The parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-14)

This article is based on a message given by David Couchman at Above Bar Church, Southampton, on Sunday 13th August 2006. It may be reproduced in print or on other web sites, subject to the copyright notice below.

barbecue

It's been the weather for barbecues recently! Text your friends! Exchange a few instant messages! Run down to the supermarket for some spare ribs and chicken drumsticks... and you're in business.

This isn't the kind of party Jesus is talking about. It was more like a big society wedding - a royal wedding, in fact. They didn't just text their friends saying 'let's get together:'

If the host was someone important, like a king, he'd invite all the leading people in the whole city.
He'd send out the invitations months in advance.
The guests would be highly honoured by the invitation.
a big feast, like a wedding, lasted for seven days.
The guests would clear their diaries around the time of the feast to make sure they could be there.

That's the picture in this story Jesus told in Matthew chapter 22. We're going to see three kinds of people in this story, and one hard saying.

1. The Unwilling (verses 1-7)

Jesus is telling his story to first century Jews. When he starts talking about a king who prepares a great wedding feast for his son, they immediately know that the king is a picture of God himself. And the Son is a picture of God's promised deliverer, the Messiah. Jesus tells us that this great wedding feast is a picture of the kingdom of heaven.

People sometimes talk as if God is a miserable tyrant, who is just sitting around looking over the edge of heaven to see if anyone is enjoying themselves, so he can tell them to stop.

Nothing could be further from the truth! At the centre of his being, God is full of joy and delight and happiness - which he wants us to share. There is nothing narrow or negative about God.

People talk as if heaven will be a miserable place, full of smug, self-righteous, uptight people, who will sit around strumming harps and talking to each other in seventeenth century English.

But really! When Jesus looks for a picture of what God's kingdom will be like, the one he chooses is a celebration. It's going to be one long party - the biggest party the Universe has ever seen.

You can't help thinking that some Christians will feel really out of place there, because they don't know how to enjoy themselves! Well, at least they'll be there - and they'll have plenty of time to learn!

Jesus saw himself as the Son in this story. Back in Matthew chapter 9, we read this:

'Then John's disciples came and asked him, 'How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?'
Jesus answered, 'How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.' (Matthew 9:14-15)

Jesus himself is the bridegroom at God's great wedding feast. He is the king's son. In Matthew chapter 21, Jesus tells a parable about a landowner and his tenant farmers 21. There, it says:

'Last of all, the landowner sent his son to them. 'They will respect my son,' he said.' (verse 37)

Don't let anyone tell you that Jesus was just a good man - a great teacher, or prophet, and that his followers made him into a god hundreds of years after his death. It just isn't true to the facts of history.

The king is giving a great feast for the wedding of his son.

Now, a bit of cultural background about feasts in Jesus's time: they sent out the invitations months in advance. Then, when the time came, once the preparations were well under way, and they had slain the fatted calf and so on, the host would send out his servants with a sort of second-level invitation. They'd say: 'Everything's ready. It's time to come.' And they would escort the invited guests to the party.

That's what happens in this story:

'He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come...' (verse 3)

But then it all goes wrong! The invited guests refuse to come!

This would be a huge snub, a huge insult to the host, at any time, and in any culture. And remember that the king is a picture of God himself.

Who are the invited guests in this story? They're the people of Israel. They're the ones God has chosen to include in his kingdom.

And Jesus tells this story where the invited guests give the king a slap in the face. God's grace is amazing, but the people of Israel treat it with contempt.

How do you think Jesus's hearers felt? They would have found this story deeply offensive. They'd have been angry and upset, and on the edge of their seats to see what he would say next.

In verse 4, the king sends other servants,

'The feast has been prepared, and choice meats have been cooked. Everything is ready. Hurry!'

But in verse 5,

'the guests he'd invited ignored them and went about their business.'

It gets worse. In verse 6, they treat the messengers outrageously. They start beating them up, and even killing some of them.

In chapter 21, Jesus told the story about the landlord and his tenants. You can't miss the parallel: in that story, the landowner is another picture of God. He also sends his servants, and the tenants beat them up and kill them.

In both stories, these servants and messengers represent all the prophets who God had sent to the Jewish people down through the years. The people had ignored them. They'd beaten them up, imprisoned them, and killed some of them.

So the Jewish people are God's invited guests - they've been God's chosen people for centuries. Now, with Jesus's own arrival, the kingdom of God is coming. It's the moment for that second invitation to the feast. But the people are unwilling.

