After you R.S.V.P.
21st Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 22:1-14
I was reading an e-mail that Dr. Vineyard sent through sometime this week. That e-mail offered some commentary on how things have changed in the last 100 years. Listen to some of them.
In 1905 –
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.
Well, you get the idea. Things have changed quite a bit in the last 100 years. Things have changed since I was a child, and even from when I was a young adult. You know that as a profession, I have always served on some church staff, originally in associate positions, and now as your pastor. During those years, when I was invited to a wedding, I usually attended, and I always wore a suit. It was expected, and that’s just the way things were. Boy, have things changed. Now days, people show up at weddings wearing just about anything. Expectations have changed. I’ll have to admit, while I find it rather easy to wear more casual clothing for our worship services here, I still will generally wear a suit to weddings and funerals. It’s just the way I am – and at this point, I’m not likely to change.
You and I have some pre-conceived notions about this parable this morning. We have ideas about the four classes of people who are mentioned – we think we know who they are, and we are surprised just how they respond to an invitation as gracious as this one from the king. Obviously, this is a king who loves his son, and intends to show his kingdom just how much he loves his son. And since it is Jesus telling the story, and since He begins this parable by saying “the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to . . .,” we recognize immediately that at its core, this is a story about how much God loves Jesus. You know, we don’t talk about that kind of thing very much. We believers spend most of our theological energies talking about how God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit love us, or expect things of us, or how Christ died for us, but we don’t spend much time contemplating the relationship that the three Eternal Expressions of God had with each other before the beginning of what we know as “time existent.”
So, the king loves the son, and wants everyone to know. He throws a feast. A wedding banquet to best the best of wedding banquets. All the best people are invited, they get the invitations in the mail, and the big day comes for the feast. As was the custom in the time of the parable, the king sends servants out to fetch the wedding guests. Were we to be watching this on our big screen TV’s, we would expect in the next scene to see limos show up at the front entrance to the king’s palace. Fine furs, men in tuxedos, servants running around making a fuss about pretty much everything. Instead, we get the awful news. All of the invited guests were unwilling to come. Wow!! We’re shocked. We can’t believe it. Not that they can’t come – unavoidably detained and all of that. No, this is a flat refusal – they are unwilling. They R.S.V.P.d, but now – now they have simply chosen not to come – and the word from the lips of the servants is this word – unwilling. What a haunting word.
I think about people who are unwilling to attend the grace banquet that God has thrown for His Son. We don’t know why they are unwilling. But we think about them. Maybe they can’t be bothered with such trivialities. Maybe they have other occupations. Perhaps they don’t really see the point of it, really, and so they are just unwilling. We don’t know why – but we think about them.
Here’s where the story gets a little iffy in my mind. In verse 4, we are told that in response to this initial refusal, the king sends out other slaves, this time with a little speech from the king himself. “Tell those who have been invited, ‘Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.” In my mind, I’m not sure to whom this invitation is extended. I’m not sure if the king sends different servants, this time with a message, to the same invited guests, or if these servants are sent to other invited guests. I really can’t tell. You may have an opinion, and I’d like to hear it this week. I’m not sure. And in my opinion, it’s really a moot point. This time the thing that is impressive is the response of the invitees – again. This time, things are a little more clear in their minds. They don’t have time for this sort of interruption. They have other pursuits. One has a farm to attend to, and another a business. They have things to do, and this wedding invitation, and this pestering king are starting to get on their nerves. So, they seize the slaves, mistreat some of them, and outright kill some of them.
Jesus may be making reference here to the history of God’s dealings with people. The history outlined for us in the Old Testament presents a story very similar to this one. God invites people to be a part of what He is intending to do in His created world, and some don’t respond to Him, and others have other things to do, and turn around and mistreat his slaves. We might take that as reference to the patriarchs and prophets who were the lead characters in the Old Testament drama of the unfolding of God’s work in this world. That makes a lot of sense when you look at the transition in the story at this point. Let me show you what I mean.
