Text: Matthew 22:1-14; Isaiah 25:1-10
So, all month long in our daily devotions we are focusing on where the Kingdom of Heaven shows up in the gospel of Matthew.
What we discover is an awful lot about how we should live right here and right now.
The Sermon on the Mount is filled with ethical instruction about how we treat one another in the Kingdom… which is often the opposite of what the world expects.
We’re called to put all of this teaching into practice in our lives and get out there and start sharing the Kingdom of Heaven with everyone we meet by healing and teaching and building relationships.
And then, we get to the parables.
This coming week we are going to talk each day about some of the shorter parables…
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, or leaven, or a net thrown into the ocean…
But for the next two weeks, I want to focus on some of the big and complicated parables we find in this gospel.
Parables, as I shared in yesterday’s devotion, are stories about ordinary things that draw people in, but have a meaning that is often hidden from plain sight.
They are meant to provoke us, to get under our skin, or as Debie Thomas puts it: “show us things we don’t want to see.”
Because they are stories, they have layers of interpretation, not just one way of seeing them. Jewish rabbis in the time of Jesus would have debated and wrestled and turned a scripture upside down and inside out and every single time would have discovered something new within it.
That is how we are invited to dive in… with open minds and willing spirits.
We are invited to dig into the history and the context that surrounds these simple narratives to try to grasp how the crowds around Jesus might have heard them.
And then we are supposed to ask how God is working to challenge the assumptions we bring into the story.
So today, we have the parable of the wedding banquet.
Now, usually when we look at this parable, we imagine that the King is God, right? God has invited the chosen ones to the party, and when they refuse, God throws open the doors to anyone else who might come.
Well, that is the sanitized version of that story.
Because it skips over all of the terrifying parts.
This is not a happy and blissful scene, but something that is straight out of a horror film.
When the invited guests don’t show up, in his rage, the king has them all murdered and sets the whole city on fire.
Then, the king pulls in everyone who is left – good or bad, rich or poor – and in essence, forces them to attend the party.
I mean, if they refuse, they might turn out like those initial guests, right?
All of these leftover nobodies show up, probably with fear and trembling.
Then, when the King looks out at the crowd, he sees one person who isn’t wearing the right thing and has him thrown out into the darkness.
Debie Thomas asks us:
“As Christ’s followers, do we really believe in a God as petty, vengeful, hotheaded, and thin-skinned as the king in this parable? A God who burns an entire city to the ground in order to appease his wounded ego? A God who forces people to celebrate…while his armies wreak destruction right outside? A God who casts an impoverished guest into the “outer darkness” for reasons the guest absolutely can’t control? Obviously the answer is no. Of course we don’t believe in a God as monstrous as that. Do we?”
One of the things that I remember my grandpa saying pretty clearly is that he didn’t understand the God of the Old Testament.
The God he found there was violent.
The God he found there punished the people.
But the God of the New Testament was full of grace and mercy and forgiveness.
But I think we can only say that is true if we selectively read through the scriptures and we skip over interpretations of parables like this.
And I’m reminded that it also requires us to skip over the promises and visions of abundance and love we find in the Torah and Prophets and Writings.
In fact, in the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking about not the wedding feast of terror from our reading today, but the feast of abundance in Isaiah 25 and 55.
Isaiah cries out…
…the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples
a rich feast, a feast of choice wines,
of select foods rich in flavor…
He will swallow up on this mountain the veil … swallow up death forever.
The Lord God will wipe tears from every face;
he will remove his people’s disgrace from off the whole earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
They will say on that day,
“Look! This is our God,
for whom we have waited—
and he has saved us!
All of you who are thirsty, come to the water!
Whoever has no money, come, buy food and eat!
Without money, at no cost, buy wine and milk!
Why spend money for what isn’t food,
and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy?
Listen carefully to me and eat what is good;
enjoy the richest of feasts.
Listen and come to me;
listen, and you will live.
Surrounding these passages are mentions of God’s judgement.
Of walls being trampled and people being destroyed.
But here is the thing about the prophets.