What's a king to do?

Verse 7 says that he became furious. He sent his army to destroy those murderers and burn their city. The same kind of judgment fell on the tenant farmers in the story in chapter 21.

In both these stories, Jesus is foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation - a destruction that fell on them in AD 70, at the hands of the Romans. Do you think this is over-interpreting the story? Please notice that, the way Jesus tells it, in verse 7, the king's army burns the city of his guests. In the natural flow of the story, the king's guests would be people from his own city. But here, they have their own city, and it's burned.

The Roman general Titus came and destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. Refugees had been crowding into the city beforehand, so it was crammed with people. About a million Jews died. The Romans killed women and children without mercy, and the whole city was flattened.

In his teaching, Jesus foretells this destruction, and he sees it as a judgment on the nation for rejecting him.

So that's the first kind of people in the story - the unwilling. A picture of the Jewish nation rejecting Jesus.

2. The uninvited (verses 8-10)

The king says, in verse 8:

'The wedding feast is ready, and the guests I invited aren't worthy of the honour.'

But he's determined to have a worthwhile celebration for his son's wedding, so he says:

'Go out to the street corners and invite everyone you see.'

In other words, stick it to the invited guests. Go and find the riff-raff from the streets. So:

'the servants brought in everyone they could find, good and bad alike, and the banquet hall was filled with guests.' (verse 10)

Who are the riff-raff in the story? Who are these uninvited guests? Well, I'm sorry to say it, but it's you and me. It's the non-Jewish people of the world.

The Jews looked down on the other nations as being ignorant foreigners who didn't know God's law. They were the rubbish. They were the people God wasn't interested in.

Except... except that here in this story, God's invitation goes wide. He invites everyone, good and bad.

This is exactly where the story touches us today. God is having a great celebration, and you're invited! It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what you may have done. It doesn't matter what kind of mess you may have made of your life. You're invited. There's a place for you at the table!

You didn't get the invitation the first time round, but this doesn't matter, because the invited guests have insulted the king and refused to come, and now the uninvited have received an invitation.

If only the story had ended there.

3. The unready (verses 11-13)

The king comes in to meet the guests, and he finds someone in verse 11, who isn't properly dressed. He isn't ready for the feast. The story ends with him being thrown into the outer darkness, where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is Jesus's standard way of describing what happens to those who come under God's judgment.

Here we have a guest at the feast who thought he was on the inside, only to find that he wasn't. He thought he'd been accepted, but then found that he had been rejected.

When the crunch came, he wasn't ready. A few chapters later, in Matthew 25, there's another story about a wedding feast, with ten bridesmaids: five are well prepared, and the other five aren't. So this idea of not being ready for God's celebration is something that is quite central in Jesus's teaching.

What's this bit of the story all about? The problem is that he isn't wearing wedding clothes. So what do these wedding clothes represent?

It seems that at big banquets in the eastern world, where the host was a rich businessman or a nobleman, or a king, he would provide a wedding robe for his guests. The guests would wear these robes in his honour, and as a sign of their respect for him.

We can't be completely sure that this is what Jesus meant, because the Bible doesn't actually say it.

But in this story, the king has invited in the poor and the raggedy off the streets. They wouldn't have had fine clothes suitable for a wedding. So the idea that the king himself provided the wedding clothes for them makes sense of the story.

Everything this guest needed to be able to stand and look good in the king's presence was given to him freely. He didn't have to deserve it. He didn't have to earn it. All he had to do was to take it and put it on.

But as he came in, this particular guest had taken a look at his clothes, brushed the dust off casually, and said, 'I'll be fine as I am, thanks.'

He insulted the king, just as much as the unwilling guests did in the first part of the story. And when the king asked him why he wasn't properly dressed, he didn't have anything to say. There was no excuse for him to be without his wedding robe.

So if the main point of this story for us is that God is having a great celebration, and we're all invited, the second point asks 'Are you ready?' There's going to be a great party, but not everyone will be ready for it.

What would it mean, to be ready for God's great celebration?

The wedding garment in this story is a picture of the righteousness that God gives his people. We have a problem with the word 'righteousness.' For us, it carries overtones of 'self-righteous,' 'smug,' and all that unpleasant stuff.