Here, the tenor of the story changes. After first radically destroying the first group of people, and their cities, the king stops messing with the likes of the first group of people – the originally invited guests – those who were presumably deserving of such an invitation, and instead, offers an invitation to those we would least expect to be invited to such a grand event - the least, the lost, the last. Jesus puts it this way in his story – “Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast. And those slaves went out into the streets, and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.” We get the impression that not only were the people in this second group not worthy of an invitation – we get the impression that they were precisely the kind of folk you don’t invite to such events. You know how we sometimes say to one another when we get all dressed up for some grand event, “Say, you sure clean up well.” Well, we get the impression that these were the kind of people who were hard to clean up. Rabble rousers, junkies, prostitutes, degenerates of every walk of life – we don’t see them showing up at this kind of event, no matter what the circumstances.
I default to my friend, Robert Capon. He notes that this parable is told in both Luke and here in Matthew. In Luke, he sees it as a parable of Grace, but here more a parable of Judgment. But even in this version of the story, the grace element is not lost. Capon says, “The point is that none of the people who had a right to be at a proper party came, and that all the people who came had no right whatsoever to be there. Which means, therefore, that the one thing that has nothing to do with anything is rights. This parable says that we are going to be dealt with in spite of our deservings, not according to them. Grace as portrayed here works only on the untouchable, the unpardonable, and the unacceptable. It works, in short, by raising the dead, not by rewarding the living.” And then he goes on to say, “They establish that the reason for dragging the refuse of humanity into the party is not pity for its plight or admiration for its lowliness but simply the fact that this idiot of a host has decided he has to have a full house. Grace, accordingly, is not depicted here as a response; above all, it is not depicted as a fair response, or an equitable response, or a proportionate response. Rather it is shown as a crazy initiative, a radical discontinuity – because God has decided, apparently, that history cannot be salvaged even by its best continuities. The world is by now so firmly set on the wrong course – so certain, late or soon, to run headlong into disaster – that God will have no truck with responding to anything inherently its own, whether good or evil. The ship of fools is doomed: if its villains do not wreck it, its heroes will. Therefore there is no point in any continuance, whether of punishment of the wicked or reward of the righteous – no point, that is, in further attempts to redeem the world by relevancy. And therefore in the parable, Jesus has the host make no relevant response at all to the shipwreck of his party; he has him, instead, throw a shipwreck of a party.”[i]
So, in the end, this is not only a parable about how the Father loves the Son, but this is as well a parable about God’s grace. Grace that is extended to those who do not deserve it, which is, of course, the very definition of the concept of “grace.”
There’s one more element to the story. After the party is in full swing, the king enters to observe the festivities, and spies one of the guests “not wearing wedding clothes.” In the custom of the day, it is probable that appropriate wedding clothes would have consisted of at least an outer garment that indicated the festive nature of the event. In other words, every one was expected to wear their best – you didn’t just walk in off the street. And if you didn’t have any best, well, the host would often supply you with something appropriate. Like going to a fine restaurant and being provided a coat and tie by management – that sort of thing. This guy did neither. Rather, he showed up at the wedding feast, in the vernacular of the sixties – “doing his own thing.”
Cornerstone, I think this is the point where this parable might speak more to us than anywhere else. We have responded to the grace that is ours in Jesus Christ. We have responded – gladly – to the gracious invitation of God to attend the wedding feast of His Son. But we must take care to attend appropriately. We can reject God’s grace by not showing up, and we can reject God’s grace by showing up as though we’re doing God a favor by showing up. Either way, we reject the grace of God.
Always, when we gather at the table of our God, we must gather with the appropriate humility – recognizing that we are responding to God’s grace as the lost, the last.
Richard W. Dunn, Ph.D.
[i] Robert Farrar Capon, Parables of Grace, Eerdmans, 1988, pp. 133-134.
