to bring us home, we would be wise to take seriously this final warning against presumption. Whatever may or may not be true for other people, we trust that through Jesus we have been brought into God's banquet, and that is cause for celebration. It is also cause for attention to our own wardrobe: what do our deeds say about us? While it is surely important to seek to discern what God is up to in history, it is perhaps even more important to show up wearing the garments that Jesus told us were most important: to love God with everything in us, and our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39 and parallels, paraphrased). Or, as one of God's earlier servants put it, "act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8 cf NIV). Amen.
____________
1. For instance, see J. C. Fenton, Saint Matthew, Pelican New Testament Commentaries, D. E. Nineham, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 350.
2. Ibid.
Both Matthew and Luke record versions of this parable that Jesus told (Luke 14:16-24), and it is not a comfortable story no matter who tells it; but Matthew's version is downright harsh and, as we'll see, extremely inflammatory. Because, no matter what Jesus may have originally meant in telling it, Matthew has worked it into his gospel as a very fierce piece of anti-Jewish polemic. To understand why, we have to understand what was going on at the time.
Matthew's gospel was written fairly late in the first century, after a couple of major developments. The first was that, although Jesus' first followers were all, like Jesus himself, observant Jews, who had come to believe that he was the Messiah, that opinion did not come to be shared by Judaism as a whole; and eventually the Christians, who were also being joined by many non-Jews, were forced to break away from the synagogue. As is often the case with family feuds, it was a very bitter breakup. So in many communities, there was tension between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue; and that certainly appears to have been the case in Matthew's community, which was probably Antioch in Syria.
This tension was exacerbated by the second major development of this period: in response to a Jewish patriotic uprising, the occupying Romans had marched in full force to put down the rebellion, and while they were at it, they had razed Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Need I say that Jews and Christians had differing interpretations of this event? For the Jewish community, of course, this was a national tragedy on a par with the Exile six centuries earlier. For many in the emerging Christian church, however, it looked like a vindication of their claim that Jesus was the Messiah, and they held that the destruction was God's judgment on those who chose not to believe, a judgment in particular on the temple, which Christians believed that Jesus had replaced with his own body and sacrificial death.
These events, and the Christian reading of them, are clearly visible behind the parable as Matthew tells it. "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' " (Matthew 22:7-8). In other words, God has rejected the Jews.
Whether Jesus intended the parable to be read this way we can never know for certain; but it is altogether too clear that Matthew read it that way, and he made sure the point was not lost on the readers of his gospel. If you had been part of Matthew's church in Antioch, you'd have had to be sound asleep in the back row not to get it.
Matthew begins by putting the parable very late in Jesus' ministry, during the highly charged final week of Jesus' life, when he had entered Jerusalem to messianic acclaim, and when all the gospels show him in mounting conflict with the religious authorities, culminating in his execution at the time of the Passover. Luke, in his gospel, has Jesus tell the story of the wedding banquet at an earlier stage of his ministry, as one of a series of sayings and stories about the nature of the kingdom of God. Not Matthew. Matthew has Jesus telling it -- or perhaps retelling it, we don't know -- as one of a series of increasingly pointed parables told in response to the questioning of his authority by the religious leaders. And there is no missing the hostile tone. Jesus is aware that the time of crisis is approaching. He seems to be drawing lines in the sand and insisting that people choose sides, even as he uses his stories to lay out his own interpretation of history -- or perhaps his followers' interpretation. We are unfortunately not always sure in the gospels whether it's Jesus himself speaking or the community that grew up after his departure -- faithful, Spirit-filled people, to be sure, yet fallible humans nonetheless, who may have been swayed by the passions of the moment as well as by the wind of the Spirit.
So here's the story as we have it in Matthew. Unlike most of Jesus' stories, this is not actually a parable, it's an allegory. A parable is a realistic story, often one with a surprising twist, which makes one main point. An allegory, on the other hand, is a story where every piece stands for something: each character in the story is a mask for someone in the real world, and the events of the story are thinly disguised references to events known to the audience. Because of this "coded" character, allegories often end up not being very realistic on their own. For instance, in this story, you have a wedding feast put on hold while the king sends his troops out to destroy his enemies and burn down their city. Hardly the kind of realistic story that Jesus usually told!
But everyone listening to this story would have known what he was driving at. "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son" (Matthew 22:2). He makes it clear right off the bat that he's picking up a very common Jewish image for the reign of God: the Messiah's banquet where the redeemed will feast with their God. Remember how many times the prophets spoke of Israel as God's bride? And that place in Isaiah where it talks about God spreading a feast for all peoples on the holy mountain? (Isaiah 25:6 ff).
