"The Wedding Reception"
by Rev. Von Clemans
Matthew 22:1-14
[22:1] Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: [2] “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. [3] He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. [4] Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ [5] But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, [6] while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. [7] The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. [8] Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. [9] Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ [10] Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
[11] “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, [12] and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. [13] Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ [14] For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Most everyone enjoys going to a wedding banquet or, as we say in our day, a wedding reception. It is a wonderful time to celebrate the wedding of a couple or, if we don’t know the couple, to honor their parents by our attendance. There’s great food and music, a beautiful location, and good conversation (unless, of course, you happen to be seated by Great Aunt Margaret who is just a little hard of hearing — I don’t know this personally, but I have heard it happens!). At wedding receptions, guests enjoy the hospitality of the host and, for a time, are transported out of their daily routines into a different world where, for a few hours, everyone lives as though life were one long celebration. Who wouldn’t want to go to a wedding reception?
According to this strange and difficult parable of Jesus, there were some in Jesus’ day that refused to attend the wedding reception for the King’s son. In the midst of this peculiar parable, Jesus shows us something important about what it’s like to live in God’s kingdom. In the middle of ancient customs, violent reactions, class distinctions, and surprise endings, Jesus lets us peek at the dynamics of grace, indifference, judgment, and hope. This is not just a peculiar story. It is a mirror that begs us to consider where are we in the story. Which character would we be if we were invited to this wedding reception?
The King of the land announced a royal wedding of the King’s son. Such affairs were grand and elaborate occasions for people to see and be seen. Great preparation was required. As was the custom in those days, the King sent out servants to hand-deliver invitations to the event. Typically the King would invite people from the upper crust — governmental leaders, close friends, or political allies. The guest list was more about influence and status than it was about the wedding couple. Then preparation would begin for the wedding. When all was ready, the servants would go out again to all the invited guests to tell them it was time to come to the banquet.
Here the problems began. The folks who had been invited wouldn’t come. So the King sent additional servants. They explained that the site was prepared, the food was cooked, and the table was ready. So, come on! But they still refused to attend. One said there was business to attend to. Another had something going on at the farm that needed attention. So they blew off the invitation.
Now as I was trying to get my head wrapped around this parable I wondered what it would look like in today’s world. Here’s what I came up with.
The governor’s son’s is getting married. The governor’s family is ecstatic and decides to put on a magnificent feast. Using all his social, business, and governmental connections he arranges for a location wedding and reception at an exclusive club on the beach. The cost for the location, caterers, musicians, designers, and planners is astronomical, but nothing is too good for this occasion. So the governor had invitations hand-lettered in calligraphy to a large list of family, friends, colleagues, donors, political supports, and even a few political opponents. Rather than send them through the mail the governor contracted with a specialized business to deliver the invitations in person, an indulgence that wasn’t missed by the invitees. Those who received invitations were appropriately pleased and impressed with the governor’s good taste and with their own status which got them on the list in the first place. Months went by as the preparations moved forward. The governor’s wife, concerned that few people had taken the time to RSVP, convinced the governor to follow up. So, in the days before the wedding and reception the same company sent out personal representatives to let the invitees know that all was ready. Amazingly, even after receiving and accepting the initial invitation, people declined to attend. When the word got back to the governor, he was incensed! He gave word to the personal representatives to try again. They went back to the invitees and said: “Look, the governor has secured this beautiful location, the weather is gorgeous, the prime rib is slow cooking, the salmon is on ice ready to go on the grill, everything is ready. All we need is you.” But the invitees made fun of the representatives and offered lame excuses like having a business meeting or needing to work at the plant. As if they didn’t know in advance that this event was coming. As if they couldn’t manage their schedules. As if this occasion really wasn’t important enough to be “inconvenienced.” So the governor read this exactly as intended. This was a personally slap of the governor’s face- disrespect of the highest order! Who were these people, anyway, to reject the hospitality, not just of any wedding reception, but the social event of the year? When someone extends their welcome and hospitality in such a grand way, the last thing you do, if you want to stay in their good graces, is blow them off!
Did I mention that Jesus’ parable is rated PG-13 for its intense violence? For that reason, you won’t hear this parable taught in Sunday school! We don’t usually see this level of violence in Jesus’ parables, but there it is.