Matthew 22:1-14
I was reading an e-mail that Dr. Vineyard sent through sometime this week. That e-mail offered some commentary on how things have changed in the last 100 years. Listen to some of them.
In 1905 –
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.
Well, you get the idea. Things have changed quite a bit in the last 100 years. Things have changed since I was a child, and even from when I was a young adult. You know that as a profession, I have always served on some church staff, originally in associate positions, and now as your pastor. During those years, when I was invited to a wedding, I usually attended, and I always wore a suit. It was expected, and that’s just the way things were. Boy, have things changed. Now days, people show up at weddings wearing just about anything. Expectations have changed. I’ll have to admit, while I find it rather easy to wear more casual clothing for our worship services here, I still will generally wear a suit to weddings and funerals. It’s just the way I am – and at this point, I’m not likely to change.
You and I have some pre-conceived notions about this parable this morning. We have ideas about the four classes of people who are mentioned – we think we know who they are, and we are surprised just how they respond to an invitation as gracious as this one from the king. Obviously, this is a king who loves his son, and intends to show his kingdom just how much he loves his son. And since it is Jesus telling the story, and since He begins this parable by saying “the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to . . .,” we recognize immediately that at its core, this is a story about how much God loves Jesus. You know, we don’t talk about that kind of thing very much. We believers spend most of our theological energies talking about how God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit love us, or expect things of us, or how Christ died for us, but we don’t spend much time contemplating the relationship that the three Eternal Expressions of God had with each other before the beginning of what we know as “time existent.”
So, the king loves the son, and wants everyone to know. He throws a feast. A wedding banquet to best the best of wedding banquets. All the best people are invited, they get the invitations in the mail, and the big day comes for the feast. As was the custom in the time of the parable, the king sends servants out to fetch the wedding guests. Were we to be watching this on our big screen TV’s, we would expect in the next scene to see limos show up at the front entrance to the king’s palace. Fine furs, men in tuxedos, servants running around making a fuss about pretty much everything. Instead, we get the awful news. All of the invited guests were unwilling to come. Wow!! We’re shocked. We can’t believe it. Not that they can’t come – unavoidably detained and all of that. No, this is a flat refusal – they are unwilling. They R.S.V.P.d, but now – now they have simply chosen not to come – and the word from the lips of the servants is this word – unwilling. What a haunting word.
I think about people who are unwilling to attend the grace banquet that God has thrown for His Son. We don’t know why they are unwilling. But we think about them. Maybe they can’t be bothered with such trivialities. Maybe they have other occupations. Perhaps they don’t really see the point of it, really, and so they are just unwilling. We don’t know why – but we think about them.
Here’s where the story gets a little iffy in my mind. In verse 4, we are told that in response to this initial refusal, the king sends out other slaves, this time with a little speech from the king himself. “Tell those who have been invited, ‘Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.” In my mind, I’m not sure to whom this invitation is extended. I’m not sure if the king sends different servants, this time with a message, to the same invited guests, or if these servants are sent to other invited guests. I really can’t tell. You may have an opinion, and I’d like to hear it this week. I’m not sure. And in my opinion, it’s really a moot point. This time the thing that is impressive is the response of the invitees – again. This time, things are a little more clear in their minds. They don’t have time for this sort of interruption. They have other pursuits. One has a farm to attend to, and another a business. They have things to do, and this wedding invitation, and this pestering king are starting to get on their nerves. So, they seize the slaves, mistreat some of them, and outright kill some of them.
Jesus may be making reference here to the history of God’s dealings with people. The history outlined for us in the Old Testament presents a story very similar to this one. God invites people to be a part of what He is intending to do in His created world, and some don’t respond to Him, and others have other things to do, and turn around and mistreat his slaves. We might take that as reference to the patriarchs and prophets who were the lead characters in the Old Testament drama of the unfolding of God’s work in this world. That makes a lot of sense when you look at the transition in the story at this point. Let me show you what I mean.
