12th Sunday after Pentecost Matthew 22:1-14
I may not be a king, but I'm married to the Queen of Tonti, and I don't want any of you people to ever come to my house again! As a mater of fact, I think I'll send my troops to burn your town. Just kidding folks, that was my hook, I was trying to get your attention. Did it work?
Our gospel reading today starts out just like nearly all of Jesus' parables, “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to.....”. This time it's about a king who invites guests to a wedding banquet for his son.
Everything human beings know and say about God is based on human experience, culturally conditioned. What we think we know about God has to be centered around where and when we live. Paul phrased it perfectly in our reading today from his letter to the Philippians: “The peace of God which passes all understanding”.
That may be why Jesus used teaching methods that focused on what the people who were listening to Him understood.
Matthew's rendition of this parable is full to the brim of ancient Jewish and Mediterranean cultural norms. All of Jesus' listeners and Matthew's readers would have known exactly what and why those things were happening. No one would have scratched their head and said, “I wonder what he meant by that?” like we do.
At that time and place when a feast or banquet was planned, the time of it was not stated or probably even known. Glossy post cards were not mailed out saying “Save the Date”. The facebook posts only said, “we're going to have a party”.
And just like today, only people of the same social status were on the guest list. And, just like today, if you were invited to a party at the Joneses, you were expected to invite them to your next party, only more so. The ability to reciprocate was written in stone. It was one of the cultural principles, undeniable.
After the first invitation the guests would have checked out who was and was not invited. This was important. If key people decided to decline, others would fall in line. Then when everything is set and ready the king sends out some slaves to call the guests. The phone lines must have been down and email disrupted. Matthew says, “But they would not come”.
Can you imagine what was going on in God's head, I mean the king's head? He has prepared a wonderful celebration for the joining of Jesus and His church, I mean his son's wedding. And the people refuse to come. So God, I mean the king, gives it another shot. He sends other prophets, I mean slaves, back out with another invitation.
He says: “Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet”.
Do you know what oxen are? That's plural for ox. An ox is a full grown bull that has been castrated. They do that to calm them down so they can be used to pull things, they're huge, and oxen means more than one ox. There were fat calves as well. If two fish and some loaves of bread could feed five thousand, think of how many people are invited to the Kingdom of God, I mean this wedding feast.
All they have to do is walk through the red doors.
But they don't. “They made light of it and went away”. One went to earthly things, his farm. Another to his business, earthly gains, things much more important than spending an hour on Sunday morning celebrating with God, I mean the king, his son and their guests.
Other invited guests went a step further. “They seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged”. Imagine that.
The king sent Roman soldiers, I mean his troops, destroyed those murders and burned Jerusalem, I mean their city. “Then He said to His slaves, the wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet”. And He means everyone. The good, the bad and the ugly.
In verse nine of this reading today, from the lectionary, we have the words “main streets”. The king says, “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet”.
Remember, Matthew's gospel was probably written in the ancient Koine Greek.
There are arguments for the Hebrew dialect Aramaic, but the Greek seems to flow so much easier. I digress. There is a nine letter Greek word used here to describe what our reading calls the main streets.
That Greek word would probably be better translated as a square or plaza into which the streets run, an open market place. Think of the place where Indiana Jones shoots the bad guy who thinks he has come to a sword fight.
That place would have been full of people from all levels of the social strata. People selling and buying everything from monkeys to melons. Jews and Gentiles alike, the good, the bad and the ugly.
Matthew and Jesus' parable king is doing something way, way out of the ordinary. Meals in that place and time were super exclusive. You never, ever shared a meal with anyone above or below your social level. It just wasn't done.
Sunday meals at my grandparent's house might be a miniature example of that. The men ate first, then the kids, then the women. It wasn't a hierarchy thing. My dad had twelve brothers and sisters, it was a small house. There just was not enough room for everyone to eat at the same time. That's just the way things had always been done. No one thought it was wrong and no one complained.
This parable king, however, is turning the known world up-side-down. He does not expect His guests to buy lunch the next time. He is allowing everyone into his kingdom, everyone, at the same time. But, but they have to be prepared to enter. Even among this second group someone refused to put on the garment provided by the king. It would have been so easy.
God, I mean the king, provides everything necessary, the banquet hall, the meal, the fellowship, for ever. All we have to do put on a simple garment which He also provides. The garment of righteousness, that means proper and honorable relationships with other people.
Parables tell us how God relates to His people and how people ought to relate to each other. Just like this one. The kingdom of God is like.
Amen.
