Click Here To Read Past Sermons

I’m going to start this morning by saying something that to some of you might seem to be verging on heresy—and to others of you may seem so self-evident that it’s hardly even worth mentioning. Ready? Here goes:

I don’t think the parable that Matthew describes Jesus telling in the Gospel lesson today bears any very close resemblance to the parable that Jesus actually would have told. I think Matthew has taken a parable of Jesus handed down in the tradition and Matthew has changed it, added to it, gussied it up, so that it addresses a situation in Matthew’s community and makes a point for Matthew’s agenda. And if we today want to know what this Gospel is about, we have to be willing to “get behind” Matthew, and take a good guess at what Jesus said, and ask why Matthew has changed it in the way he has.

For some Christians, the idea that we can look at the text of Scripture and start making judgments about what is “really” true or what Jesus “really” said seems very inappropriate. Scripture is Scripture, and the words of the text stand in judgment over us, we don’t have any business judging them. On the other hand, for other Christians, interpreting the text of Scripture with historical knowledge and critical judgment seems to be a very appropriate and very faithful thing to do, using the intellectual gifts that God has given us to try to understand the deep meaning of God’s word in ways that aren’t limited to a time and a place hundreds of years ago and hundreds of miles away. This parable in the Gospel today seems to me to be a prime example of how we can actually come to understand God’s message better if we’re willing to take the text and pull it apart a little bit.

There are versions of this parable in the Gospel of Luke and in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, so we can get some idea of what an earlier state of the parable might have been. I think the parable as Jesus originally told it ran something like this: A rich man gave a big dinner party for his closest friends. When the party was ready, the rich man sent his servants to invite everyone to come. But all the friends said they had other things to do: they had business to attend to, or other parties to go to, or their own agendas that they thought were more important. So none of the invited guests came. Well, the rich man didn’t want his party to go to waste, so he sent his servants out to invite other guests, not his closest friends, but anyone they could find, anyone at all. So the banquet hall was filled with the poor, the lame, the sick, all sorts of conditions of people. And the party was, in the end, a huge success. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

If that is something like the parable that Jesus originally told, then I think Jesus meant by it something like this: God is inviting the faithful people into the kingdom, into the fulfillment of God’s will for justice and peace. But God’s invited guests, the chief priests and scribes and Pharisees, those people who supposedly know God’s will best and care for God’s call the most, those guests don’t want to come. They refuse the call to righteousness of John the Baptist, and they refuse the community of peace of Jesus. So if they won’t accept the invitation, Jesus says, then God will invite someone else, not the priests and Pharisees, but the outcasts, the marginalized, the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors, the last people you would expect to find at God’s banquet—and yet there they are, literally having the time of their lives. So, Jesus says, if you want to enjoy the feast of God’s blessing, drop what you’re doing and come when God invites you.

Jesus told his parable to the priests and the elders, the religious leaders. By the time Matthew got hold of the parable, forty or fifty years later, the situation had changed. Matthew was speaking to a church that had been kicked out of the synagogue, the split between Jews and Christians had become a fact, and Matthew’s community was trying to figure out who they were now. They’d been Jews, and then they’d been Jews who believed in Jesus, Jewish-Christians as historians call them, Jews who still kept the covenant and still obeyed the commandments of the Law, but Jews who also followed the way of Jesus—and now they were being told they weren’t Jews anymore, now they were being told that their belief in Jesus had separated them from the covenant people. It was a real crisis of faith for Matthew’s community. So Matthew’s Gospel is full of teachings that the real people of the covenant, the real inheritor of the promises of God, is the Church, and not the Jewish synagogue. Nowadays, of course, we look at that situation and we want to be very careful not to use it as a pretext for anti-Semitism or an excuse for anti-Jewish feeling in the Christian community. But in Matthew’s time, for Matthew’s community, it was important to say that the Church was the faithful people, and nobody could tell them otherwise.

So Matthew takes the parable of Jesus and makes some changes to it. In Matthew’s version, the banquet is given by a king, not just a rich man; it’s the wedding banquet for his son, not just a regular dinner party—the king, the son, the wedding are all Christian symbols for God, Jesus, and the promise of the resurrection life. In Matthew’s version, the invited guests don’t just turn down the invitation, they mistreat and kill the messengers, just as the prophets had been mistreated and killed in generations before. In Matthew’s version, the king is so angered by their refusal that he sends an army to kill the guests and burn down their city—and that’s what happened to the city of Jerusalem in the year 70, Roman armies came and besieged the city and conquered it and burned it to the ground, and many people at that time saw God’s judgment in that destruction. And so for Matthew the old guests are destroyed, and new guests must be found. And because Matthew is concerned to show that righteousness and obedience to God’s commandments are still important in the new community of the Church, he adds the mini-parable of the wedding garment, to show that even the new guests have to be dressed in the fine linen of good deeds and the festal garments of the worship of God.

Matthew has taken the parable and he’s made it an allegory of how the covenant has passed from a rebellious people to a new people, how there is a new set of guests for God’s banquet, a new faithful people in the Church. Matthew has used a parable of Jesus, interpreted and amplified with Matthew’s own terms, to speak about God’s covenant and God’s call as Matthew’s people needed to hear it, in the time and the place where Matthew lived.

So for Jesus the parable was about the religious power elite turning away from God, and the poor and outcast being welcomed in their place. For Matthew the parable was adjusted, to be about a new covenant people being unexpectedly invited in to the kingdom of God. For both, the basic message is “When God invites you, don’t make excuses—you don’t want to be left out.” So what might this parable be about for us?—how would we adjust the message for our time and place?

We today also hear God’s invitation to the kingdom, God’s invitation to the reign of justice and peace, God’s invitation to the banquet of right relations and well-being for everyone. In our time too there are voices, like John the Baptist’s, that call us to righteousness and integrity, that call us away from the consumerism and self-gratification and self-centeredness of so much of our culture, voices that call us to justice in the ways of God. In our time too there are voices, like the voice of Jesus, that call us to communion and reconciliation, that call us away from the violence and vengeance and destructiveness we see in so much of our world, voices that call us to peace in the ways of God. God’s invitation comes to us in all sorts of ways, and in all sorts of circumstances, when we’re going about our own business and attending to our own needs and carrying out our own agendas—and God’s invitation calls us to look deeper, to see the possibilities for justice and peace in the things we do right here and now—and God’s invitation calls us to be willing to transform what we are doing and do it anew for the purposes of God.

The Good News for us today is that the invitation to the kingdom is there for us, in every moment, in all times and places—and the question for us is whether we will make excuses, or whether we will put on the clothing of Christ and take our places at the feast.

In the Name of God: the Holy One, the Holy Word, the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Readings For Sunday,