Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.
And so Jesus begins another of his great ‘party parables’.
The Kingdom of God is a party – it’s a familiar theme! Jesus told a lot of stories about parties. Jesus attended a lot of parties. Jesus was someone who clearly loved parties, as we all do, surely!
I love a good party and I can say with pride that I’ve hosted some great parties right here in Dulwich Hill – some great kids’ parties especially, with jumping castles and face-painting and clowns and Ariel, the Little Mermaid, making a guest appearance.
I have to confess though that over the years our kids’ parties have become less ostentatious. Indeed, the level of ostentation seems to be decreasing in inverse proportion to actual number of parties staged!
I don’t think Francesca’s party this year featured any jumping castle or clown or appearance of Ariel, the Little Mermaid. I wouldn’t know for sure, as I didn’t actually show up! That was on account of me being in Syria, of course, but that’s not a great excuse for missing your little girl’s party and probably does reflect just how low my party spirit has sunk.
In my defence, it’s not just a lack of party spirit determining my change in attitude. It’s also the increasing expectations of today’s kids! I remember the last time we had a clown, the poor man was constantly harassed! I remember him making a handkerchief disappear, only to have one disgruntled young man shout out “it’s up your sleeve, you stupid clown!”
It’s hard when you have kids complain when they score one of the minor prizes in pass the parcel – “What’s this rubbish?!” I feel like lecturing them on how, in my day, pass the parcel only had one prize reserved for the very last person who did the unwrapping! I save my breath of course. Even so, such parties do start to become less fun, and parties are supposed to be fun, aren’t they?
In truth, most parties are supposed to be fun, but not all parties. At least, not all parties are just about fun. A lot of parties do have a serious side to them.
I don’t know how many others here have attended a dinner party at the Bishop’s Court. That’s a party of sorts, but they tend to be serious parties – parties where you make sure you use the correct cutlery for the correct part of the meal and where you pass the port in the right direction!
I remember the first such party that Ange and I attended. She tripped when we were in one of the outer rooms and splashed her glass of wine all over one of the paintings! I don’t think it was any historic work of Jesus and the blessed virgin (thanks be to God). It may have been the portrait of one of the previous Archbishops. In truth, I don’t remember, but I don’t think we’ve been back to Bishop’s Court for a party since!
That party was actually hosted by our friends Harry and Pam Goodhew, and they were gracious hosts indeed, and people who (like the Lord Himself) no doubt enjoyed a good party. Even so, you know when you’re invited to a party at Bishop’s Court that it’s not going to be a night of hard drinking an bawdy jokes. It’s going to be a party that has a serious side to it.
Not every party is simply frivolity and laughter. Some parties are serious parties. The question is what sort of party is the party Jesus is talking about in Matthew 22?
3[The King] sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4Again 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.’ 5But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. 7The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.
OK! This sort of kills the party atmosphere, doesn’t it? In a few short verses we move from a scene of jumping castles and lolly-bags to one of murder, abuse, war, bloodshed and burning buildings! Or maybe there never were really any jumping castles or lolly-bags there to begin with? Maybe it never was that kind of party?
Problems begin when the guests who are invited to the party start making excuses, claiming that they are too busy to go, and I think my more recent immersion in Middle Eastern culture has given me a greater appreciation of what is really going on here.
Without giving away too many details, I can tell you that I spent quite a bit of effort this year trying to get a formal invitation sent to our Archbishop, such that he might accept an all-expenses-paid trip to Syria. I was trying to work this through with certain Syrian officials, and I was assured a number of times that the invitation was on its way and yet it never came! Eventually I was told (on the quiet) that the invitation could not be sent until the sender could be assured that the invitation would be accepted!
It is a terrible insult in certain cultures not to accept someone’s invitation to hospitality. That’s the flipside of an aspect of Middle Eastern culture that I was already familiar with – namely, that if somebody is in your house you have to show them hospitality, which is great when you’re going to a series of meetings in Lebanon or Syria as it means that fresh pots of coffee are being served everywhere you go!
I do remember one poor man though whose house we were visiting. He had invited our peace delegation into his house to the see the memorial to his two boys who had both just been killed by rebel soldiers but, having invited us all into his house, he had to go about immediately preparing coffee for all twenty of us! The problem was that the poor man didn’t have a lot of coffee and he only had two or three coffee cups, so we all had to pass the cup and take a sip in order to affirm our host’s dignity!
Hospitality is serious business in some cultures, and nowhere are these things taken more seriously than in the cultural context that Jesus is speaking in. Holding a party in Jesus’ world had serious implications, and if you were a king in those days, holding a wedding party for the prince, that would have had serious implications indeed!
This would not have been the sort of party where you set up a Facebook event page and hope for the best. This was the sort of party where formal invitations are sent out to a very carefully chosen guest list, and where for someone to refuse the invitation to the party would be considered an act of treason!
