Readings: Isaiah 25:1–9 · Psalm 23 · Philippians 4:1–9 · Matthew 22:1–14
May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
It’s good to be back here with you all at St. James. I think I probably have seen most of you, maybe all of you. But if we haven’t met before, my name is Canon Jody Howard, and I work in the bishop’s office, and it’s good to be with you to talk a little bit about this interim period later in the day.
Right now, I want to focus on our gospel text, which can be a challenging one.
The parable of the wedding feast is one of three parables of judgment that are grouped together at the end of chapter 21 and the beginning of chapter 22 of Matthew’s gospel.
The first is the parable of the two brothers, where Jesus asks the crowd, the people with whom he is discussing or debating, what they think about two brothers, where one was asked to go out into the fields and initially said no, but then later went, and the other was asked to go into the fields and immediately said yes, but ended up not going. And Jesus asked, “Who then did the will of the Father?” Well, it was the one who initially said no, but later went.
And then the next parable was the parable of the wicked tenants, which we heard last week, in which Jesus confronts the religious establishment. And interestingly, they respond to his parable about the tenants who killed the messengers of the vineyard owner, and then eventually killed the son of the vineyard owner. Jesus asks, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do?” And the religious leaders respond, “He will kill those wicked tenants.”
And interestingly, the violence that they plan to mete out in response is not violence that’s echoed by Jesus. Jesus says, in interpreting the parable, that the land will be taken from you and given to another. In other words, the people who’ve been called to be faithful have not been faithful, and therefore the land promised will be given to others.
And then we come to this parable, a parable of judgment, where Jesus tells the tale of a king who sets up this stupendous feast and invites all the people to come, all the people, all the great people of the country.
And as one commentator noted, a lot of folks miss the political elements of this, which is what makes it more complicated to understand and interpret.1 The king sets up this feast for his son’s wedding, and this is like a state occasion, right? So the people who are initially invited are the people who have high status in the country. They refuse to come, and not only do they refuse to come, they add injury to insult by treating the messengers poorly and then even killing the messengers.
And this is actually a political act. They move from insult to rebellion against the king, and so the king does what kings would do, what would be expected: the king puts down the rebellion. He sends out the troops and destroys the locations of power for the people who are rebelling against him.
And then — again, political event — he can’t allow the feast to be empty. This is a celebration. So he again sends his servants out and says, “Invite everyone you encounter in the streets, good and bad. It doesn’t matter. Bring them in.” And so they go out and they bring in this crowd.
And the king goes out to inspect the guests at the wedding feast, and he finds this individual, this man without a wedding garment. Sometimes people have interpreted this: “Oh, well, that means this is a representative of the bad, because the good and the bad were brought in, and this man was representative of the bad.” But actually, what seems to be happening here is that this is another type of insult.
The wedding garment — there’s lots of different interpretations you’ll hear of this. You may have heard them in the past. But one thing that scholars seem to understand is that in this period in Israel–Palestine, people who were invited to a feast like this would have been expected to wear their best clothes. They wouldn’t have been expected to show up in the short clothing they would have worn for the labor of the day. They would have been expected to be clean. They would wear the whitest clothes they owned, and they would get their clothes as white as they could — recognizing that the poor, if they were doing manual labor, couldn’t necessarily get their clothes completely white. But they would be wearing longer garments, and would be as clean as possible.
This would be their wedding garment, and it was to show respect to the host and for the event. And this is a very important event, because it’s the wedding feast for the king’s son.
So in the feast — and this has overtones of the kingdom of heaven, because the bad and the good are invited in the same; they’re all invited in — here’s this person who hasn’t bothered to put on a wedding garb.
In the narrative of the story, what seems to be happening here is that we’ve seen how a whole group of powerful people can be insulting to the invitation to the feast, and then we see how an individual can likewise be insulting and reject the invitation, even while being physically present. So it’s a matter of engagement, of taking part in the actual celebration to which one has been invited.
And still, it is troubling to hear the way this parable ends.
Matthew does something here in recounting Jesus’ parable. There’s this literary device that Matthew records. You’ve heard of breaking the fourth wall in TV shows, where somebody in the show looks out and speaks to the audience. There’s a breaking of the fourth wall here, where we suddenly leave the world of the parable, and the king who’s speaking says, “Bind the man hand and foot, and throw him” — where? Outside the doors? Outside the gate? No — “into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
So it’s a breaking of the fourth wall, and suddenly what was a story that would have been recognizable to Jesus’ hearers as a morality tale, with features that would have been used in Jewish religious storytelling, suddenly takes on this cast about the judgment at the end, like the judgment at the end of life. And it is troubling.
