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18th Sunday after Pentecost, 10/12/2014
Sermon on Matthew 22:1-14, by Frank C. Senn
We don't dress up for many events any more, least of all for going to church. When I was a boy back in the 1950s our family had Sunday-go-to-church clothes that we only wore for going to church. My father always wore a suit and tie. After I was confirmed I had a suit to wear to church too. Today casual attire is in for worship attendance.
When you go out for dinner you see that dining too is pretty casual, even in upscale restaurants. There are very few places where men would be required to wear a jacket and tie any more. You can still get people to dress up for weddings and funerals, but even at these events you see people dressing more casually if they're not in the wedding party or family members at a funeral. So Jesus is clearly on the wrong side of history in telling a story about a king who gave a wedding party and then bounces one of the guests who tried to get in without wearing proper attire.
Furthermore, consider the situation in the parable. The king in Jesus' story was giving a wedding dinner for his son and the better people all decided they had something more important to do and refused to come. But, by God, the king intended the banquet hall to be filled for his son's wedding banquet. So he had his servants scour the highways and byways and compel people to come in. So presumably they came as they were. How could the king then throw out a guest who showed up dressed improperly? So what's going on in this parable?
This story doesn't only appear in Matthew's gospel. There is another version in Luke 14:15-24, and there is also another version in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas that didn't make it into the official Bible. Each of the versions of the original story was edited to reflect the evangelist's purpose in using it. It is a good bet that Matthew's version has some significant editorial alterations of the original because it is the most different from the others. Matthew's favorite themes are stamped all over it. But so are Luke's favorite themes stamped all over his version. We can only assume that an original parable lies behind the versions in our gospels, but we only know the versions we have. And today we have Matthew's version.
But one of the things you can do help us understand one version is to compare it to the other versions to see how they handled the story. In Luke, for example, it is just a certain man holding a feast. In Matthew it is a king holding a feast and it is a wedding feast for his son. This ups the ante. There's more at stake in a wedding banquet. It is also a much more overt reference to God's heavenly banquet for his son, Jesus, and his bride, the church.
In the other versions the slaves go out once to tell the guests that the feast is ready. In Matthew they go out twice. The king is really insistent. The first time they are ignored and the second time they are even beaten and killed.
It is a frequent theme in Matthew's Gospel that God has repeatedly invited his people, Israel, to come into the Kingdom, but that they have rejected and even killed God's messengers. Only Matthew adds the King dispatching his army to destroy the cities of those rejecting his invitation, which could refer to Israel's cities being destroyed when the people failed to listen to God's prophets. It had happened at the hands of the Babylonians and it happened again at the hands of the Romans in 70 A.D., perhaps just shortly before the time that the Gospel of Matthew was written. And just in case someone notices this incongruity, the armies wage war and destroy cities while dinner is waiting!
The next detail is common to all the versions. The servants are dispatched to gather in anyone and everyone, especially those who would previously have been excluded. To the Jewish listeners of Matthew's church, the meaning would have been in-your-face obvious. God has invited Israel to respond to his love. Israel has repeatedly ignored God's messengers and even killed them. So God has allowed them to be destroyed and instead opened the banqueting room of heaven to anyone who would come, even the gentiles. There's no way to disguise the fact that this most Jewish of the four canonical Gospels also most reflects the strained relationship between the emerging Church and emerging Judaism.
But then comes Matthew's most unique addition to the story: the story about the guest who gets thrown out for not wearing the right clothes. It appears only in Matthew's version. What on earth could this be about? Surely it's over the top. The king has just invited anyone and everyone, good and bad alike, but now he loses his temper with this poor clueless guy for not wearing the right clothes. How are you supposed to have the right clothes for a king's wedding banquet when you got pulled in off the streets at the last possible moment? And it's one thing to be ejected by the bouncers for not having your jacket on, but this guy is bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Some commentators have suggested that Matthew has spliced two parables together here. If so, there must still be some underlying parable of someone showing up for a banquet without proper attire. So what on earth is Jesus saying? And why is Matthew using it in this connection? Is Matthew trying to establish a dress code for church attendance? Is this the source of wearing your Sunday best? I don't think so. Remember, this is still a parable, and one with a lot of allegory. It's not telling us to burn the cities of those who turn down our evangelism invitations either!
