October 12, 2014 | The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

posted in: Sermons 0

by the Rev. Robert C. Laird

We can be honest with each other, I think:
Today’s Gospel is a struggle,
and it has been for centuries of Christians.

Matthew’s account of the king’s wedding feast for his son
follows closely a similar parable in Luke’s Gospel,
though Matthew takes it to the next level;
he really kicks it up a notch.

There’s something deeply unsettling
about a story where even a relatively innocent guy,
like the one without the wedding garment,
seems to get a raw deal,
thrown out of the wedding party as he is,
into the outer darkness,
with the weeping, and the gnashing of teeth.

So what do we make of this allegory today,
and how do we apply it to our own lives,
which seem so radically different
from what Jesus is talking about?

A little history of Matthew’s Gospel
and the audience he was writing for
gives us some insight
into how to interpret this otherwise troubling Gospel.

Matthew was writing after the destruction of the Temple
in the year 70 of the Common Era.
His community was Jewish,
and unlike the Gospel of Mark,
which predated Matthew’s account
and was focused on Jesus,
and on the disciples that failed to understand him,
Matthew’s main antagonist is the Jewish leaders of the time,
who fail to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah,
and are ultimately responsible (in Matthew’s telling)
for Jesus’s crucifixion and death at the end of this week
(this narrative takes place on the Temple Mount,
during what we will later come to call Holy Week).

The Gospel story for today takes us back into full-blown allegory,
with a narrative that can’t be taken literally,
because of the difficulties in its plot points,
and so is meant to inform us about how
we make lives of faith as Christians today.

The king of this allegory is God,
who is throwing a wedding banquet for his son, Jesus,
and Jesus’s bride is the church.

The king has invited all the usual suspects to the wedding,
everyone who is anyone is on the list;
and, as was the custom of the time for the rich elite folks,
the king sends out his slaves to go get the guests
once the hour for the party has arrived.

But each of the guess, to a person,
says “Thanks, but no thanks.”

This is rude for anyone
when such a generous invitation has been made,
but when it’s the king who is doing the inviting,
it seems downright idiotic to turn him down.

And yet that is exactly what the invited guests do;
they go back to their fields,
or they go back to their business.
These folks have been interpreted allegorically
as the Israelites of Jesus’ time,
or alternately as the Temple authorities;
it’s not super important for our purposes this morning, though.

The king even sends new slaves out a second time;
“Come, friends, the table is ready,
join the feast!”
The king is being very generous and patient,
and his patience and hospitality
are met with rage and murder.

And the guests don’t come.
And that makes the king mad.

So, in a highly improbable turn of events,
the king musters his army
to kill the murders and burn their city.
King takes pawn. Checkmate.

The king then throws the invitation wide,
instructing yet another new set of slaves
to go invite everyone,
starting at the very end of the road,
and bring in everyone you find to join the feast,
which was all prepared and ready
even before the king’s army destroyed that city.
The timeline is pretty amazing,
with how much the king had to get done in one afternoon
before the oxen and fat calves got cold,
having been all ready for the feast…

Frankly, this is all pretty normal up to this point;
Jesus is saying (according to the Church’s interpretation
at least since the early church)
that the invitation to be a part of the feast
is open to everyone,
that nobody will be excluded from the wedding banquet
that celebrates the union of Christ to his Bride, the Church.

Everyone gets to come to this party,
and it’s amazing.

But then the allegory gets REALLY weird.

The king himself comes into the party,
to look at everyone who has shown up,
and he sees that someone doesn’t have the wedding robe.

He calls to the person,
“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?”
Beware when the king calls you “friend…”
He is up to no good…

The man is left speechless…
After all, he was hurried into the party
by the king’s slaves,
and was drawn in from all the way out in the country,
because the folks in the city were gone,
since they had been laid waste to by the king’s army.

And the guy without the wedding garment
is bound and cast into the outer darkness,
with the weeping and the gnashing and whatnot.

Really harsh treatment for someone
who didn’t know when he woke up that day
that he’d be attending a wedding
between the king’s son and the Church.
But many are called, but few are chosen.

 

So what do we make of this harsh story?
Again, the context makes all the difference
in understanding what’s happening here.

The community that Matthew was writing for
was struggling with their own oppression,
as early followers of Jesus,
but also with understanding the destruction of the Temple,
and the overthrow of Jerusalem,
the holy city.

Jesus had fared as well as all the prophets had;
preaching brought with it a pretty short life expectancy
back in the day,
for Jesus, for the prophets that came before him,
and for the apostles that followed him.

This isn’t a story about whether the average Christian
gets into heaven or not,
but is rather a way of understanding
the devastation that the entire community of Israelites
in Jesus’s time had experienced,
and the turmoil that engulfed the early church
as they tried to sort out who was in,
and who was out.

They had seen the very Temple,
the heartbeat of the Jewish community of the time,
and still the holiest site in the Jewish faith,
that Temple had been torn to the ground,
and the whole world they knew was turned upside down.

