Kerygmania: The King's Wedding Party
Matt 22: 1-14
Sometimes a parable defies all logic. This is one of them. What do you make of the king destroying the city and then sending his servants out to invite the people on streets of the same city?
Then too, if the king invited the man at the end of the story to the party, why was he thrown out for not having the right gown? It is my understanding the king likely provided suitable gowns for those invited to the party.
Sometimes a parable defies all logic. This is one of them. What do you make of the king destroying the city and then sending his servants out to invite the people on streets of the same city?
Then too, if the king invited the man at the end of the story to the party, why was he thrown out for not having the right gown? It is my understanding the king likely provided suitable gowns for those invited to the party.
Comments
Do we know it's inviting in the same city (in parable).
I'm not sure the mechanics make any more sense.
What’s more important, I think, is that the text is clear that it is the city of those who killed the king’s slaves that was destroyed. “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city”—“their city,” not “the city.” It’s a simple story, so I suspect we’re not supposed to sweat the details. But I also suspect we’re supposed to hear the story as a statement of what will happen to Jerusalem.
It seems to me that the context and the intended audience matters here. This is not a parable of general application, I don’t think.
Matthew 22 happens after the entry into Jerusalem, so at this point, Jesus’s death is days away. The parable of the tenants and the vineyard, where the tenants kill the owner’s son, comes immediately before this parable, and the one comment between the two parables is “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.”
Jesus is very clearly talking about the religious establishment in Jerusalem here.
I think Augustine was right, and here's why.
The parable appears to be showing us a king who has invited a group of people well in advance, as one does, who have all agreed to come (or if you prefer, you could say that they did not at that time refuse to come; you could argue that a king's invitation is mandatory, and no refusal was envisioned at the time the invitation was first issued). These people then went about their lives while the king went about his, preparing for his son's wedding--and some days at least passed.
On the day of the feast, the king made sure everything was well in hand and almost ready to go to table (roasting sheep and oxen has to take some time!) and then sent out runners to notify the guests that the hour had come, and it was time to gather at the king's hall. (You'd want to do that sort of thing in a world where clocks and church bells were not ubiquitous; otherwise you'd have wedding guests underfoot for several hours beforehand, requiring seating and entertainment, which would be unhandy.)
This point, where dinner is almost served--THAT'S the point where they suddenly refused to come, leaving the king with a banquet more or less ready and no guests for his tables! No wonder he freaked out. It was massively rude and also left him with no time to do anything but what he did do--that is, to replace the original group with the scaff and raff of the streets (see the parallel passage in Luke 14):
Yes, I'm sure Jesus told this story on more than one occasion, but the parallel passage is useful as it suggests he had the same situation in mind--one where the eventual guests are not expecting or prepared for an invitation, and haven't the time or wherewithal to dress themselves. The servants would be urging them to go straight to the table, given the urgency of the situation; and beggars aren't likely to have access to appropriate wedding clothing, even if they tried to borrow it. From whom? Other beggars?
So I think Augustine was right. He was, after all, much closer in terms of time and culture to that of Jesus' day, and I won't say he's wrong without evidence. And the theological meaning works out neatly as well--everyone accepts decent covering from the king's hospitality (=grace and forgiveness, the "white robes" of those who belong to Christ) except for the one oddball who has apparently refused it at the door, and who then cannot offer any excuse even when the king calls him "friend" and invites him to explain himself. I take this to be the sort of fellow we all know who runs his mouth about how the king must take him as he is, he's the equal of any man living and if the king doesn't like him or his current clothing, the king can lump it. Surely you've met the type?
Me? I see the story coming from a common source. It does look like Luke embellishes it some. He does that.
What is notable, if it came from a common source, is Luke left out the story of the man who was not wearing the wedding robe. Matthew inserts that. I think it has to do with the differences in the audience. After all, his community was in the process of becoming independent from the Jewish community.
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One thing notable about the Matthew story is the number of times the king kept inviting people to come. First there is obviously a save the date notice. Did it include an RSVP request? Probably not (inserting modern/not modern customs--I say not modern customs because reports are people do not reply as much now as, say a generation ago.) Twice to the invited guests and once to the people on the street, both good and bad.
There is some thought the city being destroyed might allude to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD. Matthew was likely written shortly after that.
If you're wondering, I did my PhD dissertation in textual studies, and my work involved manuscript filiation based on variants. So I have some minor experience.
