+It’s the best party ever and we’re invited. All we have to do is say yes and join the celebration. God has set the table and has reserved a spot just for us. God is waiting. What’s taking us so long?
Today’s Gospel is Matthew’s version of the more famous parable in Luke called the Parable of the Great Dinner. Matthew’s version varies in a few ways, first of all, in Matthew it isn’t just any ol’ dinner, it’s a wedding banquet and secondly, Matthew’s is a fairly dark take on the whole story, with some pretty violent imagery. To be honest, it would be a WHOLE lot more fun to preach on Luke’s version, for Luke’s version is minus the murder, the destroying fire, outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth. But, alas, today we have Matthew not Luke. So here we go…
Jesus is still in the temple, answering the accusations of the temple leaders when he shares this parable. Remember, in a few days he’ll be crucified. The end of Jesus’ earthly ministry looms and all indications suggest that Jesus is feeling the pressure to get his point across….and fast!
Parables are stories that are replete with symbolism, double entendre and the like. To take a parable at face value is dangerous, for the truth actually lies beneath the surface. To hear the truth we must first understand the context in which the story was first told.
In Biblical imagery, a banquet is used to describe God’s interaction with us: we’re all invited to accept God’s offer of never ending, over the moon love. Since time began, God has been inviting us to this banquet; and for generation upon generation we’ve ignored these invitations, we’ve denied these prophets, we’ve rejected God. We don’t show up for dinner.
Now the dinner Matthew describes isn’t just a dinner, it’s a wedding reception; and marriage, in biblical imagery, is a metaphor for God’s covenant with us---God’s promise to us.
To round out the imagery glossary, the king represents God and the son, of course, is Jesus.
It’s easy to assume, with this typecasting, that we’re the people who are being beaten, murdered or cast out, but—and hear me loud and clear---it not us!
In the first round of violence, beginning in verse 6, it appears that the King’s rage is a reaction to hurt and disappointment. The king, God, has invited what seem to be the most “deserving” of God’s children to the banquet. And yet the “select few” make light of the king’s/God’s invite, going back home, back to work, back to life as usual-- declining God’s invitation, disrespecting God’s offer, denying God’s love. God’s feelings, however it is that God experiences emotions, are hurt. And God acted out. You may think I’m nuts for saying that God had a temper tantrum like a 2 year old, but take a little walk through Hebrew scripture….God has a tendency to get extremely frustrated with humanity and, frankly, some of God’s responses were a little tantrum-y. My point is that for Matthew, the God of his sacred scripture, that is what is commonly referred to as the Old Testament, was a bit moody, so it makes sense that Matthew tells of “the king” sending an army to deal with the subjects who rejected the king’s generous offer of a banquet by laughing at it and beating up (and in some cases killing) the messenger. Hurt and anger leading to retribution. That pattern is as old as humanity itself.
In that light, it would be easy to write off the second episode of violent imagery as more divine acting out, but it’s not. The section I’m referring to is the part toward the end when the King becomes outraged at the man who isn’t wearing a wedding robe. He has the man bound and thrown into the outer darkness, where there’s all that weeping and gnashing of teeth.
What?
Really?
Because he wasn’t wearing the right clothes??
Ok, bear with me, at this point of the parable the imagery is hot and heavy, and the message within that imagery? Priceless.
The wedding robe is a metaphor for the embrace of God. This wedding guest wasn’t there because he loved God, he was there because he hated God. You see, this guy wasn’t a person at all, he’s a metaphor for what is commonly called Satan or the Devil, or evil, or the forces of darkness.
You’ve all heard me describe the difference between the world of us, humanity and the world God intends for us as being the world of Not God and the world of God.
The guest without the wedding robe is from the Not God world. He represents the forces of THIS world that work overtime to defeat the Love that is God. The poorly dressed wedding crasher represents all the evil that is, indeed permeating our world.
God is light and love, Not God is darkness and not Love. The wedding crasher was, most definitely, NOT love. So when Jesus says the wedding crasher will be tossed into the utter darkness he’s saying---the forces of evil in this world, the NOT GOD of this world will not win and will, in time, be swallowed up into the darkness of hate from which they came.
This parable, with all it’s twists and turns and violent scenes is, in the end, like so much of the Bible, a love story.
God has invited us to the greatest party of all time--- a party full of light and love and laughter. When we accept Jesus Christ into our heart, when we strive to live our life as Jesus has taught us to do--- loving God with all our heart and all our mind and all our soul, and loving our neighbor as our self---we’ve said yes to God and we’ve entered the most fabulous party of all time. A party that never ends, a party that’s never boring, a party that will never ever disappoint.
Amen.
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