The Wedding Banquet
Proper 23, Year A; Matt 22: 1-14
After three weeks of vineyards, it may seem a relief to get invited to a wedding banquet. Then again… This parable appears in a quite different place in Luke’s Gospel (14:15-24), and we may have to remind ourselves that here in Matthew it functions, like the vineyard parables, as part of Jesus’ final conflict in Jerusalem, as well as paying attention to the curious differences and even oddities within Matthew’s banquet.
This discourse is still taking place the day after Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, and the Wedding Banquet parable appears seamlessly in his discourse there in the Temple, amid his conflict with the authorities. It pursues many of the themes of the preceding parable of the tenants in the vineyard, and raises the same difficulties.
Matthew’s distinctive treatment of the parable goes beyond its quite different place in the Gospel narrative. It shares with Luke’s version a powerful core story about those invited to the banquet, whose excuses reveal their privilege, and whose places are taken by others with less to lose. In Luke this is more clearly an economic contrast: those invited second are “the poor and maimed and blind and lame” (14:21), brought in from the streets and lanes of the city; Matthew—for whom the host is a king, not just a wealthy householder— also mentions the population of the streets, and thus implies a rag-tag bunch of substitute guests, as well as the privilege of the original invitees, but this version strikingly emphasizes the dubious or at least mixed moral qualifications of the new guests, more than their lack of wealth: they “gathered all whom they found, both good and bad” (Matt 22:10).
While both evangelists seem likely to have edited the parable in ways that made sense for their own messages, Matthew has taken some steps that are confronting in form, as well as content. As a coherent narrative parable, this version barely makes sense; the world it evokes for the reader or hearer changes multiple times, and forces us to ask just what is happening, not just in the story but in the Gospel itself.
Matthew seems to have written some elements from the last parable, the tenants in the vineyard, into his version of this one. The slaves who go with invitations are, like the messengers of the vineyard owner, shamefully treated and killed. Then this version also introduces a “city,” somehow identifiable with the first group of invitees, on which the king takes vengeance, even though initially the two groups of invitees seemed to be different members of the same city or society. The fate of the city also fits loosely with what story-book kings might do to rebels, but not with a story about invitations to dinner.
One reason for the confusing changes in perspective is fairly clear. In this version, set within a scene where Jesus is contesting with the authorities, we are dealing not just with a parable of how the kingdom of God reverses human notions of power and privilege (it does), but with a kind of allegory of the history of Jerusalem itself. Those bearing the invitations have become the prophets, and Jesus is the Son. The “city” that represents the privileged disdainful invitees (but not its own poor) is of course Jerusalem. Matthew’s readers, some decades after these events, will know not only the subsequent story of Jesus, but the fate of Jerusalem, destroyed by Roman armies in the year 70.
While this version then seems to be an attempt to make sense not just of Jesus’ fate at the hands of the authorities but also of Jerusalem’s own tragedy, we can reiterate the point made last time that this is not a narrative about the displacement of Israel, but an allegorical reflection on historical events, wherein the nation bound to God in love has borne the brunt of the leaders’ failure to accept God’s invitation.
Another piece of confusing yet significant scene-shifting occurs in the last part of the story, clearly an appendix with a different focus. Among those whom we are told had been picked up off the street (of that city?) is someone who (unsurprisingly!) has no “wedding garment.” Then that startled individual becomes victim of another inexplicable scene change, where instead of just being bounced out into the street, somehow he discovers that the banquet is happening next to a realm of outer darkness where “weeping and gnashing of teeth”—a very Matthean formulation (see 8:12; 13:42, 50; 24:51; 25:30)—are the order of the day.
While this section must be additional to an original version more like Luke’s, it is more than incidental. Given the lurching changes of scenario, we cannot simply treat the awkwardness of the scene as a reason to take it less seriously, let alone drop it. Despite—or because of—its lack of fit in the narrative world, it seems to pick up on the curious inclusion of “good and bad” guests earlier, which had sowed some seed of doubt to the effect that the re-configured invitation list was perhaps not the end of the story.
The fate meted out for lack of a garment indicates that some are present, even among the second group of invitees, who may not ultimately remain. Matthew thus seems to be challenging complacency about Christian belonging and commitment, as well as cautioning any smugness about the fate of Jerusalem. This theme of distinguishing between mere claims to membership and the reality of discipleship recurs often in this Gospel; it closes the Sermon on the Mount (7:21), and we will find it at the very end of our year of Matthew at the great Parable of the Judgement (25:45). Belonging to the Church as a mere social fact will not be enough (regardless of who has been displaced), for discipleship requires our real commitment and evidence.
The judgement to which Jerusalem has been subject, and which has driven in part the re-writing of the parable as an allegory, is not a neat matter of Israel’s failure and the substitution of the Gentiles. Whether we would call the wedding garment “faith” or “deeds”—Matthew would dispute such attempts at separating them, I suspect—the demands that God makes remain, as do the promises. We are called to the banquet, but also called to be worthy of its host.
The literary awkwardness of the parable, its compromise between pure parable and allegory, seems to be a way of saying in its actual form what it says also in content: do not assume you already know what is demanded of you, let alone that you have fulfilled it, any more than than you think you know what this parable is about or how it ends. The kingdom of heaven is like an invitation, like a banquet, like a command, and always a mystery.