Today’s parable from Matthew’s gospel is the continuation of Jesus’ ‘teach-in’ in the temple precincts on (what we would call) Monday before Good Friday. But before we dive too deeply into that, we need to remind ourselves of what the text doesn’t say.
The text doesn’t say that some bloke had a feast. That’s the version of the story in Luke’s gospel. Matthew’s account is explicitly a King giving a wedding banquet for his son.
The King sends out messengers to invite people to the banquet. Now, you might remember that one person says ‘I’ve bought some land’, another says ‘I’ve bought some oxen’ and another says ‘I’ve just gotten married, so I can’t come’.
Except that’s from Luke’s account as well.
Matthew’s version says that ‘they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them.’ Killed the slaves who came with an invitation to the Prince’s wedding! It’s like no fairy tale you’ve ever heard.
The text doesn’t say that, when the King’s invited guests didn’t show up, he sent out messengers to bring in the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. That’s also Luke’s gospel. In fact, Luke says it twice. Firstly as advice from Jesus to his followers about who to invite to their own place, then again in the equivalent to today’s parable when people don’t come to the bloke’s dinner.
But not in Matthew.
Matthew’s gospel says that the messengers go into the streets and invite everyone they find – both good and bad.
The text doesn’t say that when you go to a fancy meal, you should always choose the humble seat so that you are invited into a more honourable place, rather than the other way around – a kind of inversion story. That’s also in Luke’s gospel!
But the text of today’s parable does have the bit about the fella who showed up to the Prince’s wedding inappropriately dressed. The King comes in to meet the guests, spots the fashion victim, and asks what is wrong. The fella is speechless. So the King commands that he be bound hand and foot and thrown ‘into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. Lovely.
Now, I really want to make today’s parable about the inversion of the world’s value system. Of how the rich and powerful don’t bother to show up or show respect, and that in God’s economy it is the poor and marginalised who are invited to the feast. That hermeneutic fits with my worldview. That hermeneutic fits with the similar parable in Luke’s gospel.
But I don’t think it fits entirely with this particular parable.
Over the last few weeks of scripture reading, we have been crowding around Jesus, under a portico in the temple precinct. Like most public spaces even today, there was a kind of foyer area before you got to the real business. Jesus is in a semi-public space. In the narrative, he is being closely watched and the temple bureaucrats are on edge and want to thump him, but they’re afraid of the crowd.
It’s helpful to visualise the geography of Jerusalem at this time. The temple is on what today we call ‘temple mount’. It was a hill that was a levelled off to create a big, flat plateau. Today, it is the site of Al Aqsa mosque and the dome of the rock - holy places for Muslims. There is a retaining wall for the plateau still in existence today, and that is the Western Wall, where you will often see pictures of Jews (and some Christians) praying. The steps leading up to the temple are still there, so we can visualise people walking up this big set of stairs to the high point of the city, then entering the temple and into a covered, cloister-type area. That’s where Jesus is.
But that wasn’t the only magnificent building on a top of a hill.
Across the way was another hill and another plateau and Herod’s palace. It had room for hundreds of guests, baths and gardens, silver and gold furniture and, of course, banqueting halls. From the temple precinct, it was the most visible major civic building.
So when Jesus is in the temple precinct and he talks about a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son and no one comes, you can imagine the minds of everyone there going to the nearest king. The one in the palace across the way. The king who had married a woman who was not only his own niece but also his brother’s wife. A king who (as far as we know) had no sons. A king who had ordered the brutal death of John the Baptist.
As the story is being told, it becomes clear - no one shows up to this mythical Prince’s wedding! It’s like something from Game of Thrones! The other houses are grumpy that the King has married the wrong person, done something scandalous and forbidden, so they don’t front up.
Not only that, but they kill the messengers sent to invite them. Of course the king is enraged! He is being rebuked by the nobles.
The rounding up of the locals is not for their benefit, but to assuage the king’s shame and send a message to the other influential people – you are replaceable. I don’t need you.
This King, though, is so fragile and temperamental, that one person who is improperly dressed (hardly surprising given the short notice and the mandatory attendance) receives a cruel punishment.
This sort of capricious ruler was well known to Jesus’ followers, and Matthew’s community in Antioch, and is well known to us today. The kind of character who does whatever suits them, demands that everyone else falls into line and lashes out whenever something threatens their status or image. Such people have inhabited The Lodge, The White House and 10 Downing Street, but they also inhabit corner offices and television studios and lounge rooms.
Matthew adds an editorial comment to the text. ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’. Clearly he has an agenda for his community, about who is included in the movement. But if we imagine this story being told in the village squares and synagogues of the holy land as Jesus travelled about, if we imagine this story being told and retold in Jerusalem in the days before his death, we begin to get a sense of how treacherous Jesus was. A story which drew attention to King Herod’s outrageous conduct, and to the dissent amongst other important, influential people? A story which exposed the King’s arbitrary and unstable treatment of ordinary people? A story in which the King looks like a fool? This is a dangerous story indeed.
In these, dare I say it, unprecedented times, it is tempting to crave stability. Part of that temptation is to abdicate responsibility for critique of leadership decisions. So when we cut our humanitarian refugee intake, we just shrug our shoulders. When tertiary education and childcare are gutted, we feel sad but powerless. When there’s billions for the construction industry but almost nothing for the arts, we just look the other way. When a candidate for Lord Mayor in our city dehumanises people who are sleeping rough, we let it slide. When there’s so much else going on, the path of least resistance leads us to give leaders a free pass. We just want things to calm down, and we don’t have much fight left.
But Jesus does not allow us to shrink into complacency. His story of a selfish, narcissistic king who cannot control his temper is just as relevant today as it was in the first century, if we only have ears to hear.
The Lord Be With You