Here we have the Messiah bringing Israel to the altar, and the great celebration afterward. Oh, but there's a problem! The people who were invited -- Israel, the chosen -- decided not to come. They'd been expecting this wedding for a while, but when the servants went out to tell them the feast was ready, "... they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business" (Matthew 22:5), just as people had often shrugged off the words of the prophets in times past. But where Luke just has people ignoring the messengers, and the king therefore sending the messengers out to round up other guests, Matthew digs the knife in a little deeper: He has the king send out other slaves to summon the original invitees again -- "other slaves" probably meaning the Christian church. And these messengers, he says, have been mistreated and even killed (Matthew 22:6).
Now, it is true enough that, in the ugly divorce between synagogue and church, there were some nasty moments, and it was not unusual for people to be shunned by neighbors and even family members, sometimes actively persecuted, rarely perhaps killed, just as Jesus had been. And Matthew wants his listeners to know that this makes God angry. So angry that God sent his troops -- and I'm sure Matthew's hearers would have understood him to mean the Romans stamping out the Jewish state -- to destroy "those murderers" who had killed Jesus, and burn their city, Jerusalem. Only after this act of punishment did the invitation go out to others who would be willing to come in -- Samaritans, Gentiles, people from the ends of the earth.
With 2,000 years of distance on the events of that time and place, and 2,000 years of maturing under the ongoing tutelage of God's Spirit, we may be more dismayed by Matthew's glaring anti-Semitism than by the synagogue's rejection of Jesus. Or not. Much depends on the presuppositions with which we come to this story. But it may serve as a cautionary tale to us to remember our human sinfulness and fallibility at the same time as we take seriously our claim to guidance by the Spirit of the God who works in human history.
We do not in fact know what God is going to do about the reality that substantial numbers of Jews did not and do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Neither do we know what God is going to do about the fact that many Christians did not and do not respect Jews as their elder siblings in the household of faith -- as Paul put it, the cultivated olive tree onto which we wild olives were belatedly grafted (Romans 11:17 ff). We all certainly have our theories; but in the end we would be wise to admit that, no matter how honestly we try to listen to God, we are not in fact God, and there remains always some room for doubt concerning opinions we hold in God's name. Just because we're in the door does not always mean we're in the right.
This is approximately the point of the end of Jesus' story, that odd little trailer about the guy who got in without a wedding robe. This is unique to Matthew, and there has of course been no end of discussion about what it means. It appears that guests were expected to wear some kind of festive garment,1 or perhaps just ordinary clean clothes; in any case, it seems that this fellow came as he was without bothering to clean up. The allegorical implications become clear when we understand that the parable is about the last judgment, and when we remember that within Judaism good deeds were seen as the passport to the Messiah's great feast. Indeed, the Mishnah said that "he who fulfils a command gains for himself an intercessor" before God.2 Our actions speak for us, the rabbis recognized, announcing in a voice louder than words whether we are children of God. And in this story, someone who had been welcomed into the feast had no actions to speak for him, and so, Matthew tells us, "he was speechless" (Matthew 22:12).
In Matthew's story, this probably means that the Christians, and perhaps particularly the non-Jewish Christians, who had had the good sense to respond to the invitation and follow Jesus into God's kingdom, should not get up on their high horses too quickly and look down their nose at those who had rejected the Messiah. Just because you're in the door, warns Matthew, doesn't mean you'll get to stay there. As Jesus had warned in other parables, the kingdom can and will be taken away from those who fail to bear its fruit.
And that perhaps is the most fruitful place for us to engage this prickly story. Whether we believe that Jesus is the only way, and those who reject him reject God, or whether we believe that God has many ways to bring us home, we would be wise to take seriously this final warning against presumption. Whatever may or may not be true for other people, we trust that through Jesus we have been brought into God's banquet, and that is cause for celebration. It is also cause for attention to our own wardrobe: what do our deeds say about us? While it is surely important to seek to discern what God is up to in history, it is perhaps even more important to show up wearing the garments that Jesus told us were most important: to love God with everything in us, and our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39 and parallels, paraphrased). Or, as one of God's earlier servants put it, "act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8 cf NIV). Amen.
____________
1. For instance, see J. C. Fenton, Saint Matthew, Pelican New Testament Commentaries, D. E. Nineham, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 350.
2. Ibid.
