Saint Matthew 22:1-14
One day last summer I was sitting in traffic when a bicycle ridden by some old guy zoomed past me. By old guy, I mean he was about my age. However he was going at a breakneck pace almost as if he were in a race.
You know how this scene usually plays out a cyclist races past you while you are moving slowly but eventually you catch up to the person and pass him or her. This time that didn’t happen. When traffic started to move again I couldn’t catch him. He was moving with the flow at about the same speed as the cars. I was impressed.
Finally he had to stop for a light and I pulled up next to him. He wasn’t even perspiring! I thought this guy must be trying out for the senior division of the Tour de France.
Then I heard it. The faint buzz of an engine. He was riding one of those new electric trail bikes where all you have to do is climb aboard, throw as switch, and maintain your balance. All of a sudden you’re Lance Armstrong and the only kind of “juicing” you have to do is plug it in when you get home.
Even though I can’t go as fast or as far as I used to I enjoy a good bike ride but plopping on a motorized cycle seemed to defeat the purpose. Still I thought about buying one until I heard about Simon Cowell the sometimes surly judge on “America’s Got Talent.”
Cowell purchased one and on his first ride he didn’t get very far from home before he crashed. In a tweet after a six hour surgery to repair his broken back he offered some sage advice: “If you buy an electric trail bike, read the manual before you ride it for the first time.”1
Reading the manual is excellent advice that my uncles never followed. Long before the days of Ikea they would purchase something unassembled and if there were parts left over when they were finished they would just declare them useless. In our garage we had countless coffee cans full of “useless” parts.
That’s the problem for many preachers with this mornings gospel. Dr. James Howell came right out and told his people in the blog he writes to prepare them for Sunday morning: “I’m skipping the Gospel, which reveals Jesus in a not-so-beautiful tirade. Matthew 22:1-14 just strikes me as yet one more of Jesus’ angrier, mystifying parables.”2
However, it is in the manual as so we might not be so quick to declare this part useless.
Jesus’ tirade comes between the events of Palm Sunday and his crucifixion. As his inevitable end seems to be becoming clearer and clearer we can see why he is becoming more and more angry. He is running out of time. People need to listen they need to respond to his invitation. The words of the prophet Isaiah are coming true in him.
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.3
It’s all about to come true. This long awaited dream is about to be fulfilled and still the people will not see it. No wonder he’s upset! No wonder he’s angry! But Jesus never gives up. He tries another parable in the hope that maybe one more story will help them to see what is going on right before their very eyes.
He tells them about a King who throwing a lavish wedding banquet for his son and future daughter-in-law.
We know what Jesus is talking about because we’ve been invited to these. They’re the kind where, if you are a woman, you almost feel compelled to go out and buy a new dress. And, for the guys, they’re the kind were you dig your tux out of the closet, try it on, and discover that you’ve gained a little weight since the last time you wore it. This is a big deal and if you’ve read the etiquette manual and you intend to attend you had better do so appropriately attired.
Biblical scholar Richard Baulkham wants us to see that there is a deeper problem here that guests who have decided they don’t want to join in the celebration exhibit. Jesus lived in an honor/shame society.
The attendance of the great men of the kingdom at the wedding feast of the king's son would be expected not only as a necessary expression of the honor they owe the king but also as an expression of their loyalty. Political allegiance is at stake. To refuse the invitation is tantamount to rebellion. In refusing it, the invitees are deliberately treating the king's authority with contempt.4
Doesn’t take much see what is going on here in relation to Jesus. He is being treated with contempt. Those in power have rejected him so he tries another way.
He, in the person of the king, throws away the manual on who should be invited and who should not and invites everybody. The goal is a full banquet hall and a lavish celebration and our king will have what he will have. Those who the manual says were worthy are not and so conventional rules must be broken.
“So the servants went out on to the streets and collected together all those whom they found, bad and good alike. And the hall became filled with guests.”5
The place was packed and the king had to have been pleased until, out of the corner of his eye he catches site of one guest. There is always one, isn’t there? There is always one person who is out to spoil the party. They are like brown penny loafers with a tuxedo, they stick out.
And there is the one! Everybody else has found something nice to wear. They went home and found their best “Sunday go to meeting clothes” and put them on. If they didn’t have a clean outfit of their own they may have borrowed one from a friend. They respected the king and his invitation by dressing up as nicely as possible.
