I have to be quite honest. There is really very little about this parable that I like. “The weeping and gnashing of teeth” is one of my least favorite phrases in all of Scripture, and Matthew seems particularly fond of it. It appears six times in Matthew, once in Luke, and not at all in Mark or John.
And then there is everything else in this parable: people refusing an invitation, servants being abused and killed, a king responding with terrible violence, a city burned, and finally one poor guest who apparently shows up wearing the wrong thing and is bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness.
It is not exactly one of those passages we embroider on a pillow. And it is one of the reasons that I sometimes struggle with the Gospel of Matthew. But here it is in our lectionary. And that is, I think, one of the gifts of the lectionary. It prevents us from simply choosing the passages we already like, the ones that confirm what we already believe about God and ourselves. Sometimes the Church places before us a text we would rather avoid and says: No. Spend some time here too. Wrestle with this. Take it seriously. So here we are.
Luke has a similar parable, as does the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. But their versions are considerably less violent. In Luke and Thomas, someone is giving a great dinner. The original guests make excuses and refuse the invitation, and so the host goes out and invites people who would not normally be included at such a banquet. Luke specifically names the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. No one murders the messengers. No armies are dispatched. No city is burned. For most of us, Luke’s version is considerably easier to hear.
Which raises the question: What happened in Matthew? Why is Matthew’s version so angry? To understand that, we have to remember something about the community from which Matthew’s Gospel emerged.
Matthew and his community were Jewish followers of Jesus. They understood themselves to be part of Judaism. Jesus was Jewish. His first followers were Jewish. And these particular Jews believed that in Jesus, God had done something decisive. They believed Jesus was the Messiah.
Other Jews did not. And by the time Matthew was writing, that disagreement had become increasingly painful.
This was not originally a conflict between Christians over here and Jews over there. Christianity had not yet fully emerged as a separate religion in the way we know it today. This was, at least in part, an argument within Judaism. One group was saying, “Jesus is the Messiah for whom we have been waiting.” And others were saying, “No, he is not.” And we should perhaps be a little more sympathetic than Christians have sometimes been toward those who said no.
Imagine, after all, that a group arose within Christianity today announcing that God had sent a new Messiah or a new definitive revelation and that the rest of us needed to change our understanding of our faith accordingly. I suspect that many of us would have questions. Some of us might be irritated. Some might be outraged. We might ask by what authority they made such a claim. And if the conflict became disruptive enough, we might decide that we could no longer belong to the same religious community.
Religious communities do not always handle internal disagreement particularly well. And Matthew’s community was living through an especially painful moment. The Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by Rome. Judaism itself was being reshaped in the aftermath of catastrophe. Different groups were wrestling with questions of identity and authority and faithfulness. Who are we now? What does faithfulness to God look like now? Where is God in all of this? Matthew tells this parable from inside that struggle.
And so, his version becomes a story of rejection and judgment. Those who refused the invitation have rejected something of enormous importance. Others are invited in their place. Matthew appears to interpret even the destruction of Jerusalem through this theological lens. And this is precisely where Christians have to be very careful.
Because Christians have taken passages like this one and used them for centuries to claim that the Jewish people rejected God, that Christians replaced them, and even that suffering inflicted on Jewish people was somehow justified. That interpretation has helped nourish Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with horrifying consequences. There is nothing faithful about that. And there is nothing faithful about taking an angry first-century argument among Jews and turning it into divine permission for Christians to condemn Jews two thousand years later.
Context matters. It matters because it helps us understand Matthew. But it also matters because it prevents us from weaponizing Matthew. So then what do we do with the parable? We cannot simply throw it away. We say that Scripture is the living Word of God, and if we mean that, then we have to be willing to wrestle even with the parts that make us uncomfortable.
