Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14
While Paul sat in a prison cell, he wrote
to the Philippian church, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable,
whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is
commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of
praise, think about these things.” Some days we might hang on to these words
like a life preserver. If only we could do this.
Toward the end of the book of Acts, there
is a story about Paul being arrested, one of many times this happened to him
during his ministry. Paul saw the inside of many jail cells. This time he has
been taken to Caesarea and is brought before the governor, Felix. Caesarea was
the capital of the Roman government in Palestine.
The lawyer for the Jewish authorities,
Tertullus, begins to make his case. He says, “We find this man, Paul, to be a
pestilence! A plague!” And what is Paul doing that is so offensive? He has been
preaching the way of Jesus Christ. Tertullus says to Felix, “Thanks to you,
most excellent governor, we have enjoyed peace for many years.” Tertullus and
his colleagues liked their position. They were comfortable with this kind of
“peace.”
Which brings to mind the words of the
prophet Jeremiah, “They’ve treated the wounds of my people carelessly, saying
‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”
The ones who were doing okay, thought
that everything was okay. And there was Paul, posing a threat to all that. He
was a pestilence, a plague.
They might have called Jesus the same,
now that I think about it.
It is kind of challenging to hold
Paul’s words in the letter to the Philippians next to Jesus’ parable of the
wedding banquet. Because if I was going to think only of things that are
pleasing, I probably would not be thinking of this parable. But the thing that
is needed, the place for us to begin is to see these words of Paul as coming
from a particular place; a place in this world but not of this world. He is
speaking from the perspective of new life in Christ.
We just recently spent a few weeks
with Paul’s letter to the Romans, on the journey of spiritual transformation.
Transformation is an ongoing process in life; we are always “under
construction,” so to speak. We are always a work in progress.
The parable from Matthew’s gospel
presents an interesting, while very challenging, perspective on the
transformation.
There is a lot of crazy scary stuff
happening in this story. This king, who seems perfectly respectable at the
beginning. His son is getting married. He is hosting a banquet – wonderful! But
then suddenly things take a violent turn. The ones who were invited disrespect
him, badly, and then for no apparent reason, attack the king’s messengers. This
enrages the king, who then declares all-out war against the people. He sends
his army to destroy them and burn down their city. All this for a wedding
banquet. I have never attended a wedding where the stakes were so high. Have
you?
Not to be defeated, the king announces
the celebration will go on, for there are others he can invite. He’ll just need
to extend himself a bit farther. It won’t be his inner circle folks who attend
the feast. These guests are, maybe, third or fourth-hand acquaintances. The
invitation goes out, the people accept, and the banquet will go on. But we are
not past the danger yet.
The guests come to the celebration,
they’re eating, drinking, and dancing. And when the king enters the hall, he
finds a problem: one man did not pay attention to the dress code. Friend, he
says to him, grabbing him by the collar of his flannel shirt, how did you get
in here like that? A colleague of mine likes to say that when you hear someone
called “friend” in Matthew’s gospel, you know that’s not a good thing. It is
likely that guy is not a friend.
And so it goes. The man without the
right clothes is tossed into the outer darkness, where none of us wants to go.
It is a parable that we struggle to
make sense of, because it seems like all the characters behave irrationally. But
there are a few bits of advice I want to offer that should help.
First, don’t assume this king is a
stand-in for God. He is a man with all kinds of human frailties. At some points
in the story he has God-like qualities, yes, but that does not mean that every
single thing about him represents God. Most of Jesus’ parables are kind of
squirmy like that. We always want to allegorize them, impose a one-to-one
correspondence between the story’s characters and real-life or divine
characters. But parables are not that simple. This king is kind of scary. In
ways that I don’t believe God is.
Second, don’t assume that the friends
who insult the king and kill his messengers are the Jews. That is actually an
interpretation that has been embraced by the church at times. Through the
history of the church, many have been tempted to read “the Jewish authorities”
and think “all the Jewish people.” Many have been tempted to read a story where
one group of people kill the king’s messengers, and say the Jews rejected God.
What appears to be happening here in
this parable, is that Matthew is pulling together a number of separate threads.
While he is, apparently, thinking about the stories Jesus told in his life, he
is also thinking about hard things that have happened since then.
He is, perhaps, thinking about the
destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which is, honestly, something that is
on the minds of all the gospel writers, in all they write. The temple
destruction, which occurred in 70 CE, was a turning point. You could compare it
to those moments about which we say, “Where were you when this happened?” Where
were you when JFK was shot? Where were you when the twin towers fell? Where
were you when the temple was destroyed? Acts of such massive evil seem to
change our world.
Matthew is, perhaps, thinking as well
about the persecutions the followers of Jesus have suffered. When they have
gone out into the world carrying Jesus’ message of radical good news – some
just ignored them, yes. But others called them a pestilence, a plague, and
threw them in prison cells or, even worse, killed them.
And finally, Matthew is thinking about
the future. The end of days when the banquet has fully arrived.
So, we see there is a lot of tough
stuff in this parable. But you know, I think it is this little detail at the
end, about the poor guy who came to the banquet in his everyday clothes instead
of the formal wedding attire, that bugs us the most. We kind of gloss over all
the horrors we see in the first part of the parable, but this thing leaves us
with our mouths hanging open.
It feels so unjust. How does the king
expect him to have the right clothes? Some guy who just got pulled in off the
street to be a wedding guest at the command of the king. Where would he have
found such clothes? When would he have had the time to acquire such clothes?
Now some have argued, well there would
have been a selection of wedding garments available at the banquet hall, he
should have put one on like the other guests did. And I have no earthly idea if
that has any credibility. But I don’t care one way or the other.
Here is one more bit of advice. Don’t
fall in the trap of reading the parables literally. For some reason, we always
want to do that. Maybe it is because the parables trigger our feelings and we
just want to reconcile things, so the feelings go away.
This is a complicated and hard
parable. But here’s the point. You and I are invited to the wedding feast, the
kingdom of God. The invitations went out. We’ve been given a foretaste of the
feast. We have heard the message.
You and I are invited to the wedding
feast. We have been given directions: Follow Jesus. He will show us the way.
You and I are invited to the wedding
feast. And we have accepted the invitation. But here’s the question. Do we look
like people who follow Jesus?
Have we put on the new life? Do we, in
what we say and do, show forth the light of Christ?
Do we?
You know, if you do put on the
garment, put on Christ, people will sometimes call you a pestilence. A plague.
It’s not always the most comfortable garment.
You will sometimes make comfortable
people uneasy.
You will sometimes make people in
authority angry.
You see, Jesus came to change us, but
not everyone wants to be changed.
My brothers and sisters, there are
times when the church is called to enter that space, to let the world see our
wedding garment, to speak out against the injustice all around us. It is such a
time we are in now. Our Haitian brothers and sisters who came here at our
invitation are now being treated as criminals. Our neighbors who have
established lives here and worked for the good of this place right along with
us, are now being hunted down and locked up.
Will we treat their wounds carelessly?
Will we say, “peace, peace,” when there is no peace? Such a thing is not
pleasing to God.
Dear ones, the wedding feast, the
kingdom of God, is near. We can glimpse it in this place. Let us be a
reflection of the kingdom in this world.
They might call us a pestilence. But it didn’t bother Paul. Let’s not let it bother us either.
No comments:
Post a Comment