Matthew 22:1-14
The parable that Jesus tells in today’s Gospel from St. Matthew, is one of the more important mission texts of our faith. It is also an important text about God’s justification of sinners.
Through this parable, our Lord teaches us what the scope of the church’s outreach is to be – that is, to whom we should deliver the king’s invitation to the wedding feast of his son.
And he also teaches us about the basis upon which entry is granted to those who do heed this invitation – that is, what kind of garment is to be worn by those who are welcomed to this celebration as guests.
God, in his sovereign mercy, had – from very ancient times – entrusted his oracles to the children of Abraham: the chosen people of Israel.
Those sacred Scriptural oracles had embedded within them, from the very beginning, a “save the date” kind of message about the Lord’s plan someday to send his only-begotten Son to Israel as a Savior: not only for the descendants of Abraham but for all peoples.
Through the centuries, the ancient Hebrews were told, by means of the Prophets of the Lord, that this day would come. And they were exhorted to remain always ready for that day so that when the announcement would finally be issued that all was ready and that the Messiah had arrived, they would embrace him and believe in him.
But as Jesus tells his story in today’s text, he points out, with sadness and disappointment, that this is not what was happening, and that this would not happen.
The king “sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding, and they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.”’”
“But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.”
When God’s Son did come among them, the Jewish people, by and large, rejected him. Most of them rejected the gospel of redemption in Christ, and of true reconciliation with God through Christ, that Jesus’ apostles also proclaimed to them.
Many of them chose instead to put their trust in the Zealots, and in the political salvation from Roman imperialism that the Zealots pledged to achieve for them by military means. But as Jesus says elsewhere, all who take the sword will perish by the sword.
The military uprising against Roman control that the Zealots stirred up did not result in national independence. Rather, it resulted in death and destruction.
The temple, and the city of Jerusalem, were destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. The inhabitants of the city were either killed or taken away into slavery.
In a sense, this was something that they had brought upon themselves, by their decision to ignore God’s invitation to the banquet of spiritual salvation that he had prepared for them, and by their decision to set up for themselves instead their own banquet of political salvation.
But in the mystery of God’s invisible working behind the scenes of human history, as he executes his just judgments in the earth by means of human and natural agencies, this was also a divine punishment of unbelief and misbelief. That’s the hard truth that Jesus teaches us today.
Jewish people today, as individuals, are still invited to come to the banquet that the God of their ancestors prepared for them in Jesus. The people of Israel are not under a unique ongoing curse of God in comparison to other nations, as misguided Christians in history have sometimes thought.
But the people of Israel do not have a special standing with God, either, as they once did. God has cultivated and raised up a new Israel, and a new chosen nation, drawn from all nations.
To recall a different parable of Jesus, the unfruitful branches of Israel were pruned off, leaving a thin remnant of this chosen planting of the Lord. Some of the Jewish people did embrace Christ, after all, and thereby became the legitimate continuation of the chosen nation of God, around whom the Christian church was then built.
Onto this remnant of true and believing Israel, new branches – from among the Gentiles – have been grafted by God, the master gardener.
Returning to today’s parable: Jesus tells us that after those who had been sent the “save the date” notice, refused to accept the actual invitation when it was issued, the king then widened the scope of his invitation:
“Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
This is the great commission. For most if not all of us, who are of Gentile and not of Jewish ancestry, this is why we can be completely sure that we also have a place in God’s kingdom.
And this universal invitation is universal in more than one way. All nations are invited to come to where Christ is; and all classes within all nations are invited to receive and celebrate the forgiveness, life, and salvation that Christ accomplished for humanity in his death and resurrection.
People who have lived – in their outward behavior – according to respectable standards of civil righteousness, are invited to receive the true righteousness that counts before God. “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
And people who have outwardly disgraced themselves even according to the lax standards of human society, are likewise invited. As Jesus elsewhere says: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
Whoever you are, whatever foolish mistakes you may have made, whatever shameful things you may have done, and whatever secret faults and sins you may harbor in a troubled conscience: You are invited.
In Jesus’ story, the king tells his servants to invite to the wedding feast as many as they find, both good and bad. This announcement of the Lord’s invitation has found you, and has been communicated to you, if not before, then at the very least through the words that I just spoke!
And God is also inviting everyone you know to the wedding feast of his Son. No one is excluded.
You should prayerfully consider if you may actually be the servant God has in mind, to be the messenger who delivers this invitation to someone you know, who has not yet received it; or who may have received it in the past from another of the Lord’s servants, but has not yet heeded it.
God’s invitation reaches us as we are, with all of our embarrassing failures and flaws still in place. God’s inviting hand reaches down as low as it needs to, into whatever hole of shame and despair we may have dug ourselves into, in order to pull us out and save us.
But the condition in which God’s invitation finds us is not the condition in which that invitation leaves us, as it draws us into the celebratory banquet of God’s love in his Son. Our appearance before God – as we stand under the scrutiny of his pure standards – does not remain as it was.
