Matthew 22:1-14 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 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.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.
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. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 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.
“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 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.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”
A few months ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a play known as The Play That Goes Wrong which ran at the Apollo Theater in London back in 2012 and then later in the U.S. An outrageous slapstick comedy, the play begins as a fictitious production of a whodunnit murder mystery entitled “The Murder at Haversham Manor” put on by a local (and presumably amateur) theater company. Before too long the play, well...goes wrong. Actors forget their lines. Set pieces fall over. Characters have to be dragged offstage after being accidentally knocked unconscious. It just descends into comic mayhem.
The show has spawned several spin-off productions: Peter Pan Goes Wrong, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, and a TV show, The Goes Wrong Show. The show was hailed by audiences and critics as a laugh riot and also probably every theater person’s worst nightmare. What if everything that could possibly go wrong onstage went wrong?
I suspect that the scenario I’ve just described probably feels a bit very similar to the way many preachers feel when reading this parable from Scripture. Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet is actually the third in a series of parables. Matthew’s Gospel picks up after the events of Palm Sunday during the final days of Jesus’ life. Jesus is stirring up trouble in the Temple, and he finds himself once again under interrogation from the Pharisees and the religious leaders. “By what authority are you doing these things,” they demand to know, “and who gave you this authority?” (21:23)
So, Jesus tells them a parable. A parable where everything goes wrong, and it’s a real doozy. “The kingdom of God is like this,” he says. A king throws a wedding banquet for his son, and first of all no one shows up. Right off the bat, we’re off to a pretty rocky start.
So the king tries sending out a second invite. “Hey, did you not hear how great this party is going to be?” he says, “We’ve got a big banquet dinner. We’ve got the fatted calf. We’ve slaughtered the oxen. We’ve got everything you could possibly want at a big party back in 30 C.E. or so.” The royal subjects respond with a resounding “Meh.” The NRSV actually says that some of them were even making fun of him...and went so far as to actually murder the king’s slaves for sending them invitations!
“I’m sorry. Murder, did you say?” Hey, I didn’t write this parable. I just report it.
If you think everything has gone wrong, buckle your seat belts because this is when things go from bad to worse. “Okay,” the king says, “that’s it. You people don’t want to come to my party? Fine!” The king has the villagers executed for murdering his slaves effectively going to war with his own subjects.
I guess you could say the party is probably cancelled right? Well, you guessed wrong. The king announces that his party is still on (as if this parable hadn’t already gone off the rails enough already). The king sends his slaves back out into the main streets to invite more people. Back in Biblical times, the “main streets” were located just near the edges of the outer limits of the territory. The king has sent his slaves out to the very edges of the kingdom (the very edges of society) to bring in whoever they can find. Good people. Bad people. Questionable characters. Doesn’t matter. Just bring everybody in. Pretty soon the wedding hall is filled with people. Huzzah!
Well, this at least sounds pretty good, right? All are welcome at the wedding banquet, good and bad alike! That is, until one of the guests shows up without a wedding robe (and why on earth wouldn’t he? He was just pulled in off the street!). This apparently sends the king completely over the edge. “Friend,” he says, “how did you get in here without wearing the proper clothes?!” He has the slaves bind the man up hand and foot and throw him out into the outer darkness. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?
Jesus smiles and says, “The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!” and I can only imagine leaves the Pharisees wondering what in the world they had just listened to. Maybe we are, too. It’s hard to make heads or tails of a parable like this one. Everything that could possibly go wrong in a parable seems to go wrong in this one.
Throughout the ages, preachers, scholars, and theologians have puzzled over this parable and what in the world Jesus might have possibly meant by it during the last days of his life as he was making his way closer to the cross. Scholars have pointed out that many of Matthew’s first readers would have likely remembered Rome’s invasion of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and the destruction of the temple. Many of those first readers of this Gospel believed that this was God’s way of punishing Israel for rejecting the Messiah (perhaps not unlike how the proverbial “ungrateful subjects” in this story rejected the invitation of their king).
As a result, throughout history this passage and others like it have been interpreted, used, and weaponized by the Christian church as ammunition to justify anti-Semitism, Biblical supercessionism, and violence towards our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community for the so-called “sake of the Gospel.”
