The Wedding Banquet

Matthew 22: 1-14 (October 15, 2023)

I mentioned last week that we were beginning a series of texts where Jesus is in confrontation with the religious authorities. Parables, we remember, were used by Jesus to “reveal what had been hidden since the foundations of the world.” Again, in today’s Gospel reading, we see Jesus directing his parable to the chief priests and Pharisees who, along with the Sadducees, were the power elite of the day.

In this story, the role of the religious leaders is played by the invited guests, and again, the role of the prophets is played by the slaves or servants of the King. Of course, the King represents God, but instead of Israel being a vineyard, we are placed in the setting of a wedding feast.

Like last week, we see tendrils from this story back to the other readings for today. In Isaiah, we read that God will offer a banquet of rich food on the mountain where the veil that separates the people from God is destroyed, and even death– the great swallower of all – is itself swallowed up. From biblical scholars, we learn that the image of the feast generally refers to the messianic banquet on Mount Sinai. It symbolizes our yearning for an end to separation, suffering, and death.

Psalm 23 is a much-beloved poem about trusting in the divine shepherd, who leads the people in a new Exodus through danger to security. And again, we see how God will provide the people food and drink in a lavish banquet. Here, the Shepherd is a metaphor for royalty and so again we see a King who lovingly accompanies his people and provides a feast for them. By looking at these texts together, we can see that when Matthew includes this parable of the wedding banquet, he is showing his readers that he understands Jesus as fulfilling Israel’s prophecies.

Once again, today’s parable turns our expectations upside down. We can assume that the original invited guests were the high rollers in places of power. That’s who a King would invite to the wedding of his son. We might expect that those high rollers, the people who seem to have it all together and be in control, are the ones who are ultimately chosen by God. Or we might expect that those who follow all the rules, who believe all the right things, and who seem certain about their religious practice, might be the ones who get into heaven. Or we might expect that those who have been most successful in this world – the rich and powerful – must have been particularly blessed by God.

But it’s those people – the ones who think they’ve done everything right, the ones who think they’ve got God all figured out – it’s those people in power who seem to have got it all wrong. And they’ve got it all wrong because their hearts aren’t in the right place. They aren’t seeking first the Kingdom of God. They aren’t bringing the people in their care to the fruits of the Kingdom, to deep relationship with God. Instead, they’re focused on power and influence of the ruling government.

Like in the story of the vineyard, here we see those in power dismiss and disrespect God, who is the true source of the gifts that are offered. The abundant life that God provides – represented here by the wedding banquet – is a life of intimate relationship with God. We might even say that if the King’s son represents God’s Son, then the wedding is the union of Christ and the people. As in texts where Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride, this marriage is the union of humanity and divinity. It’s what is sometimes called the Divine Marriage, a union that happens in the heart.

Now let’s look at the details of the story. The King has prepared a wedding feast. The guests have been invited and the slaves are sent to bring them in, but they won’t come. The King says, tell them, “Look I have prepared everything” but the invited guests just dismiss it all and go away to focus on their own lives. Again, the slaves are mistreated, beaten, and killed. This is meant to point to the history of Israel, of the people turning away from God again and again, and not listening to God’s prophets. The King is understandably enraged and burns their city. (Scholars believe that this is Matthew’s veiled reference to the destruction of the Temple after Jesus but before this Gospel was written) The King decides that the invited guests were not worthy, and that everyone the slaves can find should be invited instead. God basically flings the doors wide open.

So the slaves gather the saints and the sinners, the people from the street, which probably meant the Gentiles, so the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king enters the hall, he notices a man who’s not wearing a wedding garment. He says, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” But the man has no answer. The King tells his attendants to bind him and throw him out into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

How are we to understand this? On the surface, it seems like the King is being unnecessarily mean to someone who just didn’t have the right clothing. After all, people were just brought in from the street, right? Who had time to change? Or maybe this man couldn’t afford a wedding robe! Is he punished for being poor?