As for Jesus telling the same stories multiple times, he was a teacher--and every teacher I know (including myself!) repeats the same stories again and again, adapted for different occasions. Surely you've done it yourself?
In any case, there is a similar story in the Gospel of Thomas. I include the story of comparisons sake:
This is very similar to Luke's rendition of the story, don't you think?
How strange this glimpse into the Kingdom of Heaven is for us today and how shocking it must have seemed to the Pharisees standing before Jesus. Somebody suggested once that the knack of entering into a parable is to know when to stop interpreting or reaching for moral lessons and let the defamiliarisation work on us. This week I've been going back to a poem written by Wallace Stevens at the end of his life when he knows he is near death and imagines himself climbing a mountain in order to glimpse what may be seen from a height and "where he would be complete in an unexplained completion". It's called The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain, a poem I love and that I shall never fully understand, there's always something the eludes me, comes across as 'more than' the sum of its parts. That's how I feel about these parables.
So much foreshadowing here, as others have noted. Jesus is surrounded by enemies and he is coming to the end of his life, his mission almost complete. The Pharisees are those who are complacent about their future destiny, they are the chosen and righteous, they would kill messengers (prophets) sent to them, they want to find a reason to kill this particular prophet in their midst, and in one possible reading Jesus knows that they and the temple city of Jerusalem face destruction, cataclysm, within a generation or two. Right now (like many of us I'm sure) I find it hard to read about destroyed cities and murdered people, and yet this rejection of the offer and the resulting violence is what opens up the invitation, so that messengers go out into the streets and cities to call those they meet to come to the feast; doors are thrown open and welcomes extended to those who have never expected to be included in the celebration and feasting. It isn't indiscriminate though; those who are not aware of the significance of the invitation or not clothed in their best to show they want to honour the king and his son will be sent away into darkness. I wonder who of those standing around Jesus as he spoke could grasp the significance and urgency of what he was showing them (and us)?
In this case, in Luke the parable of the wedding feast appears when Jesus is invited to to dinner by a Pharisee and notes how the room is filled with the local great and good, people who will in return invite the Pharisee to dinner with them, who are jostling for the best places - He advocates inviting the poor to get rewards in heaven and then tells the parable.
As noted, in Matthew it appears in that period in Jerusalem between the triumphal entry and the crucifixion, within a series of stories that all relate to the Scribes and Pharisees rejecting Jesus - the two sons where the one who proclaims they do the will of the father doesn't (and that sinners are entering the kingdom ahead of them), the tenants, and this parable; and then a series of attempts by the Scribes and Pharisees to trap Jesus into giving an answer that will turn the crowds against him. The destruction of the cities of those who refuse the invitation reflect the tenants thrown out of the vineyard, the poor invited into the wedding in their place reflect the sinners who are entering the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees.
Which does leave the question about the poor man without wedding clothes unanswered, it's an anomaly in the story in that it doesn't appear to fit the theme of the passages around it. It does suggest that there are some who enter the wedding (kingdom of God) but don't actually belong, someone who accepts the invitation to all but then rejects what's expected of someone in the kingdom. I wonder if Jesus was looking at Judas as He said that part of the parable ...
It can also "lock" a story into several competing forms. Or be resolved by creating a narrative in which a single event happens more than once - there are many scholars who would put the feeding of the 5000/4000 into that category for example. Combining the Matthew and Luke nativity stories into a single historical narrative is similarly questionable. I remain aware however that for some reason these non-literal approaches are somewhat frowned upon in Keryg. I don't understand why.
Similarly, ‘this isn’t what Jesus said, it’s Matthew’s (or whoever’s) addition’, raises the question of how do we tell. Sometimes there can be comparatively reliable text-critical grounds for raising a question. Literary critical grounds can seem less secure.
That seems to be saying "take this literally, not because it's true, but because it makes the task of engaging with the text easier."
Except it doesn't, because the contradictions still exist, but are then more of a problem because we can't say "well, these are different contradictory perspectives that exist within the traditions" and end up having to try to harmonise them. The big disputes within Christianity - limited salvation versus universalism, very restricted versus wider salvation (or to put it another way "Only Christians are saved", "Well, some people who resist God for ever will end up in Hell", "No-one ultimately is lost"); predestination versus free will, et. al., and others as well also existed in the Early Church and people holding different views wrote what is now Scripture. Same applies to the OT. There are two accounts of the Creation of humans, neither of which is a historical-literal account, and which contradict each other. David's decision to take a census is described in one place as God's cunning plan to bring trouble on Israel, and in another as being Satan's. You can actually find ways of harmonising them, but only at the cost of opening up a massive gulf between OT and Christian concepts of what Satan is.
