October 12, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
I’m not disagreeing with the gospel because I want to water down the tough things that Jesus is prone to saying. I just want to do my part to chip away at the confounding redaction that his followers added as they went along – genuinely doing their best with Jesus’ teachings, but not always getting it right. And in the beginning of Chapter 22, I really don’t think that Matthew got it right.
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Proper 23, Year A, October 12, 2008
Matthew 22:1-14
The Parable of the Wedding Banquet
The Rev. Sare Gordy
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Good morning.
I’m going to do something today that I don’t think I’ve ever done before – not from the pulpit, at least. I’m going to strongly disagree with the Gospel reading, and having disagreed with it, I’m not then going to preach on something else with which I do agree. Nope. This morning I’m going toe-to-toe with Matthew.
And I’m doing this, in a nutshell, because I don’t think that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a homicidal king who will chuck you in hell if you don’t belong. I just don’t. So, this morning I’m going to spend my time doing some deconstruction on this parable, as we see it in the Gospel according to Matthew, and then a little reconstruction, using the gospel according to Sare.
Now, I’d like to make it clear why I’m doing this, before we continue. You see, at one point, Cameron Miller pointed something out to me, though maybe not in so many words. And perhaps this is going to be obvious to you, but I needed to hear it. He said that when we use our common sense and the wisdom of our own experience, our radar for B.S. becomes a lot more effective, and that we shouldn’t turn it off just because we’re reading the Bible. Now, I grew up in the camp of Biblical Literalism, so this was a bit of a shift for me. I’d learned how to read things critically in college, how to observe discordance and not pretend it to be harmonious, how to look at print ads and media coverage and see the underlying manipulation based on the desire to sell a commodity or influence opinion. But never did I apply it to the bible, or to my own religion. My vision of God back then was too small, too brittle, and too fragile to withstand that kind of attention.
But that was just my vision of God. God, as it turns out, is big enough, supple enough, and strong enough to withstand all attention. In fact, God invites it.
Which brings me to my disagreement with Matthew. Now, I’m not disagreeing with the gospel because I want to water down the tough things that Jesus is prone to saying. I just want to do my part to chip away at the confounding redaction that his followers added as they went along – genuinely doing their best with Jesus’ teachings, but not always getting it right. And in the beginning of Chapter 22, I really don’t think that Matthew got it right.
Now, let’s roll up our sleeves and dig in. We’ve got a parable, and it’s known generally as the Parable of the Wedding Banquet. It’s got a parallel in the Gospel of Luke (in the middle of Chapter 14), which means that it’s clearly the same story, but with some details changed. It’s pretty common in biblical scholarship to think, in a case like this, that both Matthew and Luke drew from a common source, which they then adapted to suit their separate purposes. This is an important point, because it underscores something very vital – Matthew, Luke, and all of the biblical writers and communities had an audience that they were trying to console, convince, or challenge.
So, the first thing we can notice in this parable, is that Matthew has turned it into an allegory. Now, Cam has made mention a couple of different times now, that parables weren’t originally meant to be understood allegorically. Parables were a weird method of story-telling that was popular pretty much only in Jesus’ day that were uniquely Jewish and had one point, and only one point. They weren’t a story that had a cast of characters and situations that had a 1:1 relationship with characters and situations in the real world, like an allegory has, an allegory, which is a beautiful Greek invention. A parable is more like a joke. And not like a complex parody from Saturday Night Live. Think: Knock-Knock Joke. It’s got a punch line, and at the end of it, you might still be confused, because it’s going to take your expectations and turn them upside-down.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?
You see, a knock-knock joke doesn’t need to make sense, it’s just supposed to make you laugh. And parables don’t need to be allegories. They’re just supposed to make you think again, from how you normally would.
So, let’s take a closer look. According to Matthew’s Allegory of the Wedding Banquet, we have a king, who is God, giving a wedding banquet for his Son, who is Jesus, who has gotten married to a nameless bride, who is the Church. And we have a whole bunch of people who have been invited long in advance, as was the custom of the day, who are Jewish people, and most particularly, the elders of the religion. Those people have, after the second courtesy reminder, which is Jesus’ public ministry, decided to do everything from politely to violently rescind their positive RSVP, which is the various degrees of rejection that Jesus’ message received among the elite. The king, who we recall is God, then crushes the entire city, which we can see as the destruction of the Temple in 72, and sends out his servants, who we understand as the apostles, to gather together people who are willing, who we understand as potentially everyone else in the world, to come to the wedding banquet, which we can understand as heaven. Now, just in case you didn’t get it, Matthew drives the allegory home with the last bit. The king, who we understand is God, notices someone at the wedding banquet (heaven) who isn’t dressed right, which we can understand as not accepting Jesus’ teachings, and the king has them thrown out into the darkness beyond, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, which we can pretty well assume is hell.