Here again, we widen our perspective when we look at the historical context. In the culture of this parable, everyone had a wedding robe and they wore that robe to every wedding they attended. One way to interpret this man’s not wearing a wedding robe is that he didn’t take the banquet seriously. He disrespected the King. But in my research, I learned something very important. I learned that in this culture, when a King hosts a wedding, the King actually provides everyone with a wedding robe! No one would have had to bring their own, so station or economic status isn’t a factor here.

A blogger named Father Kamal who writes about the holy land says that God as King enters the party to see if the guests are aware of the free grace they have received by being invited, and to “see how respectful they are.” It also seems, he points out, that the other guests haven’t noticed anyone not dressed appropriately, or, we presume, they might have told him to put on the right robe. Father Kamal suggests that the issue with this man is not his outer appearance, but his inner life, his heart.

While Father Kamal thinks the problem with the man is that he “is not leading a life worthy of the vocation he was called to,” I think it’s more about whether this man was ready for divine marriage. I think he wasn’t ready, or he wasn’t willing, to receive the Kingdom. Isn’t he just showing us in an outer way his inner belief that he doesn’t need the grace of God or that he believes he is unworthy of receiving it?

Many writers see the idea of the man being tossed into the outer darkness as referring to hell. But if we stay with the theme that this man’s lack of a robe was an inner situation, then we can see the inherent symbolic opposition between inner light and outer darkness. In other words, the lack of inner light – of clear sight – leads to outer darkness.

We might say that if we don’t have the inner knowing that we’re loved by God and are therefore in union with God, we’ll remain in the outer darkness of suffering, of weeping and gnashing of teeth. But if our hearts have awakened with the inner knowledge of God’s love, we are already in the banquet, participating in the life of God. God provides us everything. It’s all here for us. God comes to all of us seeking union. All we have to do is show up and claim our wedding robe.

This reminds me of a dream I had some years back. One thing you’ll learn about me is my passion for working with dreams as a spiritual practice. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on spirituality, psychology, and dream work and I truly believe that God speaks to us through the symbols in our dreams. This approach to dreams comes from the psychology of Carl Jung who saw dreams as a pathway to our wholeness and to our psychological and spiritual health.

In Jung’s thinking there is a movement of the human psyche toward wholeness that is nurtured by the image of God within us. As we move toward wholeness we journey through different stages of growth. In the masculine psyche, Jung thought the movement was from Poet to Soldier to Wise Man to King. These are symbolic stages. So, the King can be a symbol of wholeness and a King and a Queen together might symbolize the divine or royal marriage of masculine and feminine. Both images are significant in my dream.

This dream occurred sometime during the presidency of Barack Obama. In the dream, I was a friend of the Obama family and worked closely with the President. Now this dream isn’t about the outer world of politics or affiliation, our dreams are about our inner world, and use outer world symbols to tell us something about our own consciousness.

What matters is that in my dream I was working alongside the President and First Lady. And in our culture, we can see these roles as symbolizing something like the King and Queen, or the royal marriage. In my dream, I go to a large work picnic where all of my colleagues are, and the President is there too. He tells me that he has a special gown for me to wear, and it’s strikingly beautiful and very elegant. As I’m looking at the gown, I think to myself, “I know that gown is mine, but I’m just not ready to wear it,” and so I walk back out to the picnic and join my friends.

When I awoke, I thought the dream was telling me that although I was getting close to the inner marriage of wholeness, I wasn’t there yet, because I wasn’t ready to claim the garments that went along with it. I wasn’t ready to wear the wedding robe provided to me by the King. I didn’t even realize how similar this dream was to our parable until I began writing this sermon.

All of this prompts me to ask: What gifts has God offered that we refuse to claim and wear? What grace are we invited to receive but think we aren’t yet worthy of? Are we refusing to enter the feast that God has prepared for us?

Many are called but few are chosen. We are chosen when we open our hearts to the Shepherd King. We open our hearts because we know the Shepherd’s voice and it’s our heart’s desire to follow him through the valleys of the shadow of death to the mountaintop banquet where our joy may be complete.