Sermon on Matthew 22:1-14

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

This week, we’re looking at another in a long series of parables. Jesus is yet again reprimanding the religious authorities who tried to entrap him with a question after Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple.

And it’s a pretty offensive and unpleasant parable.

We’ve already heard the parable about the two sons—one who talked back but followed through, and the other that didn’t follow through on his word.

Then, we heard about the vineyard tenants who killed those who came to collect the landowner’s share of the harvest, including the landowner’s son.

Once more, Jesus is speaking to the chief priests and the elders in the Temple, probably in front of a listening crowd.

The parable for today has two major points of conflict.

It starts off happily enough: there’s a king whose son is getting married. If any of you have watched any of the British royal weddings, you’ll have a picture of the joyous spectacle.

But here’s the first point of conflict:

Can you imagine what it would be like if for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding—if every single RSVP came back marked “regrets”?

In the parable, it’s worse than that! The invited guests are not only making half-hearted excuses—some of them even beat and killed the messengers!

This is not just an embarrassment or an insult. It’s incredible cruelty.

The king wreaks swift vengeance on the perpetrators. But there’s still a problem (apart from all the violence and death—thankfully it’s a parable and not a factual story): the problem is that there are still no guests for the wedding.

So, the king orders that anybody and everybody be invited. “Fill the banquet hall with whoever you can find—good and bad, rich and poor—just make sure it’s filled for my son’s wedding.”

And just like that, we have a glorious image of the Reign of God as a wedding banquet filled with people laughing, feasting, celebrating together. Especially having lived through a time when so many weddings were postponed, downsized, or livestreamed, this is such a beautiful picture of what the Reign of God will look like.

I wish the parable ended there—the loveliest happy ending you could ask for.

But there’s a second point of conflict:

There’s a guest who isn’t wearing the correct attire. The king confronts him and has him tied up and thrown out of the banquet into a pretty terrifying-sounding landscape.

This is a rough parable, especially since we are so far removed from its time and culture. This is the most satisfying explanation I’ve found:

Since the king had people brought in from the street, wedding robes would have been provided for these new guests. It wouldn’t have been expected that they would have been wearing tuxedos on their way home from work. The proper attire would have been provided.

Which means that this improperly-attired guest was purposely choosing not to participate in the festivities and was rejecting his host’s hospitality.

This parable has a twofold warning:

1.    one warning is to these particular chief priests and elders (yet again)—that they have rejected God’s message brought to them by the prophets and John the Baptist and by Jesus. They have not been listening to God and they have mistreated those who bring God’s truth to them.

2.    The second warning is to the crowds—everyone listening apart from the chief priests and elders. Lest they feel self-righteous at Jesus’ stern words to the religious authorities, Jesus reminds them that no one by their own power is deserving of being a part of the Reign of God. It is by God’s grace alone that anyone celebrates at the wedding feast of the Lamb.

This is hard. I still wish the parable ended with the celebration, not with judgment.

The wedding feast of the Lamb is expansive. The table is long and full and rich. It is for everybody. Everybody is invited. Everybody is welcome. Everybody is included. Everyone’s presence is important and valued.

Sometimes though, when we focus so much on God’s mercy, we can downplay God’s justice.

Our God is both merciful and just.

I attended an online conference a few years ago called “When Faith Hurts.” It was about various types of abuse inside and outside the church—how best to support survivors of abuse, how best to prevent opportunities for abuse, how to recognize and report it, etc.

In one session, we were talking about language and stories in church and how some things can be comforting for some people and not for others because of traumas they have experienced.

The presenter was talking about an interview with our Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, from 2017, in which she was asked about Hell.

“Do you think there’s a Hell?” the interviewer asked.

“There may be,” Bishop Eaton said, “but I think it’s empty.”

“Jesus was clear in John 3 that when He is raised up, He will draw all people to Himself,” Eaton stated. “And if we take a look at salvation history, ever since we got booted out of the garden, it has been God’s relentless pursuit to bring His people to God.”

“Now, people wonder, ‘Well, can you say no?’ I imagine you can say no to God, [but] I don’t think God’s going to give up on us. And if God has eternity, then God can certainly keep working on those folks,” she said. “That might be a little bit of heresy along the lines of origin, but I don’t think God gives up.”

I love this, and I so hope it’s true.

But the presenter from the conference said that he encountered numerous people who had survived abuse who were not comforted by Bishop Eaton’s interview.

He said it wasn’t so much wishing their abusers to be in Hell, but more that it undermined their hope in God’s justice.

So often survivors of abuse do not experience justice on Earth—

whether because they feel they must remain silent, are not believed, or are ruled against in court. So the idea of Hell being empty made them feel like they would be denied justice by God also.

I had never thought of it that way, and it broke my heart to hear it. I realized that what I found to be a life-giving, hopeful, generous idea was the opposite for some people who have experienced terrible trauma.

God is both merciful and just.

I don’t know exactly how that works. How God can on the one hand be so merciful that God brings us to the wedding feast when we don’t deserve it and on the other hand that we will also be somehow held accountable for the ways we hurt each other and dishonor our relationship with God.

This is one of the mysteries of faith. In biblical Greek, the word for “faith” doesn’t mean to mentally assent to something. It means something more like “trust.”

This parable reminds us that we can trust in a God who has an expansive table that everyone is invited to—not just the “important people,” but the good and the bad and random people on the street and everyone in between. And also that we can trust in a God who brings justice for those who have been abused by people with power over them.

Without God’s justice, the feast would not truly be a celebration.

Without God’s mercy, the table would be empty.

When we eat and drink a foretaste of that wedding feast in a few minutes, I invite you to contemplate the mystery of God’s simultaneous justice and mercy. And I pray that you will feel the presence of that just and merciful God.