“1 Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: 2 ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. 4 Then he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.”
5 “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. 6 The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
8 Then he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. 9 Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” 10 So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 12 “Friend,” he asked, “how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’” The man was speechless. 13 Then the king told the attendants, “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 14 For many are invited, but few are chosen.’”
It’s nice to be invited. Next year, the Masters will be April 9-12 in Augusta, Georgia. It is an invitation only golf tournament. Those invited have already been announced. Scanning over the list, I saw that I didn’t make the cut. That’s a quite a way to find out that you weren’t invited. Of course, though, I’m not invitable. I have no discernable skill with the golfing bat—if that’s what they call the stick they use.
God has His own invitational. Any serious golfer would love to be invited to the Masters. Any serious human would love to be invited to God’s invitational. The question of life is whether we are invitable to His invitational. Most who are invited to God’s invitational, though, show themselves uninvitable and it’s not for reasons we might think.
As we’ve been seeing in the parables, life is much more surprising than we’d ever imagine. Tonight we see that in regards to invitation. Jesus tells us to respond appropriately to the grace of being invited. That’s the claim of this sermon: respond appropriately to the grace of being invited.
We will study this in two points. First: the invitations. Second: the attire. We see the invitations in verses 1-7 and the attire in verses 8-14.
We see this first in the invitations themselves; that’s our first point: the invitations. We often race over what’s crucial. That’s why mom finds our shoes in the place where we’ve already looked twice. We raced our eyes over what’s crucial. That’s why we give negligent attention to verse 1’s, “Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying.” It seems like white noise. It’s actually crucial.
Who is the “them” of, “Jesus spoke to them again in parables”? That matters. If a man says, “many are invited, but few are chosen,” as Jesus will end this parable, it matters whether that man is at a pizza buffet, doing job interviews, or speed dating saying, “many are invited, but few are chosen.” The identity of your conversation partner matters and Jesus’ conversation partners here are the chief priests and the Pharisees. This is the third parable Jesus tells back-to-back-to-back about these individuals who will not respond appropriately to being invited and so are replaced.
This one is framed in terms of a wedding banquet; “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son.” This was the event of the ancient world. This was like a school dance in the 1950’s—who is Ron going invite? Who is taking Doris?
You knew who was who in the ancient world by who was invited to what. Banquets were people’s chances to learn their place with the host and that made them delicate dances—“he’s always been a good customer; we will put him at table number four.” “She drives my mom nuts; let’s keep her as far from her as possible.” “He didn’t invite us to his son’s wedding; we’re not having him.”
All of this was trumped up, though, with a king’s banquet. If he invited you, you went. If, by chance, your daughter was going to get married over that same date, you would change her wedding date to go to the king’s banquet too. To do otherwise would be to insult the man in charge. His RSVP’s did not include a “regretfully decline” option.
In those days, the invitations would go out and given the flexible nature of time and preparation, servants would then go on the day of the festivities and tell the guests it was time to begin; that’s verse 3, “He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come.” “They refused to come,” is the surprise. It’s a betrayal of this king who has thrown this lavish banquet and honored you by inviting you.
The king is curiously gracious to this betrayal. His response is that of a genteel, measured man worthy of respect. He gives them another chance. ‘Then he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.”’
This is what this first part of the parable is all about—the invitation. It’s about an invitation to more than a wedding banquet though; it’s about the Messianic banquet. Just as we’ve seen a vineyard meant Israel to any Jew of the day, so a story about a king’s banquet would bring the Messianic banquet to their minds. Isaiah 25:6-8 describes it saying, “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.”
Jesus was saying that this invitation was going out and he, the son, is the reason for the celebration. The chief priest and Pharisees to whom he is telling this parable are the “they” of verses 5-6, “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them.” The Greek in this first section of the parable speaks to continuing rejection. They were not wanting to come and would not want to come. The chief priests and Pharisees had been rejecting God’s invitation through Jesus and would continue to do so. They were not being invitable.
Those groups wouldn’t have seen that way. They wouldn’t have thought for a second that they were rejecting God’s party by their contempt for Jesus. They would have thought they were wise to ignore Jesus’ rabble-rousing and go about the real business of God’s call on their lives—“one to his field, another to his business.” They didn’t see that they were grievously insulting the king in a manner unimaginable to anyone with good sense. That’s why Jesus told them this parable.
That’s instructive. The chief priest and the Pharisees knew that Isaiah passage on that banquet better than any of us and still threw away their invitations. Biblical knowledge is a wonderful gift but the question is whether we will accept its invitation. If we do, blessings abound. If we don’t, the gift becomes evidence against us.
People who don’t want to repent find reasons to be insulted by an invitation to God’s grace. “Thus it usually happens,” as Calvin wrote, “that ungodly men break out into fiercer rage against God, in proportion to the earnestness with which he invites them to salvation.” The more God invites, the more unrepentant people hate Him for it to the point of despising His messengers and killing the reason for the party.
We’ve seen the patience of the king and the offensiveness of the invited; now we see the climax; verse 7, “The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.” The invited thought their rejection would be the last word. The king gets the last word. God always gets the last word. The final judgment will just make clear the way it has always been—only God’s judgment really matters.
Their city is burned as the parable says; in 70 AD, the Romans after long enduring Jewish particularities and naggings level Jerusalem to the ground as a way of saying, “now stay down.” They were God’s instrument for this rejection just as surely as they were God’s instrument in the crucifixion of His Son for all who would be believe. God is able to do dozens of deeds with the same tool and still can. Faith in Him is wise. Spitting on His offers is foolish. Embracing Jesus is wise. Rejecting him is foolish
To reject God’s invitation is to reject God. To reject Jesus is to reject God. It’s not an artificial limitation we Christians have manufactured to separate our in-group from the out-group. To reject God in the flesh is to reject God altogether. God has made it simple for us with Jesus; we want it more complicated to justify ourselves. We would be much wiser to simply accept the invitation to the party to which we long to go. That’s our first point; now to the second: the attire.
