Proper 23, Year A
Exodus 32:1-14,
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23,
Philippians 4:1-9,
Matthew 22:1-14
Matthew 22:1-14
This
story is a mess. In its present form it is about a King who held a wedding
banquet, but his guest list not only refused to come, but they beat up and
murdered his messengers, whereupon the King laid siege to the land slaughtering
peasants and burning "their" entire city (presumably also his own).
Following the carnage, a somewhat more genteel King then invites
"everybody," to come, "both good and bad" and fills the
hall. But when he happens to notice that one of those innocent guests who came at
his last minute invitation (with no notice and no requirement of proper dress) was
not wearing proper dress, so he binds the poor schlep hand and foot and throws
him into the outer darkness to cry and grind his teeth. ("This is the Good
News of the Lord," as we say…)
Probably
what happened is that Matthew has put at least one, and possibly two parables
into the midst of a free-standing one, with odd results. First, in 11-13, he probably
added lines that appear to be a separate parable of a wedding garment. The
inclusion is awkward, because in 9-10 the host has gathered guests off the
streets without any warning, and then at 11-13 he expels one of them for
lacking in sartorial elegance. Second, in 6-7, he added lines that may be a
fragment of yet another parable where the enraged King lets the dinner get cold
while he launches a military campaign against the towns and villages of those
who refused his invitation. Some commentators believe that Matthew created the
war imagery himself to link this parable with last week's parable of the wicked
tenants (21:33-46). There certainly are parallels in the sending of messengers
and the level of retribution and violence. But who knows.
Matthew's
message was probably to allegorize the first part of the parable into an image
of the history of salvation:
the King = God,
guests = Israel,
first messengers = prophets
war = the destruction of Jerusalem,
second messengers = Christian missionaries,
And
he wanted to turn the second part into an application to the internal tensions
within his own community, between new (gentile) and old (Jewish) Christians. He
didn't want the new gentile members of his church to think that getting in
would be easy (cf. 5:17-19, 10:5-6). The new "elect" were not in the
church as a simple replacement for Israel; responding to the invitation to be a
part of the new community by doing nothing but showing up was not allowed.
Fred
Craddock[1]
notes that "Matthew knew how easily grace can melt into
permissiveness," and suggests that Matthew was perhaps "addressing a
church that had lost the distinction between accepting all persons and
condoning all behavior" (p. 475). Perhaps a sermon could be directed
toward "cheap grace" and the general somnambulation of Christianity.
All are invited to God's table, but there is more required for admittance than
just having a belly button.
That
may all be true, but the result of Matthew's story containing all of these
parts winds up being a parable that is very hard to read today.
(Incidentally,
clothing imagery as a symbol for the coming into the new community was common
in the early church. I wonder if a sermon could be crafted around the notion of
"Clothes to Wear to the Kingdom"? [cf. Romans 13:12-14; Galatians
3:27; Ephesians 6:11; Colossians 3:12, and a couple in the book of the Revelation,
that I’m too lazy to go look up].)
Another
direction might be to try and track down something close to Jesus' original
story and preach that. Luke's version
is generally considered to be the more original of the two and is also shorter
and more genteel. His is also more appealing to the social justice crowd. John
Dominic Crossan, however, notes that a small item in Matthew's version sounds
closer to Jesus than the parallel in Luke. Luke has the King tell the servant
to "go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the
poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame (Luke 14:21)." Matthew's
version just has the King say "Go...into the main streets, and invite
everyone you find...." Crossan suggests that in at least this one line, Matthew
may be closer to Jesus because Luke's version is straight out of Luke's own
theology (and quoted straight out of Luke's own writings: cf. Luke 14:13), and
probably does not go back to Jesus. It may be more appealing in terms of mission
and outreach, but, unlike Jesus, it still assumes a world of stratified
classes.
Interestingly,
Matthew's subtle difference may be much more extreme. "The social
challenge of such egalitarian commensality,” says Crossan, “is the radical
threat of the parable's vision."[2]
Jesus' had a fundamental, genetic, inability to stick with just one social
class, and that galled people. Note that he also seemed to draw the odd scorn
from the privileged classes that he was too much of a drunkard, glutton, and
friend to tax collectors and sinners: they possibly thought he should have been
spending more time with them.
So
given all that, here's a general guess at what the original parable might have
said. A man decides on a sudden dinner (the suddenness is from Luke's version)
and sends out his servants to invite his friends as the dinner is being
prepared. Because of the lack of warning each one finds a perfectly reasonable
excuse. But the result is a meal prepared and nobody there. The host's reaction
is to send the servant out to bring in "everybody." (There is no
implication that he is looking for riffraff.) And that is the vision of the new
Kingdom. Jesus' point is that the invited are now absent (they turned down the offer),
and the uninvited ("both good and bad") are now present. In the new
Kingdom, everybody will be present, not just the friends of the King.
Not
a bad sermon theme… if you can explain in your sermon, in less than five minutes,
all of the ins and outs of historical, narrative, tradition, redaction, criticism
that got you there without angering or confusing (or both) your parishioners.
Another
image that one might pursue in a sermon is meals. For Jesus, meals in which all
have enough to eat, are almost always a symbol of the Kingdom. Not surprising
in a country and era that was raging with poverty and hunger. See Matt 8:11-12
(par. Luke 13:28-29), "many will come from east and west and will eat with
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the
kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth." Or Luke 22:16 (par. Mark 14:25; Matt. 26:29),
"...for I tell you, I will not eat it (the Passover meal) until it is
fulfilled in the kingdom of God." And Luke 22:29, "...and I confer on
you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom, so that you may eat and
drink at my table in my kingdom."
