Not wearing the right clothes

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned 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.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”                         Matthew 22:1-14 

“Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables” – those quirky stories, designed to make people think, intended to challenge.  Only the harshness of this one maybe challenges us a bit too much.  What does it mean? 

It’s way too easy to reach for the simple allegory where the king is God, the bridegroom son is Jesus, the slave-messengers the prophets, the A-list guests who were originally invited are the Jews of Jesus’ own day, and the B-listers who actually turned up are Gentiles, ie us.  That simply won’t do.  Guests who’d rather commit murder than attend a royal wedding?  All that fine food that somehow stays fresh for all the time it takes to destroy a city?  It doesn’t really make sense, does it?  And the mix of Christian triumphalism and anti-Semitism that comes into some interpretations just won’t wash: it’s not that the chosen Jewish people get it wrong, while the good Gentiles do everything right. So what are we to make of this?

I think it helps not to see the king as God.  Because it doesn’t tally with other ways that God’s depicted in Matthew and the rest of the New Testament.  After all, the violence here against the first invited ones who don’t come, and the harsh treatment of the one who doesn’t wear a wedding robe, doesn’t make sense if the king’s seen as God.  Maybe the king here is more like Herod, the Herod who in the infancy narrative at the beginning of Matthew ordered the slaughter of the innocents. 

So maybe much of this isn’t what God’s kingdom is like.  Maybe it’s a picture of how it’s sometimes depicted by Jesus’ opponents in Matthew’s Gospel – all that focus on “being worthy” – when the kingdom of God we recognise and want to be part of is something different entirely.  And maybe the ones we connect with most in the story are the mixed bunch – and it really is a mixed bunch, both good and bad – who unexpectedly find themselves sitting at a table groaning with wonderful things to eat and drink.  Maybe that’s us, wondering how on earth we got here, and who are all these other people alongside us?  We’re called into God’s kingdom, and we know we didn’t get here because of anything special that we’ve done ourselves – and that’s always worth remembering.  We’re here because of the generous grace of God, who keeps on reaching out, wanting to connect, eager to love us.  That’s much more like the picture of what God has done and what God is like that the good news gives us!

So what about the one who doesn’t wear a wedding robe?  Here’s another way of looking at this, from reflecting on something that’s happened through the lens of a parable.  I remember one year I was at the Te Manawa o te Wheke clergy school and, through not following the instructions about where to go, I found myself in the immersion stream, where everything was in te reo Māori.  I was very much out of my depth.  What parable is this like? I wondered, and then it came to me.  I realised my discomfort made sense: something was missing.  It was as if I was at the banquet, but needing a wedding garment.  Feeling unprepared and a bit exposed.

There was a difference between my experience and the parable though: I wasn’t thrown out – instead, it was as if the others there lent me a garment.  I saw the movement of God in the generosity of the other women at my table, inviting me to participate, finding the right place in my prayer book because I’m not good at following page numbers that aren’t in English, being patient as I managed a sentence or two.  It was as if they were sharing with me the garments they were wearing.

This makes a difference to what I think of this parable, and in how I want to live.  That experience, and looking at it through this lens, challenges me to do something similar, challenges me to be one who welcomes and shares with others, and supplies what they need.  To be someone who remembers what God has done for me and for all of us, forgetting about us “being worthy” and instead just welcoming people in and feeding them.  I want to be someone who tries to do that too.  To be someone who sees what God is like – not a violent king like Herod, but someone who acts with grace and generosity, someone who cares – and so to be someone who tries to be like that too.  What about you?

(Weekly Reflection by the Rev. Dr. Deborah Broome)

Image credit: Al Elmes, Unsplash