Maybe this short story by Jesus isn’t about what we thought it was about…
Matthew 22:1-14
The Parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew is notoriously challenging. There is a much shorter and much gentler version of this story in Luke,[1] but here in Matthew’s version we are confronted at every turn with problems, inconsistencies, loose ends and pieces that just don’t fit no matter how you approach it. David Lose said, “This parable seems just plain nasty…mostly, I think, because we don’t like what it says.” He may be right about that, but frankly, it’s also hard to get past the indiscriminate violence in the story—violence that is entirely absent in Luke’s version. What are we supposed to do with that?
This is the third parable Jesus tells to the chief priests and temple authorities who had interrupted him while he was teaching in the temple to ask him, “By what authority do you do these things and who gave you that authority?” It was a fair question. It was their job to keep things peaceful in the temple and Jesus had just caused a bit of a ruckus when he overturned the tables of the money changers and chased all the animals and the people selling them out of the temple.
In his back and forth with the temple authorities, all of which is happening in front of a crowd, Jesus uses these three parables to let these temple authorities know that he and the crowd are fully aware of how they have been using their privileged positions to collaborate with the Romans and line their pockets while neglecting the needs of the people.
First Jesus tells them the Parable of the Two Sons to remind them that giving lip service to obedience and service is not the same as actually obeying and serving. Then he turns up the heat as he tells the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. When he gets to the end of that parable he asks, “What will the landowner do to these horrible people when he comes?” He lets the priests fill in the punchline of the story and they acknowledge that there will be a reckoning.
At this point you can imagine the priests getting hot under their embroidered collars as they stand there in front of the crowd that has been listening to Jesus. Matthew tells us, “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.”
And now Jesus tells them a story that very different but is also more intense and more violent. The first two parables started with common people. “A man had two sons…” “A landowner planted a vineyard…” But this one starts with a king. And there is a very important phrase that kind of slides by in the opening: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…”. The other two parables don’t mention the kingdom of heaven. I think we tend not to really notice this opening in this parable because a number of Jesus’s short stories in Mattthew begin with the phrase “the kingdom of heaven is like…,” in fact all the parables in chapter 13 start that way and so does the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in chapter 20. This one, however begins with, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…” So keep that in mind.
So, Jesus tells the priests and authorities who are already quite upset with him, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. It was a big important feast. Lots of preparation. Very expensive. All the nobility were invited. But nobody wanted to come. Some of them even beat up and killed his messengers. The king was enraged by this, so “he sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” Yeah, that’ll teach ‘em. The king doesn’t want all his planning and expense to go to waste, so he sends his servants out into the streets to bring in everybody they can find. And it’s great. A great big party for the common people. But then there’s this one guy at the party who is not wearing a wedding robe. So the king comes up to him and says, “Friend,[2]” –never a good sign in a Jesus story when someone addresses you as “friend”—“Friend,” says the king, “how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” The guest 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.’
As with so many of Jesus’ parables, we have traditionally interpreted this story of the wedding banquet as an allegory with time-honored identities assigned to the characters. In most conventional interpretations, the king who gives the banquet represents God and the bridegroom, the son, represents Jesus.
In one traditional interpretation, the original invited guests who turn down the invitation represent the people of Israel, and the people brought in off the streets represent the Gentiles who are ushered into the feast when Israel turns down the invitation.
In another traditional interpretation, the invited guests who refuse to come and who abuse the messengers represent first century Pharisees, and the street people who take their place represent the new Christian community, those people first hearing and reading Matthew’s gospel.
There is yet another interpretation that doesn’t dwell on those who decline the invitation or the street people who take their place at the banquet. This interpretation focuses, instead, on the gracious generosity of the king who issues the invitation in the first place, first to the invited guests, and then opening it up to “everyone they found, both good and bad.”
In all these interpretations, the wedding robe is understood to be God’s grace which clothes us in the attributed righteousness of Christ. The guest who is thrown out into the outer darkness for failing to wear a wedding robe is understood to represent someone who refuses to accept God’s gift of grace. That’s pretty much how I always heard this parable preached or taught.
These interpretations works well enough up to a point, but they also have some glaring problems. So let’s look at some of those problems, the things we tend to gloss over if we keep hearing this story the same way we’ve always heard it before.
Let’s start with the son, the guest of honor at the banquet. If this son of the king is Jesus—in this story being told by Jesus—he is oddly passive. The son does nothing. He does not deliver the invitation or announcement of the feast. He does not supply the wedding robes which, in traditional interpretations represent being clothed in his grace. He does not intervene on behalf of the guest being ejected into the outer darkness. He is utterly and completely passive. In fact, he is entirely in the background.
Would Jesus have described himself that way? Is that how you understand Christ?
What about the idea that those who first receive the invitation represent the Jews, the people of Israel, and the street people who take their place at the banquet are the Gentiles who would later dominate the church? In this interpretation, the people of Israel reject God’s invitation, so God destroys them. On one level, it’s easy to see how this makes a kind of historical sense. You could interpret the slaves delivering the invitation as the prophets. You could argue that the destruction of the city is an allusion to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. But remember, the first people hearing or reading this account in Matthew were Jewish Christians.
The people hearing this story in the Jewish Christian community of Matthew’s gospel still thought of themselves as Jews, as the people of Israel, but Jews who had received Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. Would they be likely to hear this parable as a story about God’s rejection of Jews and acceptance of Gentiles in their place? More importantly, this interpretation leads all too readily to antisemitism—and has historically been used for that purpose. Would Jesus, a Jew, be likely to tell a story with such a theme even if it wasn’t the main theme?
