Matthew 22:1-14
Proper 23 / Year A
Today’s parable of the
wedding feast proclaims one particular thing which truly is good news: you and
I are invited to God’s feast. In fact,
it is open to everyone who will respond to the invitation to attend. This is good news indeed. But, as they say, the devil is in the details
and the details of this story leave much to be desired.
It starts off on such a
high note – a king plans a wedding feast for his son. When all is ready, he sends out his servants
to summon the invited guests. Although
not identified, we would expect these folks are family and friends of the king
along with various dignitaries and worthies.
But this group refuses to attend.
The king resends his representatives to plead with the invitees. Some guests go about their daily affairs
while others mistreat the envoys, going so far to kill them. It is an act of unexpected violence not
merited and seemingly without any particular motivation or aim. The king retaliates with a response out of
proportion to the atrocities committed.
He sends his troops to “destroy” the murders and to burn their
city.
It is impossible to hear
this ancient story without connecting it to what is happening now in Israel and
Gaza. The Palestinians have been the
victims of human rights violations for decades, but (to be clear) this in no
way justifies attacking and slaughtering innocent civilians. The actions of Hamas, a radical fringe of the
Palestinian people, is bringing untold suffering to innocent Christians and Muslims
within its own population; many of whom are peaceful and support working with
Israel to resolve nonviolently the difficult issues between them.
Israel has responded to
these attacks as it must to secure its people and borders as well as eliminate
the threat Hamas poses to its safety.
But in so doing it is creating a humanitarian crisis beyond imagining. I am not a military analyst so I don’t have a
blueprint for how to conduct this war.
But I am a human being and what I can say is my heart breaks for both
sides. I pray for a just peace but fear
the possibility of ethnic cleansing.
So, back to the
parable. After destroying the murderers
and burning the city, the king sends his servants out to invite whoever they can
find. Out of the ashes and ruins enough
people are found to fill the hall. Are
they there because they want to be or are they just attending because they fear
what the king might do if they stay away?
Either way, the guests are compliant, going so far as to adhere to
ordinary customs around such an occasion.
All, except for one. The king
notices a man not wearing a wedding robe and orders him to be bound hand and a
foot and thrown into the outer darkness.
Perhaps it softens the thud of this act to know the king provides
wedding robes for people to wear, thus, not wearing one is an act of defiance.
Traditional
interpretations of the story hold the king represents God, Jesus represents the
son, prophets such as John the Baptist represent the servants, the religious
leaders and authorities of the day represent the initial invited guests, and
the people who respond to the invitation are the folks who follow Jesus. The man without a robe is an allusion to
people like Judas who are in the Jesus movement, but not of it. One of the troubling things about this
interpretation is how it portrays God.
If the king represents God, then God is both generous and vengeful, reactive
with fury, and willing to judge our character if not our attire. Fortunately, this is not the only parable
Jesus tells and he gives us a much broader picture of God the Father in the
rest of the gospels.
We had a pretty full
agenda for last Monday’s meeting of the Vestry.
After mulling over various issues with the building and property and
reading through the financial reports, we had finished everything on our list,
but the meeting was not over. We got to
talking about the people and families who have not returned since the
pandemic. Like the invited guests who don’t
to come to the feast, we pondered why these folks have not come back. We don’t have any real answers, but recognize
we are not alone. Pretty much every
church, regardless of denomination or theological leaning, has seen its average
Sunday attendance drop.
And it isn’t just
churches. Summer camp registrations are
also down. The Chanco Board has hired a
consultant to help us to better understand who we are and what we offer in order
to better market ourselves. At our
meeting last Tuesday, she shared some basic marketing principles. The first, which relates to your product, is
this: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In today’s parable this would transform the invitation
to come the feast into “I want to celebrate my son’s marriage. Will you join me?” Perhaps at St. Paul’s our message should not
be “Our Sunday service is at 9:30”, but rather “Faith, friendship, and a focus
on outreach drive us and all we do.”