If it did, we would, in the end, not be admitted to the feast to which God invites us and all people. And that’s because there is a dress code for a celebration like this – for a salvation like this.
Because Jesus crafted his parable in the form of a story about a royal wedding, his first-century audience would have understood, without the need for further explanation, that any people who would attend such a wedding, would not be able to wear their own clothes – not even their best clothes.
The extravagance and opulence of royal occasions in that era required attire of such high quality, for those who attended them, that this could be achieved only by the wearing of a garment that the royal host would himself provide for his guests.
This is similar to the practice of high-end restaurants in our day, that has a dress code requiring gentlemen to be dressed in neckties and jackets; but that also have a selection of restaurant-owned neckties and jackets available near the entrance, so that a male diner who may not have known of the dress code could borrow, and put on, what he needed before he entered the dining room.
It is also similar to the rules for female attire that were in place at certain Eastern Orthodox churches in Ukraine when I lived there. These rules required women to wear a head covering, and a skirt or dress, to enter the church.
But those churches also offered an array of scarves and slip-on skirts at the door, which could be borrowed, so that any woman who showed up in slacks or without a hat could easily conform herself to the rule, and then be able to go inside.
Today’s parable teaches us about God’s dress code, by showing us what happened – in the story – when someone without the proper clothing presumed to try to finagle himself into the wedding celebration anyway:
“But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. So he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
The imagery of a certain standard of attire being required for entrance into the wedding feast of the king’s son has nothing to do with the literal clothing that people wear or don’t wear to church. It is not referring to suits and ties, to dresses and skirts, or to a pastor’s vestments.
This is about something much deeper, and much more profound. This is about how we, who are sinners, can now be brought into the presence of a holy God who hates sin.
This is about how we, who have alienated ourselves from God because of our defiance of his revealed will, can now be reconciled to him. This is about how we, who have isolated ourselves from God’s Fatherly love through our rebellion against his goodness, can now be adopted into his family.
Human “fashion-designing” efforts, calculated to create a line of self-righteous, superficial moral “accessories” that would presumably be so impressive as to distract God from noticing the sin-stained rags we are also still wearing, will never work.
He sees everything we are wearing. He sees everything we are.
As we are told in Psalm 14: “The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek God. They have all turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good, no, not one.”
All such moralistic self-salvation schemes are like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, after their fall into sin, trying to hide their shame with skimpy coverings they had made for themselves from fig leaves. It was not enough. Their shame before God was not truly covered until God covered it, with substantial garments of animal skins.
These garments – which required the death of animals for the benefit of Adam and Eve – were emblematic of the righteousness of Christ, our true substitute and sacrifice, which is draped over all who repent of their sins and in faith receive God’s forgiveness: so that when God sees them, he now sees Christ.
St. Paul draws upon this imagery in his Epistle to the Galatians, where he writes: “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
You gain entrance into the wedding feast, not on the basis of who you are or what you have made of yourself, but on the basis of who Christ is, and of what God now gives you in and through Christ.
You are also not welcome in God’s kingdom on the basis of your genealogy – whether your ancestry goes back to the Hebrew patriarchs, or is marked by a long Christian pedigree – but on the basis of Jesus’ eternal, divine “pedigree.”
The eternal Son of the Father – who is God himself – took on your flesh, lived perfectly in your place, atoned for your sins, and opened for you the gateway to eternal life by his victory over the grave.
God the Father now invites you – all of you and each of you – to receive upon yourself, by faith, the garment of his Son’s perfect righteousness, which completely covers your sin, and therefore makes you acceptable in his sight.
God the Father now invites you – all of you and each of you – to feast continuously on the riches of his grace and love that are served to you at the banquet of his Son. These riches are served here and now, in the preaching of the gospel, which feeds our soul.
These riches are served here and now also when the blessings of the gospel come to us in a very specialized way: in the administration of that sacramental meal which, more than anything else, connects communicants to the mysteries of heaven, and to Christ our heavenly bridegroom.
As we are indeed welcomed into the fellowship of the church on earth, to begin our enjoyment of the wonders that God has prepared for us through his Son, we do also look to eternity.
We think about eternity, and we think about what it will be like in eternity, for the Lord’s redeemed and forgiven people – from all nations – to be clothed with Christ, and to be mystically united to God through Christ, forever and ever.
The Book of Revelation gives us some words into which we can anchor those peaceful and comforting thoughts:
“I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, …and crying out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”
We close with these words from Nicholas von Zinzendorf, as Englished by John Wesley:
Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Amidst flaming worlds, in these arrayed, With joy shall I lift up my head.
Bold shall I stand in that great day, For who aught, to my charge, shall lay?
Fully absolved through these I am From sin and fear, from guilt and shame.
Lord, I believe were sinners more Than sands upon the ocean shore,
Thou hast for all a ransom paid, For all a full atonement made.
When from the dust of death I rise To claim my mansion in the skies,
Even then, this shall be all my plea: “Jesus hath lived, and died, for me.” Amen.