Proper 23, Year A
Exodus 32:1-14,
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23,
Philippians 4:1-9,
Matthew 22:1-14Children's Sabbath, Laity Sunday
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 (though 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. That sounds nice,
but when he happens to notice that one of those innocent guests who came at his last minute invitation (with no
notice, no qualifications, and no requirement of proper dress) was not wearing
proper dress, 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 added at least
one, and possibly two, parables into the middle of a free-standing one, with very
odd results. First, in 11-13 of the original parable, he apparently added some lines
from a separate parable about 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 more lines from 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). And 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 turn the first part of
the parable into an allegory 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’s[1]
says this shows 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.”[2]
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 (which would actually keep out a couple
of people I know).
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. (Matthew prefers more violence in his stories
of Jesus.) Luke also has the benefit of being slightly more appealing to the
social justice crowd. John Dominic Crossan, however, notes that a small item in
Matthew’s version sounds closer to what he thinks Jesus would have said 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....” He believes this is closer
to Jesus because Luke’s version is closer to Luke’s own theology (and quoted
straight out of Luke’s own writings: cf. Luke 14:13), and not necessarily that
of 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.”[3]
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. Presumably they 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 just for Luke’s riffraff.) And that
is the eschatological 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 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.” For poor and hungry people, a big banquet is the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven.
[1] Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes,
Carl R. Holladay and Gene M. Tucker, Preaching
Through the Christian Year: Year B (1993), p. 475.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
(Crossan, Historical Jesus (1992), p.
262.