Let me just get something out of the way right off the bat. This kind of response to the Gospel is horribly anti-Semitic. If our reading of Scripture emboldens us to act out in violence towards our brothers and sisters in our community, then our faith is misguided, tone-deaf, and wrong. Especially given the fact that the narrator of this parable (Jesus) is just about as devout a Jew as you’re ever going to find and who (in this same Gospel just give chapters later!) will tell his followers to put down their weapons even in the face of his enemies and even in the face of his own death (26:52).
Secondly, I think it’s important to remember who Jesus is talking to here. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees. He is being questioned and interrogated specifically by those who hold status and power in society. Jesus responds with this completely off-the-rails parable. I mean, the tone of this parable is just so over-the-top. It almost feels like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie...or something out of The Play That Goes Wrong! It almost feels like a comedy! Like Theater of the Absurd. So, my question is what does it tell us that Jesus is telling this parable to the Pharisees? There’s a lot that we could say about these guys. Being hilarious stand-up comedians was probably not one of them.
I think it’s very telling that Jesus opens the story the way that he does. Jesus doesn’t exactly say, “God is like this crazy king.” Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is like this whole crazy story. The Kingdom of God is like Theater of the Absurd. A comedy where everything goes wrong. A kingdom where everything you think you know to be true on earth (where the powerful and the elite are lifted up, and the poor are cast out and punished) is turned upside down. Everything is turned completely on its head.”
As for our friend at the end here who is cast out into the outer darkness, take a look at what Jesus actually says about that part of the story. Jesus doesn’t say he was kicked out because his clothes weren’t fancy enough. Jesus says he was kicked out for showing up without a wedding robe. That’s a very specific detail.
Remember, (according to Jesus) this is a party. A wedding robe back then was something you wore to be festive. To celebrate. A wedding robe was what you wore when you were ready to get out on the dance floor and boogie, and this is the dance where Jesus is being welcomed as the bridegroom. The symbolism here seems to be that this particular guest was invited to get up, get his boogie on, and celebrate, and his response was “Nah. I’m good.”
As I read this parable, this whole story almost started to remind me of “The Safety Dance.” Have you ever heard that song? “The Safety Dance” was a new-wave pop song by the group, Men Without Hats. It came out back in 1982 after the lead singer was famously kicked out of a nightclub for not dancing the way that everybody else in the club was dancing.
“We can dance if you want to,” the song goes:
“...we can leave your friends behind
‘cause your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance,
Well they’re no friends of mine.
We can act if we want to. If we don't, nobody will.
You can act real rude and totally removed, and I can act like an imbecile.”
Almost sounds a little bit like our parable, doesn’t it? In the post-punk world of the 1980’s “The Safety Dance,” was written as an anthem for the weirdos. An anthem for those who didn’t dance the same proverbial dance as everybody else.
“We can dance. We can dance. Everything is out of control.”
Jesus tells a parable that is out of control to a group of people in power who have done everything that they can to consolidate control. Jesus says that the Kingdom of heaven (the real kingdom of heaven) is not about the dominion of the powerful or gate-keepers who have status. It’s a great big party. It’s the dance floor for the weirdos and the oppressed. The vulnerable and the poor. The great banquet table that turns everything upside down. A kingdom that acts like it comes from out of this world and leaves this one far behind.
I wonder if that’s what Jesus hoped his church would look like as he sat there in the temple during those last days of his life. An anthem for the outcast and for sinners. A community that sings the anthem of the ones who don’t live on Main Street. For those who are just outside the outer limits: invisible and unnoticed. I wonder if Jesus imagined a Church that would dance for the most vulnerable people in the neighborhood because (as Matthew seems to say) “if your friends don't dance, then they're no friends of mine.” If we are no friend to the most vulnerable people in the neighborhood, then how can we possibly be a friend to someone like Jesus because that's exactly who Jesus has invited to the party?
I wonder if that’s what Jesus hoped his Church might look like. I suppose the answer to that question is entirely up to us. I hope that we can be the Church that’s not afraid to get out on the dance floor of this strange story. To sing the anthem of the Kingdom of God that turns society upside down for the sake of the outcast and more deeply than that, for the sake of the Gospel. If that’s the kind of Church that we can be, then who knows? Maybe this parable didn’t go quite so wrong after all…
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.