If we choose an interpretation that focuses primarily on God’s grace, then what do we make of the king’s violence? If grace is our theme, what are we to make of the king ordering one of the guests to be bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth simply because he didn’t wear a wedding robe, especially since we are given no reason for whyhe’s not wearing one? And what do we do with that last line—”many are called but few are chosen”—when it seems like the many are staying at the banquet and the few, the one, really, is being chosen for a brutal exit?
If we take any of these traditional approaches, I think we might miss something else that’s going on in this parable.
If we listen more closely to this parable in Matthew, we can hear overtones that are clearly political. The host is not just a man, he is a king. That means that the invitation to the banquet carries a lot of weight. It is, in fact, a kind of command appearance. The noted English Biblical scholar, Richard Baukham, put it this way:
“The attendance of the great men of the kingdom at the wedding feast of the king’s son would be expected not only as a necessary expression of the honor they owe the king but also as an expression of their loyalty to the legitimate succession to his throne. Political allegiance is at stake. Excuses would hardly be acceptable…. To refuse the invitation is tantamount to rebellion. In refusing it, the invitees are deliberately treating the king’s authority with contempt. They know full well that their behavior will be understood as insurrection. This is what they intend, and those who kill the king’s messengers only make this intention known more emphatically.”[3]
So… we have a king whose kingdom is in open rebellion. In response to his envoys being killed he launches an all-out attack and destroys the rebellious city. Because that’s what kings do to rebellious cities. Meanwhile, the feast is all prepared and must go ahead. The king has to save face. He has to show his political strength and force. The aristocrats who were invited are out, so he turns populist. He brings in people off the street. This is right out of the Roman playbook—using bread and circuses to pacify the masses. But when the king sees one poor schmo who isn’t conforming to the dress code, he has him booted.
If the king in this parable is supposed to represent God then we’re being shown picture of a god who is capricious, thin-skinned, hot-tempered and short-fused.
Is that how we see God? More importantly, since Jesus is the one telling this story, is that how Jesus saw God?
I don’t think so.
Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus described God as a patient, tolerant and nurturing parent. He said, “Your Father in heaven makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (5:9). “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (6:8) “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (6:26) “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (10:29) Even when Jesus is totally exasperated with the Pharisees and Scribes he says, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” He tells them they won’t be first in line, but he doesn’t say they’ll be excluded or thrown out.
Does that sound like the king in this parable? Or is Jesus trying to tell us something else here?
I think the people listening to Jesus tell this story might have recognized it as being very much like an episode out of their own not-too-distant history.
In 40 BCE, King Antigonus Mattathias, the last Hasmonean king and high priest of Judah, made an alliance with the Parthian Empire to counteract the growing influence of Rome in the region. Herod, who would eventually be known as Herod the Great, had been trying to build up his own political power in opposition to Antigonus. He knew that the Romans would not be happy about the Parthians having a foothold in Judah, so he headed to Rome, where the Roman Senate, backed by Mark Antony and Octavian, named him King of the Jews. He then returned to Jerusalem with a Roman army led by the Roman general Sosius.
In 37 BCE, during a break in his military campaign, Herod married Mariamne, the Hasmonean princess and niece of Antigonus, so he could claim a legitimate connection to the Hasmonean dynasty. The remaining members of the Hasmonean nobility refused to attend the wedding because they hated Herod and because the wedding took place in Samaria. Herod and Sosius then laid siege to Jerusalem and burned down part of the city before defeating the army of Antigonus. Herod consolidated power over the next decades, systematically eliminating his remaining Hasmonean rivals, especially those in the priesthood whom he replaced with priests of his own choosing. After Herod’s death, the Roman authorities took over the appointment of the priests.
So, with this history in mind, let’s go back to the Parable.
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…”. Compared to…meaning it might be very different from the kingdom in the parable.
What if the king represents all the powers that be in this world, the powers that insist we conform to their norms—religion, politics, the restrictions of culture and society—the powers that rise up to crush anything or anyone that steps too far out of line, powers that reject and eject those who don’t wear the garment of conformity?
What if all the people in this parable are just that? People. In all their stratified layers—the aristocrats and wealthy, the privileged who get the embossed invitations to everything that’s good in life—and then everybody else—regular people who go about their lives making do but who every once in a while get a fabulous break because the original guests are no-shows.
What if Jesus is describing the system as it was…and as it is? What if he’s describing the way the world works, with its hierarchies of wealth and levers of power, with its violence and struggles for control and its pressures to create and maintain business as usual?
And then, what if the “God” figure in this parable is the guest without a wedding robe? What if Jesus is the one who refuses to wear the wedding robe, the garment of conformity? What if Jesus is making a statement and saying, “I refuse to play along.”
When the king asked “Friend how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” the guest was speechless. When Jesus stood before Pilate, he was speechless, too.[3]
What if the way to the real celebration was to opt out of the coerced party hosted by the powers that be? What if the way in to the full celebration of life requires you to refuse to wear the clothes of conformity, to let yourself be bound hand and foot and thrown into the “outer darkness” of rejection, just as the way to Christ’s resurrection was through the cross and the tomb, just as the way to eternal life is through death?
What if Jesus is the guest being forcefully ejected from the party? What would that mean for us as followers of Jesus?
Would you be willing to take off your robes of privilege, position, power and wealth to follow him into the outer darkness?
Would I?
Many are called. Few are chosen.
[1] Luke 14:15ff
[2] The Greek word here is hetairos which means something akin to “comrade” or “fellow-soldier.” Jesus uses the word in chapter 26 when he greets Judas when he betrays Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Hetairos is distinct from philos, which means a true friend of the heart.
[3] Matthew 27:12-14