But wrestling with Scripture is not the same thing as taking every detail literally. A parable is not a newspaper report about God. And the king in this story is not simply God with a crown on. God is not a violent tyrant who burns cities when people decline an invitation to dinner. Parables are stranger than allegories in which every character simply equals something else. Parables provoke. They unsettle. They turn things upside down. They force us to see something we would rather not see. And perhaps this one does that partly through its extremity. Because beneath all the violence and anger of Matthew’s telling is a claim that I think we should take very seriously:
God’s invitation matters. What we do with our lives matters. The kingdom of God matters. We are not simply living out our own individual stories, trying to build pleasant lives, accumulate enough security, take care of ourselves and the people we love, and get through our days with as little disruption as possible. We are part of a much larger story.
God is at work in the world. God is healing. God is reconciling. God is liberating. God is gathering people around a table where the people who are usually excluded are welcomed and where strangers discover that they belong to one another. And God keeps inviting us to participate.
The problem is that, like the first guests in the parable, we are very good at being busy. We have fields to tend and businesses to run. We have calendars and responsibilities and worries and plans. We have careers and families and retirement accounts and homes and committees and inboxes and all the thousand small things that fill our days. None of those things is necessarily bad. But they can become so important to us that we stop hearing the invitation.
We begin to believe that our lives belong entirely to us. We begin to believe that our security matters more than someone else’s well-being. We begin to believe that what we have is ours because we earned it and deserve it. We forget that we are because God is. We forget that everything begins in grace.
And sometimes we do hear the invitation. Sometimes we show up at the banquet. After all, here we are. We are churchgoing people. We worship. We pray. We receive Communion. We serve on committees. We give money away. We try to be good people. And perhaps we are tempted to say, “What more do you want from us, God?”
And then there is that strange man without the wedding robe. I will admit that I feel rather sorry for him. The king has just dragged people in from the streets, and then apparently becomes furious because one of them is not dressed appropriately. But again, if we resist reading the parable literally, perhaps the point is not clothing.
Perhaps the point is that simply showing up is not the end of the invitation. God wants more than our attendance. God wants us. Not because God is possessive. Not because God is keeping score. But because God’s work of healing this world is that important. God’s dream is that important. And God will not give up on it. If one group refuses the invitation, God invites another. If the people who were certain they belonged at the center refuse to come, God goes out to the crossroads. God opens the doors. God expands the guest list. God breaks apart traditions if those traditions stand in the way of love. Including, perhaps, some of our own beloved traditions. Because God’s dream matters more than our comfort.
And strangely enough, that is where I find good news in this rather unpleasant parable. God does not give up. Human beings say no to love again and again. We choose fear. We choose self-interest. We choose violence. We divide people into those who belong and those who do not. We protect our own privilege. We turn religion itself into one more means of exclusion. And still God goes back out into the streets. Still God invites. Still God gathers. Still God sets the table. Still God dreams of a world reconciled and healed and made whole.
I still do not like this parable. I doubt I ever will. It is probably never going to be one of the passages I turn to for comfort. But perhaps comfort is not what every passage of Scripture is meant to offer us.
Sometimes Scripture is supposed to disturb us. Sometimes it is supposed to ask whether we have become too comfortable with a world that is very far from God’s dream. Because we can say quite easily that God loves everyone. Absolutely everyone. We can say that Jesus came to reconcile and heal all of creation. We can say that there is room at God’s table for everyone. Those are beautiful things to say.
The harder question is whether we are willing to live as though they are true. Are we willing to let those convictions shape how we spend our money? How we use our power? How we treat people we do not understand? How we vote? How we invest? How we speak? Whose suffering we notice? Whose dignity we defend? Whose presence at the table makes us uncomfortable?
God does not simply invite us to admire the banquet. God does not simply invite us to walk through the door. God invites us to become people of the banquet. People shaped by the generosity of the host. People committed to the radical breadth of the guest list. People willing to participate in God’s stubborn, relentless dream of a world made whole.
God wants us to come to the wedding. But God also wants us to join the party. The question this difficult, infuriating, unsettling parable leaves us with is whether we will.
Amen.
