Monday, October 13, 2008

Sunday 12th October, 2008 – The Parable of the Wedding Feast

Isaiah 25.1-9
Philippians 4.1-9
Matthew 22.1-14

Today's gospel reading is actually two parables. One of them appears in Luke's Gospel as well. It's known as 'the Parable of the Wedding Banquet' and as we have heard tells the story of someone – in Matthew it is a king – who invites guests to a wedding feast. To understand this parable we need to understand two things about meals in Jesus time. The first is how important sharing food together was. We still have some of this today: to invite someone to a meal is more than just to invite them to take nourishment – it is to invite them to enter into a relationship with you. When someone visits our house the first thing we say to them is, "Would you like a cup of tea?" It's not because we think they might be thirsty particularly, it's because we want to make them feel welcome. We use the tea as a way of building the relationship with them. Now in Jesus' time and place – and in this still true in many places in the Middle East – to share a meal was to forge a bond with someone which was unbreakable. And indeed the whole purpose of sacrifices in the in the Old Testament and in Jesus' time was not that the animal's body was burnt but that it was cooked, part of it burnt as God's share, the rest eaten by human beings as a meal shared with God establishing a relationship of peace with him. We have a sense of this in the familiar words of the twenty-third psalm where we read, "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies". The psalm writer is not saying, "I can eat my dinner with arrows flying over my head." He is saying that God is the one who reconciles enemies and makes peace between them. So that is the first thing to understand. By inviting the guests to this important meal the host is seeking to build up that relationship between him and the guests.

The second thing to understand is that by the time we get to this story, (and everyone who originally heard the story would understand this); by the time we get to this story the guests will already have said that they are coming to the party. You have to remember that in the ancient world there were no clocks or other reliable ways of telling the time. If you were holding a dinner party was a standard procedure which you would undertake. Firstly, some time before the party, you would invite your guests. Now to say no at that stage would be tricky but possible if you had a good reason. There were carefully nuanced ways of expressing regretfully your inability to come. But if you said 'yes' at that stage then you were committed, and you could not withdraw without it being deeply insulting to the host. Once the host knew who was coming he could then prepare the meal and when the meal was ready the host would send his servants to inform the guests it was time to come to the party. Now to refuse to come at that point would be to deliberately insult the host. Remember that the meal establishes the relationship with the host, so to refuse the meal is to reject the relationship. To reject the invitation at this stage is a deliberate insult. It is to say, I have no wish to be at peace with you; it is a declaration of war.

In Matthew's version of the story that rejection is violent. Some of the invited actually kill the servants sent to call them to the feast, and the king is furious. Matthew's is the most Jewish of the Gospels and it seems that as Matthew writes he is straying out of allegory in to history. Throughout history God has sent the Old Testament prophets and Christian Teachers of the New Testament to call people to join in the feast that God prepares for his people, the feast that Isaiah spoke about. But the ruling clique, in Jerusalem, have constantly rejected those teachers; sometimes violently. When Matthew writes his Gospel the memory of the destruction of Jerusalem by the army of the Roman general, Titus, is still fresh in peoples memory. It was a horrible time and Matthew clearly sees it as a consequence of the rejection of the offer of God's peace made through God's messengers.

Today we are not happy with the idea of judgement. We would prefer that our deeds and actions didn't have unpleasant consequences. I remember one Simpson's cartoon where, as usual, Homer's foolishness has landed him and everyone else in trouble. Homer sits on his doorstep and complains, "this is everyone fault but mine". Homer is a kind of everyman figure and reflects a very common unwillingness today to accept responsibility for our own deeds and actions. Deeds and actions, and even the choice to not to act, have consequences. To be grown up is to recognise that fact – it is part of the infantalisation of our society that so many people fail to recognise this. Matthew's telling of this story makes the consequences of rejection the invitation of the king very clear. This is not a pleasant thing to hear but I believe it is something we desperately need to hear today. How comfortable might we be in seeing the current economic woes of the western world as a Judgement upon it for putting the pursuit of wealth ahead of the pursuit of justice, and of putting greed in the place of God?

Back to the parable: the king is left with the feast which those who have been invited have rejected. What is he to do with it? He sends out his servants again, this time to invite anyone who will come. In Luke's telling of this parable it is "the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame" who are invited. Matthew is less specific. It is anyone who will come, good or bad. Remember that this is not simply about nourishment. It is about relationship. Because those who were originally invited have turned their back on the invitation it is now open to any who will respond. There is a wonderful discussion of this in Paul's letter to the Romans where he sees the failure of Israel to accept that Jesus is Messiah as being part of God's plan for the salvation the gentiles, of you and me. But Paul also looks forward to the day when both Jew and Gentile will rejoice together in the salvation that God gives.

And there, in Luke's account, the story ends. Matthew combines another story with it. A man is at the wedding feast but not dressed appropriately. When the host challenges him he has nothing to say and is summarily evicted from the banquet. When we read this story in combination with the previous one, something within us protests. It's a bit unfair if he's just come of the street to expect him to be wearing a wedding garment, we think. Again we need to understand that at a wedding feast in Jesus time there might well be festive garments made available for the guests to wear. It's not that this man has no garment; it's that he refuses to wear it. We are back to this idea of consequences. Being a follower of Jesus has consequences. It's not enough to talk the talk; you have to walk the walk. "As God's chosen ones," says St. Paul, "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning--you must walk in it.

Once again the Bible faces us with challenges. God's invitation is open to all but it is an invitation into a life of relationship with God. And if we accept that invitation God has expectations of us – the expectation that we grow in holiness and righteousness and in the likeness of Jesus Christ. It's not enough just to say the words - God has infinitely more to offer us than that. He calls us to a relationship with him that begins here and now and lasts eternally. How sad it is that so few in our time are willing to respond to that call. Truly, many are called but few are chosen. How about you?

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