St Matthew 22: 1 – 14
Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. “Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’ “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. “Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and 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 wedding clothes. He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
Reflection
A friend invited me to the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley Regatta to watch him row for Jesus (The Cambridge College!). Henley is a posh gig. But he didn’t tell me about the dress code. On a boiling hot day, I turned up without a jacket. I was refused entry. It was humiliating and brutal.
There is something brutal about Jesus’ words in this parable. A man strays into the wedding banquet, dressed improperly. He is unceremoniously ejected.
But the parable is about grace isn’t it? Part of a string of Passover pronouncements, when Jesus upends self-righteous morality. Those who initially were not invited to the feast, find themselves attending. Those on the A-list didn’t notice the groom arriving and missed the party.
Jesus is uncompromising about the self-righteous who ignore his dress code. They have no place in the kingdom – unlike the sinners, failures, and outsiders clothing themselves in a righteousness that is not their own. So we need to be very careful about our own goodness.
Grace is seen as soft and comfortable, but this is a tough morality – something uncompromising forcing us to make hard choices: to stand alongside the unlovely. Jesus talks about both the bad and the good coming to the feast. This suggests to me that, in His Kingdom, there will be people that we like and people who are harder to love. But they are also invited and chosen. It seems that some unsavoury characters are entitled to carry the Cross of Jesus. They are our family too.
Jesus’ tough morality goes further. Some moral choices are the province of worldly Caesars and it seems we have to let them have their due. But not with total passivity – we are called to get on with the tough things that are God’s due also.
Prayer
Lord, give us strength
when making difficult decisions that You call us to address.
Give us grace to love all those that You call into Your family,
remembering that we, also, are called by your grace.
Amen.