Parable of the Wedding BanquetThe mystery of communion at the heart of the wedding banquet which we find in Revelation and Jesus’ parable is beautiful, and humbling.
Scripture Reading
Matthew 22:1-14Once more Jesus spoke to the people in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again 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.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then 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.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”Scripture ReflectionThe man on the corner with the “end is nigh!” sign is all too eager to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is coming, and he furnishes his proclamation with all sorts of visceral descriptions of the disasters he expects are soon to come upon the world. No matter that a Kingdom not yet come, even if it’s supposedly just around the corner, can’t quite gel with the words of Jesus, who said it had already come: “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Mt. 12:28). Jesus himself was nowhere near as eager as today’s prophets of doom to provide descriptions of the Kingdom to the masses. To his disciples, he revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom (Mt. 13:11). But to the rest, he spoke in parables. “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” and such. And so he likens his Kingdom to things they’d understand, and his parable paints a vivid portrait of Israel’s history up to that day, and hints at where things were shortly to be headed. The kingdom is like a royal wedding banquet. The King sends out his servants to gather those who had already been invited to his Son’s wedding, for the big day has come. This is the King of Israel, God Himself (Jer. 31:9), whose Son is Christ. The servants are those prophets after the order of Moses, who was “faithful over all God’s house as a servant” (Heb. 3:5). How many times the Lord, through the prophets, tried “to gather [his] children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and [they] were not willing,” but stoned and killed the servant-prophets instead. You must search the apocryphal writings of Israel to learn the fates of the prophets whose writings are in our Bibles — they often came to violent ends at the hands of their countrymen whom they had sought to lift up. Those whose hands were not bloodied from murder only stood by and “made light of it and went away.” The King therefore “sent his troops,” the armies of Assyria and Babylon, “and destroyed those murderers, and burned their city” as we read in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jeremiah. Those whom the King had placed on the “straight and narrow” path to his banquet, so to speak, had been dispossessed. This was the state of things for centuries as Israel’s faithful remnant awaited the coming of the Lord’s Anointed One. When Jesus first sent his apostles out, he sent them only to “the lost sheep of Israel” — not to the nations, not even to Samaria in the north. “The lost sheep of Israel” were the descendants of those who had first been invited to the wedding banquet. But Jesus is teaching them that the time was coming for the servants’ second mission to gather the wedding guests, and the King would instead turn to the “main streets”. This is his warning to his countrymen that soon, their King would be sending his servants out to the wider world of all nations to “gather all…both good and bad.” He put it more explicitly elsewhere: “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation who will produce its fruit.” (Mt. 21:43). Indeed, there came a time when Christ’s apostles had exhausted their mission to Israel. As a rule, for instance, during his travels Paul preached first to his kin, the Jews. But when their faithlessness frustrated his efforts, he moved on to the nations: “It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing you put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the nations…be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the nations, and that they will hear it.” (Acts 13:46, 28:28). In fact, in a stunning echo of the events of Jeremiah’s day, troops once again encircled Jerusalem not long after the days when Israel rejected Christ, and in the great war that ensued, the city was destroyed once again. This was predicted by Christ (Mt. 24, Lk. 21, etc), and his disciples interpreted it as confirmation that the heart of the Kingdom of God was no longer the temple of stone in the land of Judea, where the Zealots took their last stand in Jerusalem’s final days, but the temple of flesh where the Lord dwells, his universal church of all nations. It is Christ, after all, who is the temple (Jn. 2:19-21) in whom “the fullness of God dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9), and his people who are the members of that body, among whom the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile is no more. The mission to the nations set about informing them that this is so. This mission to the nations began when St. Peter saw much the same vision as St. John saw in Rev. 19: an invitation to feast upon the unclean, that is, to have communion with them. “Call nothing unclean that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15). And so the disciples of Christ first began to gather together the “good and the bad,” raising the just and the unjust to new life in the Kingdom of God through the preaching of the living truth of Christ, by whose blood the world is washed clean. Their mission continues to this day. And so this parable’s final warning applies to us all today. The King, though gathering together good and bad and calling every one a “friend”, nonetheless expects his guests to wear proper attire, “wedding robes”. In his vision, John saw these robes of bright and pure white linen, and they are the linens of the Son’s Bride the Church: “the righteous acts of the saints” (Rev. 19:8). Those not so clothed will be bound hand and foot, cast into the outer darkness, which was first the portion of the “sons of the Kingdom” (Mt. 8:12) — those who had first been called but refused to come. The opposite of “outer darkness” of course, is “inner light”. Our light is Christ, whose life is the light of all people (Jn. 1:4). This light is in all people, “good and bad”, for “Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). He is crucified in those who love the darkness more than the light; but those who are “crucified with him” in spiritual baptism (Ro. 6:3-6) rise again with the robes of resurrection. To be “crucified with him” is to be baptized with his baptism (Mt. 10:38), that is, to offer ourselves as living sacrifices for the same reason he did: for the forgiveness of the world. And so all who proclaim forgiveness wear the luminous robes of the wedding feast, eating “the flesh of kings and commanders and mighty men, of horses and riders, of everyone slave and free, small and great” (Rev. 19:18) — that is, enjoying communion with all people in Christ. The street-corner prophet of doom might very well be disappointed that his Kingdom will not come with a literal cannibal banquet, though I shudder to think that such preachers relish in such a grisly “hope”. But the mystery of communion at the heart of the wedding banquet which we find in Revelation and Jesus’ parable is far more beautiful, and humbling. How can we possibly have communion with one another without forgiveness? It is easy enough to do so with friends; but we are called to love our enemies as well, and so we must forgive. Otherwise, we are bound hand and foot by our own ungraciousness, imprisoned in the outer darkness where the light of Christ’s mercy is hidden under the bushel of our self-righteous pride. But the truth, God’s over-abundant and so often under-appreciated love for all, sets us free from this captivity. Amen.
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