This story is not a manual about proper attire but a manual on proper attitude.
I’ve never seen the dishevelled guy in this parable as sitting off in the corner, embarrassed. I’ve always seen him front and centre at table 1 his appearance a deliberate poke in the eye of the king. He’s there but he’s not going to honour the occasion. He’s not going to enter into the celebration. He’s there to purposely look surly and out of place.
In this very strange year of 2020 there is a very simple way to understand this parable. Change the words “wedding garment” to the word “mask.”
There is a manual for handling what we are going through and the first and perhaps most important instruction is that we wear masks. I hope you saw the moment when, appearing before congress, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centre for Disease Control, held up a simple mask that looked a lot like the kind we give out at the door and said: "These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have, and I will continue to appeal for all Americans to embrace these face coverings, if we did it for six, eight, 10, 12 weeks we'd bring this pandemic under control.”6
Yet I still see posts from people that seem to be in opposition. I know one that actually said:
“Please, don’t look back 5 years from now & have to admit that you spent an entire year of your life wearing a mask, cooped up in your house & avoiding all the people you love. A year in your life that you’ll never get back. We went from being a free nation to being told ... how far apart we have to be, what to wear... God is gonna call you home when it’s your time. Virus or no virus.”
Yes, I trust that God will indeed call me home but my intention is to make that later rather than sooner. I wear a mask and in my case have been tested three times not for my safety but for yours! We wear our masks and are inconvenienced in countless other ways by this pandemic not just for our sake but for the sake of the people we love and people we don’t even know.
In this strange and terrible year when over 215,000 of our brother and sister citizens have died we understand perfectly why the guy at the king’s banquet had to go. We know that if someone came to worship on Sunday without a mask and refused to wear one of the free ones we offered we would have to ask them to leave.
It would break my heart as I am sure it would break yours but they would have to go. As I think about it, the health and safety of others is the only reason I would deny anybody the sacrament. It would make me sad but I would have to do it.
New Testament scholar “Luke Timothy Johnson has said, ‘When we say that the Bible has authority for us we mean that even when we think it’s wrong, we believe the Bible has something to teach us. We pay attention to it,’ Even when we think it’s wrong.”7
This is in the manual! We cannot declare this part useless! It tell us how we the chosen ones act. We care for each other. We care enough for each other to suffer a little inconvenience for a season. And we respond to God’s gracious invitation with joy and not in rebellion.
This is the part of the manual we may not like but it warns us of the dire consequences of accepting the unmerited invitation of God’s grace and then doing nothing but showing up.
I love the way Tom Long in his commentary on Matthew summed this up.
To come into the church in response to the gracious, altogether unmerited invitation of Christ and then not to conform one’s life to that mercy is to demonstrate a spiritual narcissism so profound that one cannot tell the difference between the wedding feast of the Lamb of God and happy hour at a bus station.8
We’ve read the manual!
We’ve taken even the parts we do not like to heart! We understand that even in the gracious reign and rule of God things are still required of us. So, wedding garments on, masks in place, and the manual not just in our hands but on our minds and in our hearts, we are ready to celebrate the great supper of the Lamb.
We’ve been invited. Thanks be to God.
1. Jessica Coulon, “Simon Cowell Breaks His Back After Falling Off an Electric Motorbike,” Bicycling (September 19, 2020), https://www.bicycling.com/news/a33563310/simon-cowell-breaks-back-in-ebike-accident/.
2. James D. Howell, “What can we say October 11? 19th after Pentecost” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions (blog) (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
3. Isaiah 25:6-8a. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
4, Brian Stoffregen, “Matthew 22:1-14 Proper 23 - Year A,” Matthew 22.1-14, accessed October 10, 2020, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt22x1.htm.
5. Matthew 22:9. (PHILLIPS) [[PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English: a Translation (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1960).
6. Peter Sullivan, “CDC Director Says Masks More Guaranteed to Work than a Vaccine,” TheHill (The Hill, September 16, 2020), https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/516686-cdc-director-says-masks-more-guaranteed-to-work-than-a-vaccine.
7. Karla Pratt Keyes, “Such a Terrible Story,” A Sermon For Every Sunday (A Sermon for Every Sunday, October 6, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Carla-Pratt-Keyes-Wedding-Banquet-1.pdf.
8. Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 248.
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