It's About Us
By Debra Dean Murphy
October 6, 2011
18th Sunday After Pentecost; 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
Perhaps our response to Sunday’s lectionary gospel text ought to be Quaker-like silence.
It’s Matthew, after all, so we are familiar with the uncompromising eschatology. But what to say? It’s a passage that contains one of the hard(est) sayings of Jesus: plenty of mystery but seemingly little grace.
In Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding banquet (would that it was Luke’s!), a king plans a great nuptial feast for his son. Twice he sends slaves to summon the invited guests but, for reasons left unsaid, “they would not come.” (The second wave of slaves are brutally slaughtered by some of the guests—a shocking, inscrutable over-reaction that prefigures more violence to come).
The furious king sends in the troops, wipes out the murderers, and decimates their city. But he’s still got a party to put on so he dispatches another group of slaves (who couldn’t have been enthusiastic about the assignment) to go into the streets and “invite everyone [they] find to the wedding banquet.”
They bring in everybody—“both good and bad”—and now it’s time to celebrate. But our moody, tyrant-king notices a man not properly dressed and says to him, “Friend” (Matthew’s attempt at sarcasm? “Loser” seems more like it), “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” The bewildered man can’t speak and once again the king lashes out with no sense of proportionality of crime to punishment. He orders the waiters to tie the man up and throw him out—way out—into the outer darkness where, he says, “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew then succinctly, dispassionately sums up the drama: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Our first thoughts about this parable might tend toward a truth we are prone to forget in this age of therapeutic, feel-good religion: the sheer strangeness, obtuseness, plain weirdness of much of the Bible’s world. Some of this has to do with ancient culture and context and language; much of it has to do with the odd story at the heart of the faith we confess. Our temptation always is to tame the wildness, mitigate the weirdness—how else to keep the church doors open? Bonhoeffer’s famous dictum—“when Christ calls a person he bids that one come and die”—is hardly a slogan for church-growth success.
But it’s hard to know how this parable can be tamed. (The real temptation may be simply to ignore it). God as a petty dictator? We prefer Luke’s loving father of the prodigal, thank you.
The unrelenting harshness of Matthew’s vision of the end times is shaped, certainly, by his preoccupation with Israel’s future in and with the ekklesia (issues of culture and context, again), and the preacher can easily take this historical/theological issue and run with it. But how to find the gospel—the good news of the kingdom—in this troubling text may be the more pressing question.
It is telling that our discomfort with this parable is located more in the portrayal of God as the despot-king and less in the ill-clad guest who, in Matthew’s symbolism, stands in for the gentiles, for us—outsiders invited, for no other reason than the king's generosity and his wish to celebrate his son, to the lavish feast. The judgment the guest undergoes is not moral in nature; both the “good and the bad” were invited to the banquet. Rather, he hadn’t put on the “right clothes”—a metaphor the apostle Paul, writing a generation earlier, would use to talk about the new self, new life in Christ--discipleship lived out in particular, practical ways.
We get a glimpse of that in this week's epistle lesson from Philippians: "Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you."
But who knows? Matthew's parable is a hard saying. Perhaps our response ought to be Quaker-like silence.
Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
Perhaps our response to Sunday’s lectionary gospel text ought to be Quaker-like silence.
It’s Matthew, after all, so we are familiar with the uncompromising eschatology. But what to say? It’s a passage that contains one of the hard(est) sayings of Jesus: plenty of mystery but seemingly little grace.
In Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding banquet (would that it was Luke’s!), a king plans a great nuptial feast for his son. Twice he sends slaves to summon the invited guests but, for reasons left unsaid, “they would not come.” (The second wave of slaves are brutally slaughtered by some of the guests—a shocking, inscrutable over-reaction that prefigures more violence to come).
The furious king sends in the troops, wipes out the murderers, and decimates their city. But he’s still got a party to put on so he dispatches another group of slaves (who couldn’t have been enthusiastic about the assignment) to go into the streets and “invite everyone [they] find to the wedding banquet.”
They bring in everybody—“both good and bad”—and now it’s time to celebrate. But our moody, tyrant-king notices a man not properly dressed and says to him, “Friend” (Matthew’s attempt at sarcasm? “Loser” seems more like it), “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” The bewildered man can’t speak and once again the king lashes out with no sense of proportionality of crime to punishment. He orders the waiters to tie the man up and throw him out—way out—into the outer darkness where, he says, “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew then succinctly, dispassionately sums up the drama: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Our first thoughts about this parable might tend toward a truth we are prone to forget in this age of therapeutic, feel-good religion: the sheer strangeness, obtuseness, plain weirdness of much of the Bible’s world. Some of this has to do with ancient culture and context and language; much of it has to do with the odd story at the heart of the faith we confess. Our temptation always is to tame the wildness, mitigate the weirdness—how else to keep the church doors open? Bonhoeffer’s famous dictum—“when Christ calls a person he bids that one come and die”—is hardly a slogan for church-growth success.
But it’s hard to know how this parable can be tamed. (The real temptation may be simply to ignore it). God as a petty dictator? We prefer Luke’s loving father of the prodigal, thank you.
The unrelenting harshness of Matthew’s vision of the end times is shaped, certainly, by his preoccupation with Israel’s future in and with the ekklesia (issues of culture and context, again), and the preacher can easily take this historical/theological issue and run with it. But how to find the gospel—the good news of the kingdom—in this troubling text may be the more pressing question.
It is telling that our discomfort with this parable is located more in the portrayal of God as the despot-king and less in the ill-clad guest who, in Matthew’s symbolism, stands in for the gentiles, for us—outsiders invited, for no other reason than the king's generosity and his wish to celebrate his son, to the lavish feast. The judgment the guest undergoes is not moral in nature; both the “good and the bad” were invited to the banquet. Rather, he hadn’t put on the “right clothes”—a metaphor the apostle Paul, writing a generation earlier, would use to talk about the new self, new life in Christ--discipleship lived out in particular, practical ways.
We get a glimpse of that in this week's epistle lesson from Philippians: "Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you."
But who knows? Matthew's parable is a hard saying. Perhaps our response ought to be Quaker-like silence.