Sunday, October 9, 2011: Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
We might Bible-study our way through most of this difficult parable, but what do we do with the guest who is pulled in off the streets and then kicked out?
If you wrestle with this Matthean parable through the night, it'll leave you limping by morning. Martin Luther didn't like preaching on it, and worshipers in early October won't be in the mood for its judgment. While this teaching occurs as Jesus travels to the cross, we worshipers are still a long way from Holy Week observances. Our minds are on football games, Oktoberfest fun and Halloween costumes. We're having too much fun to gnash our teeth. But the odd gift of the lectionary is that it does not give us the freedom to avoid difficult scripture, nor does it give us total control over passages that refuse to be tamed by our interpretative tools. To mix things up even more, we are presented with Paul's glorious hymn of praise in Philippians. How do we always "rejoice in the Lord" who casts an invited guest into the outer darkness?
Those who view the Christian life through the lens of God's final judgment and divide the world into those who are blessed and not blessed may not find this parable a struggle. But I'm a theological wrestler on this one. While we might be able to "Bible study" our way through the initial allegory of the first invited guests as the people of Israel who killed the prophets and rejected God's work of salvation in Jesus, while we might understand the slaves as Christian missionaries and the newly invited ones as the gentile community, and while we might see the destruction of Jerusalem smoldering in the background, we still have to explain the guest who is pulled in off the streets at the last minute and later kicked out of the party for not wearing the proper wedding clothes. How can we understand this failure of grace in what seems to be an amazingly open party of God?
Calvin and others have taught that the one ejected from the banquet represented the one who did not "put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 13:14 and Gal. 3:27). We are all invited to the kingdom, but we are all under obligation to be clothed with Christ and to live lives of righteousness.
