Wedding Banquet of the Kingdom

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Good and Gracious God, we pray that we will accept the invitation that you extend to us, doing your will, and loving you and our neighbor.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

With a teacher for a spouse and years of serving as a school board member, we receive a lot of invitations.  I’m not certain about Muscatine, but parties for graduations arrive in stacks starting in April and continue through July.  But June through August are the height of the wedding season, so those envelopes show up too.  It’s not uncommon to have six or seven commitments in one day. Uffda!

If that’s what was going on in today’s Gospel, we could probably understand a note being penned that offered regrets to the King, Sending along a nice gift or buying something from the wedding registry at Target or Bed Bath and Beyond also would have lessened the blow.

Another possible interpretation is that accepting the invitation was a matter of conscience for the receiver.  For example, our companion Diocese of Swaziland has a king, Mswati III, who hoards wealth.  He has an annual household budget of over 60 million dollars while his people struggle with HIV infection, extreme poverty, and a life expectancy of less than fifty years old. While children raise their younger brothers and sisters and subsist on one meal a day, his lavish lifestyle includes cars that are worth a half-million dollars.  So perhaps the guest would have been excused for not wanting to attend the wedding on principle.

But this is no ordinary wedding. The people in the first century who heard this parable would have understood it for exactly what it was:  a valuable political alliance.  It’s quite likely that the wedding taking place was designed to unite an adjacent kingdom, where the daughter of that country’s king was marrying to cement power.

Jesus is telling the people that they belong to the kingdom of the daughter in this alliance.  They are refusing the invitation through their stubbornness and unwillingness to submit to a new Ruler.  And then, some of these people cross a line that can’t be undone. Just as in last week’s Gospel reading, these stiff-necked people kill the messenger slaves, totally disrespecting the wishes of those wanting the alliance.  Both kings would have been upset at the rejection, and an eye-for-eye type of justice would have been seen as totally legitimate.

If that’s where the parable ended, we’d have a good example about the limits of resistance and the amount of power the first king wielded.

In today’s New Testament reading, we hear that Paul speaks of a banquet of values to prepare in our own life. Instead of fatted calves and a multi-day feast, Paul wants us to dine on truth, and justice, and honor.  It’s a beautiful sentiment, but just like the king in the Gospel, it’s easy to ignore the call that we receive and instead do things that please ourselves and grow our own influence and appearance.  Praise for God becomes secondary to praise for ourselves.  And when we are asked to consider the merits of the request of our King, the Lord Jesus, we hem and haw and worry about other ideas, including our standing in the community and our financial bottom line.

We are human.  We do make mistakes. God gets it, and sends reminders, again and again, to ask us to give up our waywardness and return to his protection through our faithfulness.

In the second part of the parable, Jesus approaches us again, telling the story from a different viewpoint.  In this telling, we are the wayward, the poor, the blind, and the lame. And Jesus sends out the Spirit to woo us back to faithfulness, and truth, and invites us into the king’s multi-day feast. In this telling, the king is a generous and caring Ruler, willing to provide clothing, food, drink and lodging to the people who are most in need of help.  By putting on the wedding robe provided, the people are proclaiming their joy and acceptance. They are rejoicing in the fulfillment of the promise of Isaiah to have a leader that provides shelter from the rainstorm and shade from the heat. The feast of well-aged wines and plentiful meat is ready. Really, who would not want to be in the sandals of one of these wedding guests?

That’s the last little twist in this parable.  There will always be people who lack a moral code and who are bad actors.  These are those that pretend to profess loyalty, but have a knife ready in their belt to commit violence.  They sit quietly and stir up mischief designed to undermine the ruler. Here, they refuse to wear the wedding robe, and are sending a subversive message that they do not support the King. As you have no doubt figured out, the Ruler is our God: Creator, Son and Spirit.  These people believe in a code that is focused solely on themselves, and as such, have no use for humility. As a result they are thrown out of the banquet.

I’ll be honest.  This third part of the parable is uncomfortable for me, but without it, where would we be?  Our God is offering to us the freedom to choose, to ignore the Kingdom, to subvert the Kingdom or to become part of the Kingdom.  Free will is both the blessing and the curse for our lives as we consider our choices and ask for the grace to follow the Great Commandment and build our lives living out the Way of Jesus.

Amen.