When I was a member of Cub Scout Pack 88 way back in elementary school, the end of the program year (which coincided with the end of the school year) was commemorated with a Spring Banquet. On a Friday night in late May, we’d all dress up in our blue and yellow uniforms and gather to celebrate at a place that specialized in wedding receptions and similar such events.
The ritual of these evenings was very predictable: We’d sit at a bunch of long tables; we’d eat as if we hadn’t been fed in weeks; we’d misbehave with our friends (but not too much, because our parents were sitting right next to us); we’d listen to some boring speeches; we’d receive all of the patches and badges and pins that we’d earned over the previous year; and then we’d go home.
Given my limited life experience up to that point, these seemed like the most magical evenings ever — not only because they were held at the fanciest place I’d ever been, but also because I got to spend a few hours acting silly with my peers, drinking bottomless pitchers of soda, and eating absurd amounts of ziti, dinner rolls and chocolate cake. It was only after I became a parent myself that I came to appreciate that my own parents probably had a divergent take on these events.
After all, they were the ones who had to find a babysitter for my little sister, then drive a half hour to spend an evening with a bunch of rowdy boys who were all amped-up on sugar, and then drive a half hour home listening me to complain that I had to go to the bathroom (because I’d managed to sink three gallons of root beer and two gallons of ice water in the span of two hours) and felt like I was going to throw up (because I’d also eaten twice my body weight in pasta and baked goods).
Same banquet, different perspectives.
In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus decides to tell the chief priests and Pharisees, with whom he’s been chatting for a while now, a parable about a slightly different kind of banquet.
As the story goes, a king decides to throw a wedding party for his son. He sends his slaves to call upon the invited guests, but they refuse to come, which would have been as scandalously rude back then as it would be now; I mean, when the king invites you over for dinner, you’re kind of expected to show up.
The frustrated monarch then dispatches more slaves to round up the prospective celebrants. Some of them respond with excuses for their absence — they make light of the situation and quickly turn their attention to other things; one going away to his farm, another to his business.
Others choose to take the act of RSVPing to a whole different level, seizing the king’s messengers, mistreating them and killing them and this is kind of weird. I mean we’ve all been invited to parties we’d rather not attend, but sending one’s regrets in this way seems a bit much.
The king, as you might imagine, is completely enraged by this behavior — so much so, in fact, that he sends his troops to exact vengeance upon the people who murdered his servants and to burn their city to the ground.
But the king has already rented a hall and hired a DJ and bought all of this food, so the wedding banquet must go on. The king sends his slaves into the streets to invite everyone they find — the “good” and the “bad” — to the palace for the party, and the previously empty wedding hall is soon filled with guests.
But when the king finally shows up, he is surprised to see a man there who is not wearing a wedding robe, which was the customary attire for such an important event. The king, who is clearly already in a foul mood, turns to his attendants, points to this inappropriately dressed guest and says, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Again, this seems like an extreme response to what amounts to a fashion foul, but it seems like there’s a whole lot of harsh to go around in this story.
Jesus then wraps the whole thing up by turning to the chief priests and Pharisees and saying to them, “For many are called, but few are chosen,” which probably left them all standing there scratching their heads for a while. I know that’s what I did when I read it.
For what it’s worth, Luke tells a version of this parable too, but his is very different — and those differences are worth thinking about. The festivities in Luke’s story take place not in the king’s palace, but at the home of a hypothetical someone who “gave a great dinner and invited many.” The potential guests decide to skip the event here too, and the scorned host is understandably angry, but there is absolutely no violence to be found in Luke.
In response to his guests’ rejection, Luke’s host sends his slaves into the streets to bring all sorts of people to his party. Upon discovering that there is still room for more people, he orders his slaves to go out again and fetch everyone they can find so that his house may be filled.
As Luke’s story concludes, the banquet host is apparently still bitter about the lack of gratitude shown by his original invitees, which leads him to declare, “For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.” I mean sure, his reaction is a little spiteful, but the relatively mild punishment of “none for you” is the extent of the vengeance he seeks.
Same banquet, different perspectives.
Matthew’s version of the wedding banquet parable follows right on the heels of the parable of the wicked tenants (the one we heard last week), and so the connections between these two stories are hard to overlook: in both, two sets of slaves are sent out to do the master’s bidding; in both, these messengers are met with violent rejection; in both, the consequences of this rejection are said to be as severe as it gets; And both can be seen as allegories about God’s gift of salvation and our response to that gift.