The guests who rejected the king likely thought their rejection would be an end to the party just as the chief priest and Pharisees their rejection of Jesus would end his movement; the party, though, goes on; verse 8, ‘Then he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” The great qualification of those who now come to the banquet is that they came. These replacements aren’t by nature better than those were invited and didn’t come; these replacements simply had the good sense to come to the party.
This is those who accept Jesus. The church at the time Matthew wrote this gospel is made up of the replacements—the sort of people the chief priests and Pharisees would have called “anyone you find” sort of people from verse 9. This is the former prostitutes, the tax collectors, unschooled fishermen, and disgraced teachers like Paul.
It’s these, though, who are the true synagogue. That’s the lexical connection to verse 10’s, “gathered.” It’s connected to the word used for “synagogue.” Matthew has that in mind. Those who enjoy being part of Jesus’ party are the new synagogue—the new gathering of God’s people.
The chief priests and the Pharisees despise the banquet all the more because people like this are invited. There is no humility about the chief priest and Pharisees. Woody Allen was self-deprecating enough to say, “I’d never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.” He made that joke by turning the attitude of people like these Pharisees on its head. They wouldn’t join a club that would have people like Matthew or me or you as a member. They wouldn’t join a party that would have Jesus as the focus and so they get what they want—life without Jesus—and they have it forever.
Those who come to the party are a mixed bag too, though. We are told that good and bad are invited—much as with the parable of the wheat and weeds. This is a reminder that the replacements are not by nature any more worthy of the party than the original invitees. Matthew wrote his gospel, in part, to warn the early church to avoid the errors of the Pharisees and the chief priests and not become like them all over again. It’s remarkable how quickly we become as self-righteous as those who would self-righteously exclude us. Years ago, I had a friend who thought he was getting too heavy. He made it his business to exercise regularly. Once he reached his goal, though, he turned on heavy people and despised them. We humans tend to despise what we are afraid we might become. This parable warns us that we have it in us to both despise the attitudes of the Pharisees and chief priests and then become them 2.0.
We can go wrong that way, but we can go wrong in many ways. That’s a hard spiritual lesson to learn. We tend to think trouble only comes from one angle. The church of the Reformation tried so hard not to be Rome that they fell into their own errors. When we think self-righteousness is the only sin, we wind up excusing transgression. There are dangers from every angle—“in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers,” as Paul put it to the Corinthians. You do not want to develop a reactionary spirituality. It will feel good to be not like others but it is a dangerous impulse that will back you into all sorts of spikes. Far better to keep focusing on the invitation and continuing to accept it.
We see a form of refusing to continue to accept the invitation in the man without the wedding clothes; verse 11, “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes.” This was something of a staple in wedding stories of that day like a guest wearing white to someone else’s wedding is a staple in our wedding stories today. Much ink has been spilled on the symbolism of the required wedding garment—is it repentance, is it good works? I think it’s best to leave the meaning imprecise because there are many ways to respond poorly to grace.
The meaning is simply that this man was not behaving in a way worthy of celebration. It’s a bit like me at Disney World. When I was young, my grandparents wintered in Florida and some years we would visit them. One year, they got us tickets to Disney. I remember watching the fireworks at Epcot with my grandfather. He asked, “what do you think of that Taylor?” He’d call me by my middle name. I was a teenager who thought I knew everything and so told this man who paid for my ticket to Disney that you would have thought Disney could have launched three fireworks together in the shame of Mickey Mouse—a center circle with two circles as ears. That’s a small response that was full of myself.
That’s this man who doesn’t wear the wedding garment. He’s not a good-hearted guest who unfortunately doesn’t understand arcane etiquette. His response to the king’s celebration is just as petulant as mine to the fireworks or the original invitees to the invitation.
The king gives him a chance to repent. “Friend,” he asked, “how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’” He gives this man another chance just as he gave the original invitees with the second round of messengers. The man, however, makes no reply. He is thinking only of excuses and has no excuse. Celebrating as if you want to be at the banquet celebrating the son is what’s required and this man won’t.
The message is to celebrate. That’s also why it’s such an offense to break etiquette and wear white to a wedding if you are not the bride. You are making it a celebration of yourself. You are refusing to celebrate what you are there to celebrate. A bride won’t like that. God doesn’t like that. That’s a warning because we sinners have a perverse ability to make anything and everything about ourselves. I’ve got a lot more stories about my petulance than me making fireworks at Epcot about me and you’ve got your own. The message here is to stop and recognize that the future is indeed a party but it’s not a party about us.
If you don’t want the party to be about Jesus, like the original invitees, you don’t get to come. If you want it to be about you once you get there, you don’t get to stay. There are lot of ways to reject Jesus. Don’t try to pull any of them. Just accept the invitation to interact and keep interacting.
Don’t ruin the fun. That’s what children say when their play is disrupted by someone’s selfishness—“so and so’s ruining our fun.” That’s the chief priests and Pharisees. That’s the man without the wedding attire. They are ruining God’s fun. He won’t allow that.
Be invitable. Get it in God’s fun. Come to His party in honor of Son. Be His happy guest. That’s the few who are chosen. “For many are invited, but few are chosen.” Don’t get morbidly introspective about whether you are chosen by way of trying to plumb the depths predestination. Ask yourself whether you are invitable. That’s the mark of someone who stays at the party and that will forever be a lot more fun than sitting alone with your sin and self-righteousness. Amen.