But it doesn't really mean that. It really just means 'being in the right' - being in the right with God. Being able to stand in front of God and look good, and not be condemned.

Back in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah says,

'I delight greatly in the Lord;
my soul rejoices in my God.
For he has clothed me with garments of salvation
and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness...' (Isaiah 61:10)

We can't be sure that Jesus had this verse in mind when he told this story, but it's possible. He certainly quoted from Isaiah 61 at other times.

So the idea is that this wedding robe represents the righteousness, the right standing with God that God himself gives us. We can't earn it, but he gives it to us as a gift.

We have to be a bit careful here. We can look back on this story, in the light of what we know, and say that this righteousness is given as a result of Jesus's self-sacrificing death for us. This is right - but it isn't something that Jesus's first hearers could have understood from the story, and it isn't something that's in the story in any way.

All we can take from the story is that we need to be ready for the feast, and that God has provided what we need so we can be ready.

The heart of the Christian message is that we can't earn our right to be accepted by God, He offers it to us as a free gift. It doesn't depend on who we are, or on anything we've done. It depends on who Jesus is, and what he has done for us, dying on the cross. All we have to do is to accept it - to put on the robe. But some of us won't even do that.

A hard saying

This brings us to Jesus's hard saying in verse 14:

'Many are invited, but few are chosen.'

Jesus quite often ended his stories with difficult or provocative sayings. There are some things in the New Testament that we have to work to understand because we live in different times. Jesus's first hearers would have understood them straight away. Others just are difficult. With these cryptic sayings, even Jesus's first hearers wouldn't have found them obvious - they were meant to be difficult, to make us think.

OK, so what does it mean: 'Many are invited, but few are chosen.'?

We need to look first at what it doesn't mean:

You've probably come across the belief that God chooses who will be saved and who won't be saved. He chooses to save some people, but not others. Today, I think our instinctive reaction to this is that it isn't fair. How could God do that? We find it rather difficult, and even a bit repulsive.

We may have a problem with God's fairness because deep down, we think that we're really OK, and God owes us something. But the Bible's picture is that we aren't OK. All we deserve is God's rejection and judgment. 'Fair' would mean that God lets everyone be eternally lost. That's where we would be, if he left us to ourselves. It is only God's completely undeserved good will towards us that moves him to save anyone at all.

Part of our problem with this that it seems to say that we don't have any choice in the matter. But the Bible is absolutely clear that we do make moral and spiritual choices. They are our choices, and God holds us responsible for them.

The Bible is also clear that God is in control of all that happens, including the choices that we make.

You may say 'this is a contradiction. It doesn't make sense.' Well, perhaps it's a paradox rather than a contradiction. It may be beyond our tiny little minds to understand it. We can't expect to understand everything about God. But the Bible teaches both sides of this, and we have to keep hold of both sides of it, however difficult that may be.

OK, that's the end of this brief digression. We can see how people might think this is what Jesus is talking about here - but it isn't.

There's no way his first hearers would have understood him to mean that. We mustn't read back into their setting something that we get from Christian theologians in later centuries, or something that Paul taught in his letters. We have to ask what Jesus's hearers would have understood him to be saying.

So if Jesus isn't talking here about God choosing to save some people but not others, what is he talking about?

'Many are invited.' Jesus isn't really saying anything more than he's already said in the story: God's invitation goes wide.

But not all those who are invited will actually be included. Even among those who think they've accepted God's invitation, some will find that God hasn't actually accepted them. Why? In the light of the story Jesus has just told, it has to be because they aren't ready for the feast. They aren't properly dressed. They haven't accepted what the king has provided for them.

So this saying means something like 'many are invited, but few are included.' The issue here isn't about whether or not God has chosen you. The issue is about whether or not you're ready: whether you've accepted the robe that God provides.

Conclusion

So what does this story say to us today?

God is having a great celebration. His invited guests - the Jewish nation - have refused to come. They're the unwilling.

God's invitation has gone wide - it's reached the whole world. We're all invited to this great celebration - whoever we are, whatever we've done. We're the uninvited who have now received an invitation.

But we need to be ready. We need to be properly dressed. God has provided all we need. He gives us the wedding robe of righteousness as a free gift. We don't have to deserve it. We can't earn it. All we have to do is to accept it. There's no excuse for being unprepared.

There's going to be a celebration. It's going to be the biggest party the Universe has ever seen. God's house is going to be full. Will we be there?

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