Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Our scriptures this morning are full of parties.

In Isaiah, God prepares a feast of rich food and well-aged wine for all people and promises to swallow up death forever and wipe away every tear from every face.

In our Psalm, God prepares a table for us, even in the midst of our enemies, and fills our cups till they overflow.

And in Matthew, Jesus tells us about a king who throws a wedding banquet, a fabulous, sumptuous, extravagant feast beyond anything we could imagine.

Except, of course, the party in Matthew's gospel doesn't go quite as planned.

The invited guests refuse to come.

Some ignore the invitation, and others attack and murder the servants who bring it.

And the king retaliates with terrible violence, destroying the murderers and burning their city.

And then, finally, the invitation goes out into the streets to everyone that the servants can find, both good and bad, until the wedding hall is filled.

But even then, the king discovers a man who isn't wearing a wedding robe, and he has him bound and thrown into the outer darkness, where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I promise there is a party in there somewhere.

[laughing] I can't pretend that this isn't a difficult parable.

It is.

For one thing, the king isn't exactly a model of gracious hospitality.

[laughing] The invitation to everyone only comes after the original guests refuse.

It almost sounds like an afterthought, like, "Fine, if those people won't come, I'll just invite anybody." And the violence is deeply troubling, giving us a picture of God, if we assume that the king represents God, that is hard to reconcile with God we know in Jesus Christ.

Now, Matthew is not the only gospel to tell this story.

There is a version of it in Luke's gospel too, and it's interesting to compare the two.

In Luke, when the original guests make their excuses, the host immediately sends his servant out to bring in those suffering from poverty or illness or disability.

And then when he sees that there's still room, he sends the servant out again to gather more people.

There's no army, no burning city, no guest thrown into the outer darkness.

But Matthew's doing something different in his version.

Matthew's interpreting salvation history over the course of this parable, trying to understand how the ministry of Jesus fits into God's relationship with Israel and how that invitation has come to encompass people the early Christian community could never have imagined would belong.

So while we ought not to ignore or justify the violent judgment in Matthew's gospel, I think there's something more true that we ought to pay attention to, and that's that the trajectory of the invitation keeps getting wider.

The community is discovering that God's purposes are bigger than they had previously understood.