We need to understand, therefore, that those who make light of the invitation and those who molest and kill the king’s messengers are actually all on the same page. They are all equally rejecting the authority of the king. This mass refusal to attend the party is indicative of an uprising! It is an act of rebellion, and indeed blood is already being shed, and so the response of the king is as understandable as it is brutal. He sends out his troops, he slaughters the rebels and he burns their cities!
Now … Jesus’ story is a parable and not an allegory (where each and every element in the story corresponds to some particular person or group of people) and so it is not appropriate to ask “who is it that really gets killed or has their city burnt?” Even so, Jesus’ parables do tend to have their sting in the tail reserved for particular groups of people, and so it is appropriate to ask who it is that Jesus is directing this parable to.
The Parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22 is in fact a part of a larger tirade that Jesus is making that has been aimed primarily at the religious establishment! This parable is in fact the third volley of a three-barrelled shotgun.
In quick succession Jesus has come out with the ‘parable of the two sons’ (Matthew 21:28-32) – one son who says the right thing and one son who does the right thing, ‘the parable of the bad tenants’ (Matthew 21:33-46) who refuse to pay the rent to the owner and end up murdering his estate agents, and then this ‘parable of the wedding party’ – where the party celebrations are set against this backdrop of violence.
Who, amongst those listening to Jesus, are likely to feel that they are being targeted when Jesus speaks of the gruesome fate of the first set of guests? Is Jesus here having another dig at the notorious Scribes and Pharisees (their religious leaders) or would all Jews consider themselves to be on that primary guest list?
Perhaps it’s not important that we pinpoint exactly who Jesus was trying to offend. There is scope for plenty of Jesus’ hearers to be offended here. The chief point surely is the contrast between the group that was initially invited to the party and the group that actually go!
8Then [the king] said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 10Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
The parable is quite explicit on this point – that the king now invites everybody to join Him – the good, the bad and the ugly!
‘Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ It doesn’t matter if they are Jewish or not Jewish! It doesn’t matter if they are not overly religious! You can be rich or poor, black or white, male or female, straight or gay – whoever you are, the king is inviting you to come and join his party NOW!
And so the king’s servants gather all they find – ‘both good and bad’ – so that the wedding hall is filled with guests, and it looks as if this story that started out sounding so promising before it suddenly turned ugly is going to have a happy ending after all!
The king enters the palace and you can see him smiling as he greets his guests, and everybody is there – a sea of multicoloured faces representing every layer of society and every culture and language-group represented in the king’s domain, and it seems that his kingdom has been happily restored and that now the party can go ahead, and then the king notices some guy who is not wearing his tux!
11“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13Then 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.’”
This is not the end we were looking for, is it? On the contrary, this is an uncomfortable ending to a discomforting story. If you somehow weren’t offended by the fate of those who were on the primary guest list, there’s room for us all to be offended now!
For its not only those who were initially invited to the party who manage to offend the king. Those of us who are dragged in as late arrivals are equally capable of causing offense! Indeed, all of us, it seems, are equally capable of stuffing up our invitation to the party!
For there are lots of ways of offending the king. You can ignore his party invitation. That will do it. Murder his messengers. That’s bound to work. Turn up to his wedding banquet dressed like a slob. That’ll work too!
I’m sure we can think of other ways of offending the king if you work at it. You could try urinating in the punch or vomiting on the king’s carpet. There are plenty of ways of offending the king and getting yourself thrown out of the party!
This is not my favourite parable. It’s not even my favourite ‘party parable’. Indeed, this isn’t even my favourite ‘parable of the wedding feast’ parable. There’s a very similar wedding feast parable in Luke, where a lot less people get killed and beaten up.
‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame… Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.’ (Luke 14:21-23)
The parable in Luke is told as part of Jesus’ explanation as to why he hangs about with so many social drop-outs. In Matthew though the story is told to a different audience and is serving a different purpose. This is not a parable aimed at helping us understand God’s love for the weak and the wayward. This one is a parable that targets the religiously presumptuous! This story is not about comforting the afflicted. It’s about afflicting the comfortable!
There were only ever two groups of people that Jesus ever really gave stick to – the very rich and the very religious – and I think both groups are being targeted here!
“The Kingdom of God is a party,” says Jesus, and yes it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s for the exclusive guest list of the religiously rich and famous that you might have envisaged it to be! And it’s not a night out on the town with your mates either.
It’s a serious party. Indeed, in some ways it so serious that makes a night at Bishop’s Court look like drunken frivolity! It’s not the sort of party where you turn up when you like, dressed as you are to do as you please because it’s not your party! This is the king’s party and you’re here as the king’s guest and so you behave as the king would have you behave and you treat both the king and your fellow guests with respect!
And don’t assume that you’re on the primary guest list just because of your good pedigree or your high social standing or your wonderful piety. And even if you are on the primary guest list, be assured that this does not mean that you’re currently on the right side of the king!
The Kingdom of God is a party, but it’s a party that needs to be taken seriously, as the king who is throwing the party is a serious king who ultimately demands our respect!
There is room at the party for all of us – we know that. We just need to remember whose party it is. “For many are called but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:14)
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 21st of September, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