Jesus tells us, after the second set of servants are rejected by the invitees, the invitees turn violent. Beyond disrespecting the King and blowing off the event, the invitees capture the king’s servants, mistreat them, and eventually murder them. The King is outraged. His anger explodes. Who could blame him?
The King reacts violently to being disrespected. He sends soldiers across the land to the original invitees, murders them, and burns their cities. This is not one of the edifying parables of childhood. This is an adult-sized parable challenging our sense of propriety and shaking up our comfortable notions of how God deals with people. The disrespect of the invited guests has consequences even in a kingdom where the king graciously invites them to the feast.
After the anger of the King abates, he turns to immediate matters. Apart from the mistreatment of the king’s representatives, the wonderful event, offered to kin and kindred, was in danger of being cancelled. He had a banquet to put on and no guests to enjoy it. What good is a reception if nobody comes? So, what to do?
In the sports world, this is when you bench the starters and bring in all new players. If the starters can’t or won’t engage with enthusiasm, or worse, behave defiantly toward the coach, they get replaced. Take them out and let new players have a chance to play. The effects of such a radical move, both on the incoming players and on the ones replaced, is often amazing.
The King tells his servants that the first string wasn’t worthy of the invitation. So, he said, “Go out into the main streets and invite everyone you find.” The main streets were the common thoroughfares, the public spaces, where Kings and peasants crossed paths, where wealthy and the poor passed nearby but avoided contact, where shopkeepers waited on the affluent. Imagine a public street in uptown Charlotte and you get the picture. The servants invited everyone they saw. Here, the text points out that they gathered both the good and the bad and were able to fill the banquet hall.
If the original invited guests had come, the hall would have been filled with all the good people, the people of high standing, the connected people, the people with influence and affluence, the people who everyone would agree deserved to be at the King’s feast. The good people would have been pleased that someone, especially the King, recognized the effort they had put into achieving and maintaining their favored position. But those very worthy people believed their own press releases and thought it safe to disrespect the King. Their arrogance was their undoing. For the King was not pleased with their reaction and reacted most unfavorably to their dismissal.
The guests that did come to dinner that day were regular folks, not particularly deserving, some good and some bad. They were there because, when invited, they came.
You can imagine the conversations on the street as the servants went out with their invitations. “Are you saying the King is inviting me to his son’s wedding feast? This is a joke. Right? Why would the King invite folks like me? You’re serious. Really? Right now? Okay… Hey, Martha, close up the shop. We’ve got to run home and get our best robes. We’re going to the King’s party!”
The banquet was underway. Everyone there marveled at the great food and wine — fit for a King! Even more they marveled at their good fortune at having been invited. They didn’t quite understand how they ended up there, but they were enjoying the experience and feeling more than a little gratitude toward the King.
In the Gospel of Luke, the parable Jesus tells ends here. The King throws a party. Invited guests rebuff the King’s invitation. Consequences are severe. New guests, of much lower status, are brought in to enjoy the party. The King’s wedding reception was successful. A good time was had by all. The end. According to Luke.
But here in Matthew’s Gospel there is one additional, disturbing scene. The King circulates among the guests, as good hosts do, and spots a man dressed inappropriately for the wedding. Now, since the guests were last minute replacements, you might wonder why the King became so upset over someone, having just come from the main street, was not dressed properly in a wedding robe. How could the King hold someone off the streets to the standards expected for any normal, kingly wedding reception when this one was anything but normal? Two things might be at work. On the one hand, the King had just been through the bad experience of rejection by the first invitees. So he was probably sensitive to any perception of being slighted. This man, like the originally invited guests, dishonored the King by this choice of dress. Note, also, that all the other second tier invitees were dressed properly. Apparently, when they received an invitation from the King, they did what they could — dressing up — to show their respect for the King. Imagine someone showing up to a formal wedding reception in cutoffs and t-shirt when everyone else was in semi- if not formal- dress. There are some behaviors that bring shame upon the guest and the host.
The King then, in another surprising reaction, has the man tied up and thrown out of the wedding reception, at which time the weeping and gnashing of teeth begins.
The parable ends with a saying we’ve all heard before: Many are called, but few are chosen.
