Matthew 22: 1-14; Yellow Lake Lutheran Church, Danbury, WI; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; 10.11.2020
Let us pray,
Open our minds and hearts O Spirit, to hear your word for us today. Blow through us, so that we may know you more, and live in your loving grace. Amen.
Well, this gospel is a fine how-do-you-do! My first sermon text in this new setting turns out to be the hardest parable in the gospels. A suspicious person might think this was a test! In the year 1513 Martin Luther, when faced with this text, called it the “terrible gospel on which I hate to preach!” Well, I accept the challenge. Digging deep into the Scripture results in rich rewards. So, let’s dig in.
This is the third parable in Matthew’s gospel addressed to the religious leaders of the day. The setting is the temple, where Jesus has just turned over the money tables. They question his authority. It is not a “peace that passes all understanding” sort of a time and place. No, in fact the verses that come directly before this passage go like this: When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet. Jesus tells an intense parable for a tense setting.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king, who gave a wedding banquet for his son. The king, in perfect story format, sends out his slaves three times. The first time his slaves go to gather the invited they are ignored. The second time the invited brush it off and go their own way. The intended guests are too busy. Some of the invited, though, do more than reject the invitation. They turn on the messengers seize them, mistreat them and murder them.
From a story telling perspective, that’s a pretty big escalation. So, the king sends his soldiers out to kill the murderers and burn down the city. But this stubborn king will be damned if he is going to give up. So, finally, he sends some more slaves into the burning city to invite anyone, good or bad, who will fill the banquet hall.
Even then the king is not satisfied. He scans the banquet hall and sees a man who has been dragged in, off the streets who isn’t dressed appropriately. The King approaches him saying, “Friend, how did you get in without a wedding robe?” The man is speechless.
And if this were a movie the final lines of the drama would be spoken with horror music playing in the background. “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.”
What in the world do we do with a parable like this?! The most common way of interpreting this parable through the centuries has been to turn it into an allegory, where each character in the story stands for a character in the real world. In the typical allegorical interpretation, the king stands for God, Jesus is the son, the wedding feast is the banquet in the life to come. The invited guests and murdered slaves are the Old Testament prophets and the Israelites, the guests who actually attend the banquet are the gentiles, us, and the servants who bring them in are the missionaries who bring people to the church. There it is. A nice, neat package. All said and done.
But, Oh, how much terrible theology and bloody history has come from that allegorical interpretation! This text was used by the church for centuries to persecute the Jewish people. The crusades against Muslims were justified based on this text too. It’s important to remember history’s lessons when we look for meaning this story.
It might be easy to understand why it has been understood this way. The essence of faith has often been simplified to something like this: trust in Jesus to forgive your sins and you’ll get to go to heaven when you die. At some level I think we want it to be that clear.
A cut and dried formula is so much more comfortable than the day to day practice of following Jesus, the challenge of loving our neighbor as our selves, the work of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. It feels better to say the Jews got it all wrong and are therefore cut out of the kingdom. They are replaced by the Christians. Whew! We’re safe. If we just say the right prayer, put on the robe of righteousness, we’ll be welcomed into the feast to come.
But parables don’t work that way. Allegorizing the text locks us into our own thinking and keeps us from really experiencing the change of heart that parables are meant to create. If we tie up the parables in a neat little bundle, we miss the point. We skip right over the violence, escalation and ridiculousness of the plot. In our attempt to wiggle out of the squirmy feeling that we get at the end of this parable we strip it of its power to change us.
You’ve probably heard the adage that religion is supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Well, parables fall into the latter category of afflicting the comfortable. They are supposed to turn something on its head so completely that we see things in a new way.
Debie Thomas, from St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California suggests on her blog, Journey with Jesus, that we reconsider this parable – letting it speak to us in all its provocative fullness. Maybe Jesus is telling this parable in such an extreme and offensive way precisely because we actually DO believe in a God as hard as the king who turns his armies loose on his own people and we need the hyperbole in order to recognize it. Perhaps Jesus tells this harsh story to the upright, self-righteous leaders of the Temple who insist on the right appearances of things because they don’t recognize him or his authority. After all, they were looking for a king like Herod, a conqueror who would restore Israel’s might not a simple man riding into town on a donkey.
She asks, Is it possible that Jesus is offering us a critical description of how God’s kingdom is often depicted by God’s own followers? What if the king in the parable isn’t God at all? What if the king is what we project onto God? What if the king embodies everything we’ve learned to associate with divine power and authority from watching other, all-too-human kings and rulers? Kings like Herod. Conquerors like the Romans in Jesus’ day. Leaders in our own time and place who execute their authority in abusive, violent ways, compelling their followers to gleefully celebrate in circumstances that call for lament.
Her questions ring true for me. I can’t begin to tell you how many people I have counseled over the years who have been wounded by brutal versions of religion, bludgeoned by a depiction of an angry God who demands the right prayer, the right confession of faith, the right sign of the spirit. So many people have experienced the church as petty, stingy, and judgmental.
I grew up in a healthy church in Moorhead MN. We had excellent pastors who preached God’s grace. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the love of God was bigger and stronger and warmer than anything I could ever imagine. I hope that’s true for all of you listening to or watching this broadcast. But I know some of you still carry deep wounds from the years or decades you spent appeasing the King you mistook for God. Sometimes God is presented to the world as easily offended, displeased, dishonored; whose power is unsearchable, unknowable, and must be submitted to; whose invitation has strings attached.
The opening line of this text says, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king… It doesn’t say as it does elsewhere the kingdom of heaven is like. It says it can be compared to, suggesting that it’s not like that. As followers of Jesus do we really believe God is a mean, petty, vengeful, hot-headed, thin-skinned ruler intent on getting even? Does God burn down a city out of wounded pride? Is God like the capricious king who greets a stranger with a passive aggressive greeting, “Friend…” just before having him bound and thrown out into the outer darkness?
Debie Thomas again suggests another possibility: What if the God figure in the parable is the one guest who refuses to accept the terms of the tyrannical king? The one guest who decides not the wear the robe of forced celebration and coerced hilarity? There is a striking similarity between the one who is bound hand and foot and cast out into the outer darkness and the one who stood silent before Herod before his journey to Gethsemane, Calvary, the cross and the grave.
The parables of Jesus are meant to afflict the comfortable and the show us who God is and maybe even who God isn’t. We must remember that it is Jesus who tells this parable, the one who shows us all we need to know about God; whose unwavering love was always bigger, stronger, warmer than anything we could possibly compare it to. Jesus the Christ is our banquet host.
Isaiah foretold it: The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy…the shroud that is cast over all peoples, and will swallow up death forever.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to that stubborn vindictive king’s wedding banquet—and if we hear the parable in its provocative fullness we might see that there is no comparison whatsoever.
Let us pray. Gracious God, let us hold on to your good news. May we rejoice in you always. Show us how near you are to us. And fill us with the peace that passes all understanding, guard and keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.