Now, as I mentioned last week, the characters and happenings in allegories always have correspondences to people and events in the real world — and this one is no exception to that rule.
The king here is obviously God (go figure); the feast is the table that the Twenty-third Psalm says God will prepare for us; the slaves sent to fetch the guests are God’s prophets (past and present); the violent treatment the slaves meet alludes to the Israelites’ tendency to reject those prophets; the invitation extended to the good and the bad represents the early church’s mission to both the Jews and the Gentiles; and the burning of the city here is likely meant to symbolize the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans, not long before Matthew wrote his Gospel).
And that last piece is really important for us to understand: Matthew wrote his Gospel long after Jesus had died and risen (which happened around 30CE), at some point following the fall of Jerusalem and the loss of the temple (in 70CE). Did Matthew include this detail about the burning of this fictitious city to convey to his readers that Jesus had actually predicted the fate of Jerusalem four decades before it happened? Sure, maybe. But there’s more to it than that.
It is a truth widely acknowledged that, when a bad thing happens, people tend to look for someone to blame for it. The destruction of Jerusalem was a very bad thing, and so it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if Matthew were looking for someone to take the rap for it.
A lot of folks in Matthew’s first audience, comprised mostly of Jewish followers of Jesus, would have read this story and understood it to mean that God had destroyed the most important place in Judaism in order to punish the Pharisees and other religious authorities for their unfaithfulness. And it’s fair to say that’s part of what Matthew is driving at here.
Among the Gospel writers, Matthew is arguably the most concerned with the whole idea of God’s judgement; but the fact that this judgement is often depicted as being both violent and directed against the Jewish leadership makes this First Gospel a really uncomfortable read, even today.
I have to be honest with you: Matthew’s allusions to God’s wrath make me squirm, not only because they’re so harsh, but also because they’re so completely inconsistent with the way in which Jesus — who Matthew makes pretty clear is God living among us — actually behaves. At the end of the day, I’m not sure what to make of Matthew sometimes.
Unfortunately, many among Matthew’s later Christian audiences have wrongly interpreted this story and others in his version of the gospel (like the one we heard last week) as a broad indictment of Judaism. They see the king’s punishment of the original invited guests, and the extension of a new invitation to everyone, “both good and bad,” as justification for asserting themselves as God’s new chosen ones and summarily relegating the Jewish people to a lesser status. And this is seriously misguided, not only because anti-Semitism is objectively wrong, but also because this parable doesn’t lend itself to such a simplistic reading.
I say this because Matthew really throws a wrench in the works by appending the final four verses to the first ten of the story (for the record, Luke’s version doesn’t include any of what happens here). The unfortunate guest who shows up without a wedding garment, and is subsequently bound and thrown into the outer darkness at the king’s direction, seems to make an already disagreeable parable even more cringeworthy.
I mean why does the king have to treat this poor man so harshly? He’s been gathered off the street and brought to this party, so how could he possibly have had time to pick out an appropriate outfit for the occasion? Why is the king, who told his slaves to go and bring to the party everyone they could find, surprised that this poor guy showed up there at the wedding hall underdressed?
We’d all do well to remember that this is a story, one that Jesus and Matthew are using, with dramatic effect, in order to make a point, and that point is this: Even the newly-invited guests, representing the people of the church, will not be exempt from God’s judgement.
You see, there are “both good and bad” among the Jews and the Christians — those who choose to clothe themselves in righteousness by living into Jesus’s teachings, and those who don’t. And this is neither a Jewish thing nor a Gentile thing, it’s a human thing.
In Matthew’s way of understanding, if no one is beyond the reach of God’s grace, then it only stands to reason that no one is beyond the reach of God’s judgement either. For some reason, the things we choose to say and do actually seem to matter to God.
Same banquet, different perspectives.
And we are left to wonder whether we can count ourselves among the few who are chosen or among the many who are called; at the end of the day, I guess God is the only one who really knows for sure — though, we’ll all find out at some point, I suppose.
But, in the meantime, you’ve gotta wonder: wouldn’t the world we live in now be a much a better place if we all just behaved like we believe that we are truly among the chosen — showing gratitude for the gift of eternal life that we’ve been given, and honoring the tremendous responsibility that comes along with it?