Indeed! In this parable, many guests were called, because, as they saw it, they were worthy. But they were not chosen. Then, many other guests were called, not because of their merit, but because of the King’s generosity. One of them was singled out for his dishonoring of the King. He was not chosen. Of the many who were called, the ones chosen were those who heard the invitation to the feast and responded appropriately and honorably. The chosen ones enjoyed the King’s hospitality and ate and drank and celebrated, honoring the King by the way they behaved.
Let me say a quick work about the violence in this parable before we wrap up. Matthew wrote his Gospel in the last decades of the first century, some fifty or more years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. He wrote this parable, I believe, as an allegory of how God and human beings behave toward one another. The King is God. The Son is Jesus. The original guests are the people of Israel, especially their religious leaders. The wedding reception is the great banquet envisioned by prophets as what the world would look like when God is in charge. It is a metaphor for the heavenly kingdom to which all faithful followers aspire.
Matthew writes his Gospel in the shadow of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. when the center of Jewish religious life was destroyed by the Roman Empire. For the people of Matthew’s day this was like our December 4, 1941, or the more recent 9/11. The terrible events of that time caused God’s people to reflect deeply, as we have done, on what they had done to deserve such punishment. Matthew and others concluded that God was displeased with humans who respond to God’s favor with indifference and defiance.
In the shadow of the destruction of the Temple this parable is very much a parable of judgment, of how God will act toward us if we act in certain ways toward God. In that sense, the violence of the parable provides tangible deterrance to avoid the behaviors that precipitate that violence.
In our lives of faith such violence has been used as the primary motivation for living a Christian life. Obey God’s commandments and you’ll avoid God’s punishments. Obey God’s rules and you’ll be rewarded.
But the people of God in Jesus’ time recognized, as we do today, that there is little direct correlation between good behavior and rewards to come. So there is something else going on. Something that works against our built-in sense of goodness or badness. Something that God’s people call grace.
This parable illuminates the all too human cycle of grace, indifference, and judgment, and the triumph of grace which give us hope.
The parable reminds us that God reaches out to us before we even know there’s a party in the works. God reaches out to us because God is connected to us, God cares about us, God values us, even before we know we are on God’s mind. God continues to reach out to us even when God’s attention leads us to believe that we are special. Basking in the reflected glory of God can easily tempt us to believe God’s favor is a result of our merit. And when that merit turns into a sense of entitlement, we are further tempted to discount our need for God. We might be inclined to reject God’s invitation to celebrate God’s goodness and put our trust in our own ability to enjoy life without attending God’s party. That’s when God’s judgment comes upon us in the form of the consequences of our decisions. When a people, or a nation, begins to think that everything they have is a result of what they themselves have done and earned and don’t see the hand of God working in and through and in spite of human effort, they succumb to the idea that it’s all about us. In that idolatry lays the seeds of our destruction.
The parable warns us of judgment but quickly moves to a word of grace. When God moves on to more responsive people, God reaches out to those on the margins of our acceptability — the common, ordinary folks that live not in the heights of privilege and power, but those that you can find on a street corner. God reaches out to people who are shocked when they get an invitation to God’s party. They know instinctively that it’s God’s favor, God’s graciousness, not their own, that opens the doors to the party. Their humble gratitude is the only gift they can offer in return for the host’s extravagant hospitality. But here, too, is a danger.
If we think that such a gracious invitation requires nothing on our part and we show up to God’s party in our grubbies without regard for the respect due to our host, we too will be discarded like the ungrateful people before us.
It’s not about being called, for many are called. Those who are chosen have responded with thoughtfulness and gratitude for being invited to the party.
The judgment of this parable is that grace does not give us a free ride. Grace demands a response of gratitude. But, even still, grace trumps ingratitude. Grace continues to seek out those who will respond to it and calls them chosen. The wedding reception went long into the night.
So… where would you be in the parable? Are you living more like the original invitees, who relished their status and power, thinking that will be enough? Are you like those who are so tied up with work and responsibility that you don’t have time to attend God’s party? Are you like the one who is grateful for the invitation to join God’s party but thinks it’s not worth changing clothes to attend? Or, are you like the regular folks who use what they have to respond with humble gratitude to God’s extravagant invitation, enjoying the feast that God has prepared?
Friends, the wedding reception is coming. The King is putting on a party. You are invited. Other guests are waiting. The table is spread. It’s going to be great! How you dress is up to you! Come on in!
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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