Throughout the scriptures and especially in the New Testament writings, clothes and especially wedding clothes are used as an image of something else. "Clothe yourselves in Christ." "Put on the garments of righteousness." "You who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ." In the liturgy of Holy Baptism it is traditional for this to be symbolized by the newly baptized person literally putting on a new white robe, their baptismal robe. Our babies still wear white christening dresses. In some churches adult candidates for baptism put on an alb after their baptism. In the ancient Church Easter week was called the week of white robes because the newly baptized attended worship every day in their albs (their white robes) to hear the bishop explain to them the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion that they had just experienced at the Easter Vigil.
So what we've got here is the story of a guy who's come in the door along with everyone else who was invited but who has then refused to put on the garment of righteousness. Some historians say that it would have been customary for the king to hand out the appropriate wedding robes at the door on an occasion like this. So you really had only yourself to blame if you weren't wearing the right suit. But let's not get hung up on the literal details or we'll be worrying about how the king had time to burn cities without burning dinner too!
What Matthew is telling us is that there are some people who go through the motions of responding to the call but don't actually make any real attempt to reclothe themselves, to put off the old ways of living and acting and put on the new way of living in Christ.
This is a classic Matthew twist. He tells several parables in a row (this is the third one) which all condemn those who have rejected Christ and stoned the prophets, and then just when his hearers are all nodding along with him and thinking, "Yeah, those people are terrible," he suddenly turns on them and says, "And don't the rest of you become complacent. If God can destroy them he can discard you too! Don't go thinking that you're in and now you can just rest on your laurels. If you accept the call to follow Jesus and to be baptized into his Name, you accept it on God's terms; and if you don't get serious about following Jesus you could just as easily be thrown out on your ear again!"
It would certainly be possible and quite understandable for people to hear this as a very threatening kind of message; even as the opposite of grace. It's the sort of thing that makes God seem like a cosmic principal who is always looking for an excuse to expel someone. I think that would be a mistake though. I think it is important to remember that Matthew is prone to saying these kind of things whenever he's worried that, just because of what he's just been saying, his listeners might take undue pleasure in the message of judgment directed at some other group, like the members of the synagogue across the street. It's akin to Jesus's saying "Judge not, lest you yourselves be judged."
It is nevertheless an important teaching for how we understand the nature of grace. Matthew is underscoring for us that the grace offered in Jesus is not something we can presume upon. It is a free gift in that there are no preconditions that you have to meet before you are eligible for grace. All people in all nations are invited to be baptized and are then led into the banquet hall of God's kingdom. But they enter the banquet hall wearing their baptismal robe of righteousness. And they wear it constantly in daily life and keep it clean for every Eucharistic feast. You see, there are Sunday-go-to-church clothes after all---the clothing of righteousness, of following Jesus and doing what is right. And we're supposed to wear that garment every day of the week.
Moreover, you can't think of the garment of righteousness as something you can just put on over your other clothes and then take it off at will. No, to use the baptismal practice of the ancient church as a model, you take off all your old clothes when you enter the font. You go down into the water naked and emerge as a new person, born again by water and Spirit, and receive and put on the white robe that signifies your new life in Christ. The new garment is the clothing you wear.
When the kings says, "How did you get in here without wedding clothes?" it's no use saying, "Well I received them at the door, but I folded them up and put them in my bag." We've been given our wedding clothes, our garments of righteousness, as a free gift. Now it's up to us to wear them. There's no point be being given a gift that you don't use.
We've become a society that doesn't like to get dressed up for ordinary events. I think it's really because we don't want to go through the bother (although Halloween is coming and it seems that a lot of people will go to some bother about their costumes). Maybe the man in Jesus' parable didn't want to go through the bother. If so, our Lord through his evangelist Matthew is making a very strong point that some things are worth bothering about, because they have eternal consequences. Amen.