This allegory helps the downtrodden,
the outsiders,
the tax collectors, and the prostitutes
and the shepherds, and everyone on the margins
understand how they, too,
are invited into the Kingdom of God,
and how Jesus is really on their side
a whole lot more than the folks on the inside,
the Temple authorities and other influential folks.

The Kingdom of God,
the thing that Jesus has spent his whole earthly ministry
talking about, and pointing toward,
and inviting the world to help make real
right here, and right now,
that Kingdom of God
is (or will be) filled with the folks who really need Jesus,
the folks who can see clearly
because they have found forgiveness for their transgressions,
they have found the balm for their sickness,
they have found light in the darkness.

And those aren’t, by and large,
the authorities, or the people who work with them.

But what about that guy?
the one who got thrown out,
with the gnashing, etc…?

That’s a hard question.
I’m pretty sure
that question is a big part of why Martin Luther
HATED this Gospel story,
and loathed preaching on it.

A friend and scholar in Minnesota
has the theory
that the “wedding garment”
(which is a weird reference for Matthew
that we don’t really know anything about),
this “wedding garment” would have ben handed out
by the king’s servants at the door,
since one can’t expect these new guests
to show up with a clean festive party clothes,
given the fact that they didn’t even know they were invited.

And if they had been offered the garment at the door,
then this guy that we read about today
was really disrespecting the king,
in the same way that the first invited guests
from the beginning of the parable had;
by ignoring the king,
and just doing whatever they want.

Put in that context,
it’s a little bit more understandable
that the king
(that is, God)
would have the man bound and cast out:
he was being intentionally oppositional,
which is why he had nothing to say
when the king inquired about why
he was dressed the way he was dressed.
But this is also read with a serious eye toward allegory,
and some scholars think
that the “wedding garment”
isn’t a thing that this guy was supposed to wear,
but rather was our own heart,
which either has faith in it or not
(and no matter how little your faith is,
know that it can grow, and grow,
like the heart of the Grinch,
which became three sizes too big.
(Someone in my house has been watching
Christmas movies lately,
in anticipation of a huge haul of presents,
so I apparently have Christmas on my mind, too,
now that it’s mid-October…)

Even though we show up to the party,
that doesn’t mean we’re there for the right reasons,
or that we’re ready to party for real;
how many of us have gone to a party,
or a dinner, or a festive occasion
that we weren’t really up for,
but went anyway,
because it was the thing to do,
or because it was expected of us,
or because a loved one wanted us there.

We can pull that off when we’re dealing with each other,
but not with God.

God sees our hearts,
and God can help us find the motivation,
can nurture that in us;
but if we close ourselves off from God,
if we refuse to even wear the wedding garment,
then there’s nothing that even God can do for us.
That’s the rub of free will:
We get to choose,
and if we say yes, God will lift us up when we’re low,
and encourage us when we’re down,
and bless us when we feel un-bless-able, unlovable.
But if we say no,
if we refuse,
we’re on our own.

The other point to make
is that in an early Christian community
like the one that Matthew is writing to,
it took a lot to get “voted off the island;”
because it was so dangerous to be a Christian,
you had to work hard to join the community,
through years of study and evaluation and formation.

This is because if you weren’t really in it,
or if you decided to cooperate with the empire,
you compromised the security of the community,
and it could cost everyone their lives.

A compromised community
often equaled a destroyed community,
so if you crossed the line, you were out.

But beyond that,
once you were formed and baptized
and a part of the community,
you were in.
It was really hard to get kicked out,
in part because of how hard it was to get in,
so they didn’t have to do it as often,
but also because of the theology of baptism,
of what it means to be sealed by the Holy Spirit,
and marked as Christ’s own forever.
If you had an argument with someone,
it didn’t mean they were dead to you,
or couldn’t talk to you;
it meant that you had a disagreement,
and the two of you
had to work to move past your differences
(how different is THAT from today,
where churches split at the first sign of disagreement,
and people refuse to even speak to each other
if they don’t pass an ideological litmus test?)

And if you understand the wedding robe
as a gift from God, a sign of being a part of the community;
or if the robe is your heart,
ready to be in relationship with God;
then of refusing to wear the wedding robe
seems to be a pretty defiant stance
for a person to take,
whether intentional or not.

All this person had to do
was wear the robe he was given;
the threshold for being in right relationship
was really quite low;
but he wouldn’t do it,
and so he was excused from the party,
and sent into the darkness,
because he had already put himself there
by refusing to wear the robe in the first place.

God’s whole reason for creating us
was to be in relationship with us,
to love us;
and when we’re open to receiving that love
(even if we’re not ready to;
heck, when are we actually ready to love?)
then God has amazing things in store for us.

Come to the feast:
the groom is waiting,
the meal is prepared,
and all is ready.

If we say “yes,”
then there are wonders in store for us.