I prefer to engage with what the writers say, with insights as to who they were, what sources they had, and when they wrote, especially compared with when the events they are talking about are meant to have occurred. And if the conclusion to the examination of a text has to be "no, I'm not buying that", then so be it.
And IME, non-literalist posts don't get disputed. They get ignored and the literalists talk to each other over them.
This is super interesting, and makes me think of the bit about "Don't make my Father's house a house of trade" (I'm going by memory here, so don't trust it). I'd love to know if there are other bits in the Gospel of Thomas that have a similar theme. Obviously I need to go re-read it (it's been years!) but time, where am I going to find the time? Thank you.
Ouch.
I'd never considered that, but this is the point where the interpretation of parables "goes live" on me and I have to start dealing with what Jesus might be saying to me in the story. Which is a much stickier issue and apt to be humbling.
In the end, that's a bit of consideration I have to give to all these stories, or I'm just wasting time. (Though it usually gets done in private.)
The Gospel of Thomas is really a very quick read, unless you want to translate it from the Greek which can take some time I would grant.
Looking again at Thomas and Luke, I can see how you could argue Jesus is telling similar stories at different times.
Thank you.
Weddings put extra stress on families, and hairline cracks become fractures. Suddenly there are all these unspoken assumptions and unmet expectations which emerge.
"I thought I was going to walk you down the aisle, not him!"
"We're paying for this, so here's our guest list <unrolls scroll> I guess you'll just have to uninvite some of your friends."
"We're having a destination/child-free/alcohol-free wedding, and everyone's mad at us."
In the immortal words of Hank Hill, "It puts extra stress on a structure that wasn't up to code in the first place."
Obviously there were broken relationships well before the royal wedding. Usually that's a hot ticket. Why did the invited guests refuse in such a public and shaming way? Look how fast these broken relationships can escalate from contempt to violence. On a smaller familial scale, this is when fights break out at a wedding, police are called, arrests and charges follow. It's a shitshow debacle.
It seems to have been a reasonable expectation for the new wedding guest to have worn appropriate clothes. AIUI, most people of the time didn't own many sets of clothes, nor were they likely to have travelled far. I wonder if the ill-dressed guest was yet another gesture of contempt/broken relationship toward the king. "Yeah, I can show up in my sweats and hoodie and eat his food, since he's so desperate for guests."
I agree.
I remember discussing this passage with the late great Shipmate, leo. I had read *somewhere* (aagh, could not find my notes for the source, to my ongoing chagrin) some contextual information about the outer darkness:
The outer darkness was not the abyss of hell. It was the area outside the city walls. People who slept there might be homeless or migrants or country merchants sleeping before the journey back to the farm. To be bound and gagged and thrown into their midst was not a sentence of utter condemnation. [The author of this commentary compared it with a mildly dangerous college prank, akin to being bound and gagged and dropped off in the parking lot of a convenience store in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood.]
The entitled douchebro who didn't bother dressing up was now at the mercy of the poor and dispossessed. How would he handle this?
If you have bothered to build any kind of rapport or community with the poor and dispossessed, the outer darkness isn't much of a threat to you. Someone will recognize you and help you. Or perhaps someone will help you out of the goodness of their hearts, but why make that less likely?
It's so striking to me that the first crowd is a bunch of rude and cruel aristocrats, while the last is whomever is outside the city walls. With whom would you rather take your chances?
In the wild swing of reactions - pleading, violence, generosity, scapegoating - I see a representation of human responses to broken relationships. That's why I don't think the king is meant to represent God in this parable, though YMMV. I see God and God's gracious will as consistent and 'above' all this nonsense, although I think there are things to be learned about the law of love from all these shenanigans.
I read it as comparing the kingdom of heaven with an event (giving a wedding banquet) and not a person (the king). Since that's such a common simile in the New Testament, I think that's a defensible reading.
Also, I'm just spitballing at this point.
We had this passage in a sermon a while ago and I thought about it a lot afterwards - the speaker gave the fairly evangelically traditional interpretation that unless you're wearing Jesus' garment of righteousness at the feast (put on by praying the prayer of accepting Jesus into your heart and life as your saviour and lord) you won't be welcome there. Which I don't agree with.
The thoughts I had about it were: if a lot of people were invited in at the last minute that guest can't have been the only one there who was inappropriately dressed. Was the point more that he should have been aware of and more confident in the fact that he was there by invitation and it didn't matter what he was wearing?