Here, the tenor of the story changes. After first radically destroying the first group of people, and their cities, the king stops messing with the likes of the first group of people – the originally invited guests – those who were presumably deserving of such an invitation, and instead, offers an invitation to those we would least expect to be invited to such a grand event - the least, the lost, the last. Jesus puts it this way in his story – “Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast. And those slaves went out into the streets, and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.” We get the impression that not only were the people in this second group not worthy of an invitation – we get the impression that they were precisely the kind of folk you don’t invite to such events. You know how we sometimes say to one another when we get all dressed up for some grand event, “Say, you sure clean up well.” Well, we get the impression that these were the kind of people who were hard to clean up. Rabble rousers, junkies, prostitutes, degenerates of every walk of life – we don’t see them showing up at this kind of event, no matter what the circumstances.
I default to my friend, Robert Capon. He notes that this parable is told in both Luke and here in Matthew. In Luke, he sees it as a parable of Grace, but here more a parable of Judgment. But even in this version of the story, the grace element is not lost. Capon says, “The point is that none of the people who had a right to be at a proper party came, and that all the people who came had no right whatsoever to be there. Which means, therefore, that the one thing that has nothing to do with anything is rights. This parable says that we are going to be dealt with in spite of our deservings, not according to them. Grace as portrayed here works only on the untouchable, the unpardonable, and the unacceptable. It works, in short, by raising the dead, not by rewarding the living.” And then he goes on to say, “They establish that the reason for dragging the refuse of humanity into the party is not pity for its plight or admiration for its lowliness but simply the fact that this idiot of a host has decided he has to have a full house. Grace, accordingly, is not depicted here as a response; above all, it is not depicted as a fair response, or an equitable response, or a proportionate response. Rather it is shown as a crazy initiative, a radical discontinuity – because God has decided, apparently, that history cannot be salvaged even by its best continuities. The world is by now so firmly set on the wrong course – so certain, late or soon, to run headlong into disaster – that God will have no truck with responding to anything inherently its own, whether good or evil. The ship of fools is doomed: if its villains do not wreck it, its heroes will. Therefore there is no point in any continuance, whether of punishment of the wicked or reward of the righteous – no point, that is, in further attempts to redeem the world by relevancy. And therefore in the parable, Jesus has the host make no relevant response at all to the shipwreck of his party; he has him, instead, throw a shipwreck of a party.”[i]
So, in the end, this is not only a parable about how the Father loves the Son, but this is as well a parable about God’s grace. Grace that is extended to those who do not deserve it, which is, of course, the very definition of the concept of “grace.”
There’s one more element to the story. After the party is in full swing, the king enters to observe the festivities, and spies one of the guests “not wearing wedding clothes.” In the custom of the day, it is probable that appropriate wedding clothes would have consisted of at least an outer garment that indicated the festive nature of the event. In other words, every one was expected to wear their best – you didn’t just walk in off the street. And if you didn’t have any best, well, the host would often supply you with something appropriate. Like going to a fine restaurant and being provided a coat and tie by management – that sort of thing. This guy did neither. Rather, he showed up at the wedding feast, in the vernacular of the sixties – “doing his own thing.”
Cornerstone, I think this is the point where this parable might speak more to us than anywhere else. We have responded to the grace that is ours in Jesus Christ. We have responded – gladly – to the gracious invitation of God to attend the wedding feast of His Son. But we must take care to attend appropriately. We can reject God’s grace by not showing up, and we can reject God’s grace by showing up as though we’re doing God a favor by showing up. Either way, we reject the grace of God.
Always, when we gather at the table of our God, we must gather with the appropriate humility – recognizing that we are responding to God’s grace as the lost, the last.
Richard W. Dunn, Ph.D.
[i] Robert Farrar Capon, Parables of Grace, Eerdmans, 1988, pp. 133-134.
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