That is Matthew’s allegory, and it’s a pretty complicated bit of storytelling. Heck, I might have missed something, but I think we’ve got enough to go on.
Now, as I mentioned before, Matthew, like every other biblical writer, had an audience that he was trying to console, convince, or challenge. And in this case, it was beneficial and convenient for him to do a couple of different things:
It was convenient for Matthew to reinforce the already existing idea of a vengeful and violent god who swoops in and destroys when he sees something going dreadfully wrong. In fact, a theme of condemnation (or depending on your point of view, clensing) that grows out of rejection, which is the more personalized version of this ‘swoop in and destroy’ motif, is actually quite common throughout the Hebrew prophets. It’s violent. And it’s interesting to note that in Luke’s parallel parable (or really, Luke’s parallel allegory), there is no violence. None.
It was beneficial for Matthew to affirm the placement of The Church into the Jewish context, because that is one of the main themes of Matthew’s entire gospel telling: to normalize and affirm the followers of Jesus.
And so, according to Matthew, the punch line at the end of this allegory that we are given, if it wasn’t already dreadfully obvious, is that the Hebrew people, and specifically the religious elite were called, but ended up rejecting the call, and so now we’re picking a new team, and they’re officially not invited.
Now, call me crazy, but in addition to the fact that that’s an allegory not a parable, that just doesn’t sound like Jesus. This is the man, after all, who advised his apostles to just brush the sand off their sandals and peacefully and quietly move on if they were rebuffed for what they were preaching and teaching in a town they came to.
But you know, if I had to boil down this allegory into a parable, just as Matthew tells it, I’d boil it down like this: If you get rejected, condemnation is the next step. Or maybe, I’d put it this way: God got rejected, and now he’s dating someone new and planning to boil his ex in hot oil.
Again, it doesn’t quite seem like Jesus. Is this from the man who told us to turn the other cheek? Is this from the man who told us to take the log out of our own eye before trying to get the splinter from our neighbor’s eye? It just doesn’t seem to add up.
So, if that doesn’t work, we are left with just three things: We are left with our previous experience with the teachings of Jesus, we are left with the similarities that this allegory has with it’s parallel version in Luke, and we are left with our good, common sense – a fairly respectable moral compass that if we choose to listen to it, will probably guide us in the right way.
So, we’ve touched on some of the previous teachings of Jesus just now, and our common sense is telling us that Matthew might have added a little something to the story that wasn’t there in previous tellings. So let’s look at Luke.
There are four points that the two stories have in common, besides all of their differences. The first similarity is food. There is feasting or dinner involved in both stories. The second similarity is that the first round of invitations did not, in the end, bear the fruit of actual guests that show up on your doorstep. The third similarity is a master sending out messengers. And the fourth similarity is the subsequent invitation and arrival of guests that you normally wouldn’t think to invite to dinner.
Now, if I were going to pull out the central theme to this story, I’d say that it was, ‘in the face of rejection, you’ve still got to persevere,’ which is a far cry from ‘in the face of rejection, feel free to condemn.’ In fact, I might put it this way: “Not everybody is going to get this. That’s okay. Keep inviting people until the table’s full.”
Perseverance. Perseverance in the face of rejection. Perseverance instead of condemnation. Now that strikes me as one of the challenging sorts of things that Jesus might say.
That is something we can take home with us, have it tumble around in our minds as we think to ourselves, ‘he says I’ve got to do what? But it would be so much simpler to blame, condemn, rationalize, and stay angry!’ Perseverance in the face of rejection – it doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t have to make sense. Remember – it’s a knock-knock joke, not a complex Saturday Night Live parody. It’s designed to make us think, and to think again. It’s designed to make us second guess what has always seemed so normal and natural. It’s designed to make us pause and deeply examine the motives behind our behaviors and actions so that when we do act, we act with the deepest of integrity, regardless of whether the situation is pleasant or unfortunate. So that when we act, when we speak, those words and deeds ring true for what we purport to believe.
And so, the Kingdom of Heaven is like Martha Stewart giving a dinner party, and after all of the hob-nobs and big-wigs sadly informed her that the third Saturday of October was just terrible for them, she regrouped and sent out her twenty-seven assistants into the surrounding quaint New England township and told them to get whomever they could – it didn’t matter, so long as the grand Harvest Dinner didn’t go to waste. And it didn’t.
Amen.