Note, I've put this entirely in personal context - for others who are not basically secure and comfortable in life a message that in Christ there's security and comfort may be what they need to hear. And, exactly what wearing the right clothing or otherwise looks like will be different for different people (and, even the same person at different times and contexts).
But then the story takes a swerve right at the end, like a second parable embedded in the main narrative. The riffraff, good, bad and indifferent, have arrived and are in the hall. The volatile and fierce king appears to single out one hapless guest. Who wouldn't stand there speechless? And the humiliation of being tied and bound and carried away to be cast out into darkness. It's like a scene out of Kafka or a Fellini movie. Getting into the Kingdom of God is all about precarity and the unexpected. A quandary and tension between the many invited and those few chosen who will join the feast and be allowed to stay. What to make of this passionate, generous but unreasonable king as representing the Divine?
I'm not sure Bonhoeffer's notion of the cheapening of grace vs the discipleship and commitment needed for costly grace is altogether helpful here. The drama here defies a logical reading and I've always come away from this passage with more questions than answers. To arrive without wedding clothes signifies to me that this guest is not yet ready for the Kingdom, still adhering to the old and not the new. It isn't about fairness in a legal or judgmental sense: more like the last being first, the worker who turns up just before close of day in the vineyard and is paid as much as those labouring since dawn. God's radical freedom to confer grace as separate from our limited human reasoning or notions of fairness.
Yes! Possibly worse than being unprepared: the ill-dressed guest might have been seen to be perfectly confident in the suitability of their attire... dressed in their own self-righteousness. Which, as we know from Isaiah, is like unto skidmarked gitch. Symbolically, the ill-dressed guest sailed confidently into the feast in their bacon-striped boxers.
Tbh I've never been that fond of the allegorical interpretation of the wedding robe symbolizing Christ's righteousness. But perhaps in some way, this metaphor for divine grace somehow hit the scribes and Pharisees hard, such that they immediately began to plot to entrap him.
This all really does have a cinematic quality, doesn't it?
The first 'half' of the parable is an escalation of a familiar scenario. It's not just a wedding, it's a royal wedding. It's not just family snits and grudges, it's a huge and humiliating near-revolt by the aristocracy. It's not just the police being called, it's a city besieged and burned. This half is a horror movie about the utter breakdown of relationship, ending in terror, death, annihilation.
The second 'half' has the makings of an 'unlikely buddy' comedy movie. If my social science history commentator is correct, the ill-dressed guest is tossed into the bad part of town. What if he's rescued by someone to whom he normally wouldn't give the time of day? "Can this unlikely duo make it into the city and attend the wedding feast?" They do - appropriately dressed this time, the king recognizes him, the guest repents, the feast goes on. Maybe there's a clue in here about what builds relationship: curiosity, compassion, humility, shared purpose.
I can imagine how a liberation theologian can mark up these stories.
An example:
Our king wants to include everyone to the feast. The rich people (first world) have it so good, they do not need a king. Our cities have become so polluted, they are collapsing in on themselves. We have even developed the weapons that are destroying us. The banquet is ready. If the first people don't want to come, the King will find people who will. There are people out there who would (ahem) die for such an invitation.
But even then, there are a few who just want to skate by. They do not put on the robe of righteousness. They refuse to live in right relationship with the King and the other party goers (see Isaiah 61:10). In the end they will be thrown out of the party too.
Just an example of how it can be applied today.
Sorry for the double post.
Where does it say the commoners were shanghaied?
Immediately before this parable, Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard and the owner’s son, and Matthew says “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.” This parable of the wedding feast falls smack dab in the middle of an extended and harsh criticism of the scribes, the priests and the Pharisees in the days leading to the crucifixion.
I don’t see any way around the parable being primarily a warning to the scribes, the priests and the Pharisees about the path they’re on. Any timeless meaning we see in the parable should, I think, be grounded in why Jesus told the parable to start with.
I don’t think this parable does. Perhaps there’s some confusion/conflation with the parable of the Great Feast in Luke 14, which ends: “Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’” (Emphasis added.)
And yes, that it can be abused in such a way as to lead an antisemitic diatribe is a potential problem, and care needs to be taken to make sure that doesn’t happen. It seems to me though, that ignoring the context in which Matthew records Jesus telling the story in search of some timeless, and apparently contextless, applicability is not the way to avoid that problem. It’s just inviting a different problem.