And then we have this phrase that sums up: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
So what I want to say to you about this parable, and about the storytelling that Jesus engages in, is that he’s trying to highlight certain dangers. And we should not forget the initial audience to whom he’s speaking. It is the same audience that he just told the parable to about the wicked tenants: the religious establishment, the leaders, the people who were rejecting his message while claiming to be right with God — and in fact, perhaps a select group of people that were right with God.
And so the interesting thing about this parable is what ends up happening. It’s not the powerful who come in to enjoy the feast. It’s not only the people who would have been considered good who come in to enjoy the feast. And it is not the distinction between good and bad that determines whether people will get to enjoy the feast.
It is instead their ability to engage with, and willingness to engage with, the joy of the one who invited them. It is instead the willingness to take part in the feast that actually makes the distinction between those who remain in, and the one who does not.
In other words, it is not about their behavior ultimately, as far as discrete actions, except for one thing: Do they accept the invitation? Do they truly accept the invitation?
So Jesus is talking to people who are convinced of their own righteousness. Elsewhere, John the Baptist tells a similar gathering of people, “Do not presume to say, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God can make from these stones children” — or descendants — “for Abraham.”
So folks were convinced of their own standing, and they had transferred their assurance from God to something else. And that’s the key.
Because the reality is that we should all feel a certain assurance because of the grace of God and the love of Christ. But we all have the temptation in our lives to transfer that assurance to other things, even if it can still have a sort of religious cast to it.
We might transfer that assurance to the idea that, well, I have control over my life. I have a good job. I’ve done all the right things. I’m saved. I’m taken care of because of the decisions I’ve made. And that may be the case — until the unexpected happens.
We may have assurance because we think, I am a good person. I do all these good things for others. And that is good. However, no one is good enough to actually do everything and meet every need we encounter in the world, right? There’s always more. There’s always more need. There’s always more to be done, and you can’t work your way to salvation.
Instead — instead, the good works that we do, and the things that we’re called to do, and the ability that we have to do them, from the perspective of our faith, are a response to the grace of God and the assurance we have been given.
And so the real question that’s raised by the parable today is: In what direction is our assurance based? Is our assurance based upon the grace and the goodness of God and the love that God has for us? Or are we basing our assurance on something internal to us, where we think we’ve done something and do not have any need of God or others? Because we will always have need of God, and we will always have need of others.
And in fact, we will enact today in this service a sort of teaching liturgy of that.
In our tradition, in the prayer book tradition, Thomas Cranmer — the architect, people say, rather than author, of the first prayer books — did something that was unique in Western Christianity. It’s still unique. If you go to the Roman Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church, or if you use something called the Penitential Order in our own prayer book, you’ll notice that the confession is in a different place. In many Western Christian services, the confession happens at the beginning of the service, and then you continue on with the rest of the service. But in the Anglican tradition, in the prayer book tradition, Cranmer intentionally moved the placement of the confession to be after the reading of the Scriptures and the sermon.2
And he did this as an expression of a theological insight, or theological truth, that he believed, which is at the heart of our particular tradition: that repentance, rather than being a prerequisite for forgiveness, is actually the result of forgiveness. Repentance in our lives is because we hear that God has forgiven us and loves us, and that prompts us to then confess and to try to live anew.
And the way Cranmer talked about it was that our hearts are first softened toward God because of the grace that’s proclaimed in Scripture, and then our hearts are softened toward one another. Softened first toward God, and then softened toward one another.
And so this can be a troubling parable. But what I would encourage you to think about and focus on is the fact that the feast itself is this huge amalgam of people from every walk of life who simply accepted the invitation. And the people who remain in the feast — which is representative of the great eschatological feast at the end of days, people coming into the kingdom, the feast that was foreshadowed in the reading from Isaiah today — it is all about engaging with the grace and the celebration of the one who has invited us to the feast.
And so we today have been invited to a feast. We have been invited to receive once again Christ’s body and blood; to be reminded we have been called as God’s people; and to be reminded that, while there are many things in the world that we are called to do, we are not sent out to do them on our own.
But as Paul reminded us in the reading from Philippians, God is always present and near us. We can rejoice with those who rejoice. We can weep with those who weep, precisely because we’ve been invited to the feast. And God does not leave us on our own, but is with us every moment, and empowers us to do things that we could not do on our own.
And that is our assurance.
Amen.
Bauckham, Richard. 1996. “The Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-14) and the Parable of the Lame Man and The Blind Man (Apocryphon of Ezekiel)” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (3): 471. https://doi.org/10.2307/3266897.
Ashley Null has lectured about this, among others. This article discusses some of the background: Hackett, Charles D. “Entrance Rites, Confessions of Sin, and Identity In the Sixteenth Century.” Anglican and Episcopal History 73, no. 1 (2004): 4–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42612380.