They were speaking to a people who were actively experiencing their own ruin.
Their cities were being overrun and burned to the ground by occupying forces.
Their neighbors were being killed.
And they had to try to make sense of what was happening.
How could God have let them down?
Why weren’t they protected?
And what the prophets proclaimed in this moment is that the rulers and the people needed to acknowledge their own sin and complicity and failures.
But every single time, the prophets also spoke of Gods redemptive love.
They set forth a vision of abundance and grace and restoration.
You see, the God proclaimed in these texts is not petty or cruel… no, God’s steadfast love endures forever.
God is patiently waiting, with the banquet table always abundantly set, ready to swallow up death forever.
How do we reconcile that vision with our traditional interpretations of this parable?
Maybe we start by asking new questions.
I was a bit blown away when Debie Thomas posed a question in her reflection:
“What if the king in the parable isn’t God at all?”
“What if the king embodies everything we’ve learned to associate with divine power and authority from watching other, all-too-human kings and rulers?
This king, after all, acts a whole lot more like Herod that the God we find in scripture.
You know, the one who went out and murdered infants because he felt his rule was threatened.
This king acts a whole lot more like the Roman Empire, which has subjugated the people of Israel.
Perhaps, Jesus tells the parable in precisely this way because he wants to challenge the assumptions we have about the kind of Kingdom he is bringing.
A parable, after all, shows us things that we don’t want to see.
Not about God, but about ourselves.
This parable comes on the heels in Matthew’s Gospel of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem.
There were some there, who wanted God’s reign to come with violence. They hoped for an overthrow of the Roman empire.
But there were also those like the religious leaders who believed that God’s reign was exclusive and filled with judgment. They sought to arrest and kill Jesus because he was not playing by their expectations and rules.
What is Jesus trying to get us to see?
If God is not the King… where do we find the Kingdom of Heaven in this parable?
In the parables we will explore over this next week in our daily devotion… Jesus tells us the Kingdom of Heaven is hidden. It is quiet. It is blossoming. It is unexpected. It is contagious. It is inclusive. It can’t be stopped.
When I hold those Kingdom of Heaven values up to this parable, I come to a surprising insight.
What if the Kingdom of Heaven is centered not on the powerful ruler, but the one person who has the courage to stand out?
The one who refuses to follow the rules of the party, the empire, the world.
As Debie Thomas puts it, “What if the ‘God figure’ in the parable is… the one brave guest who decides he’d rather be ‘bound hand and foot’ and cast into the outer darkness of Gethsemane, Calvary, the cross, and the grave…?”
After all, just prior to this parable, Jesus challenges the religious leaders quoting scripture to them:
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The Lord has done this, and it’s amazing in our eyes.”
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a feast of terror where guests are forced to attend by the threat of sword and fire.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a feast of abundance that turns upside down our notions of power.
It is where tears are wiped away.
It embodies the kind of love the Apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 13.
The Kingdom of Heaven is patient.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not easily angered.
The Kingdom of Heaven keeps no account of wrongs… not taking pleasure in wrong doing, but rejoicing in the truth.
The Kingdom of Heaven endures all things… even the threats and violence of the world.
In fact, it is the rejection by this world that lays the cornerstone for God’s will to be done among us.
Last week, we compared the values of the kingdoms of earth and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Today, we are invited to imagine ourselves as those invited guests…
Will we allow fear and intimidation to keep us in the world?
Or are we willing to take up our crosses and stand against the forces of evil, injustice, and oppression?
It was a decision that the disciples would have to make just a few days after Jesus shared these words.
Some of them betrayed Jesus and handed him over.
Some of them fled.
Some of them tried to fight.
Some of them denied who he was.
You see, standing against this world feels almost impossible.
Almost.
Because even our rejection cannot stop the Kingdom from taking hold.
Even our hesitation cannot stop the Spirit from moving.
God’s steadfast love endures forever.
And God is patiently waiting for us, with the banquet table always abundantly set, ready to swallow up death and fear and oppression forever.
All we have to do accept the invitation.