Jesus again in reply spoke to the chief priests and elders of the people in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. He dispatched his servants to summon the invited guests to the feast, but they refused to come. A second time he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those invited: “Behold, I have prepared my banquet, my calves and fattened cattle are killed, and everything is ready; come to the feast.”‘ Some ignored the invitation and went away, one to his farm, another to his business. The rest laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged and sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The feast is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy to come. Go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.’ The servants went out into the streets and gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests.” (Matthew 22.1-10)
Our selection from scripture today is taken from that part of Matthew’s gospel that is sometimes called “the controversy section.” The title tells everything. Controversy is at the center of the section, with Jesus pitted against the religious leaders of Judaism, the latter intent on removing Jesus from the public arena in one way or another. They want to be rid of him, especially now that he is walking inside the streets of Jerusalem and not off on the backroads of Galilee.
For the last few Sundays, we have seen the religious leaders confront Jesus, demanding an answer to the question, “By whose authority do you do these things?” Jesus’ answer, for the most part, has come by way of three parables. We have the third of those parables today. In the weeks ahead, the chief priests and elders will direct more questions at Jesus, each question an effort to entrap him so that they have cause to discredit and dismiss him.
Of course, we know where this escalation of tensions will end. Jesus will be hauled before a kangaroo court made up of these religious leaders and then put before Pilate the Roman procurator for prosecution. We have already witnessed those final events months ago during Holy Week. Our readings for these last few Sundays of the liturgical year move us steadily towards those final moments in Jesus’ life on earth.
As we listen to the parable that Jesus directs their way today, we should not be surprised that it carries a strong resemblance to others that have preceded it. We find at the heart of each of these parables a message of rejection. We saw it in the parable of the two sons, both of whom are asked by their father to work in the vineyard for the day. The elder son answers no, but goes, while the younger son answers yes, but doesn’t go, becoming an archetype of refusal and rejection.
Last Sunday, we heard the parable of the vineyard owner who leaves for a while, entrusting his vines to tenant farmers. When it is time for harvest, he sends servants to collect his part of the produce, but the tenants refuse to turn over the produce, instead beating, stoning, and killing the servants. When the owner sends his son, sure that the tenants will comply, the wicked men also kill him, rejecting every attempt that the vineyard owner has made to have compliance from the workers.
Today, as we see, the message is much the same. Instead of a vineyard for the setting of the story, as was the situation in the previous two parables, Jesus uses the image of a banquet, also a classic image found in the Hebrew tradition when referring to God’s abode. The plot of the story is simple, the same as we saw in the earlier stories. The king holds a wedding feast for his son and invites his friends, but they refuse to come.
Learning of their refusal, he instructs his servants to go into the streets and to invite anyone they find. The street people respond and so, as the parable says, “the hall was filled with guests.” Again, we see, front and center, rejection, this time found in the invited guests who refuse to come to the wedding feast, in this way rejecting the invitation of the king.
They are little different from the vineyard workers who refused to turn over the harvest that was owed to the vineyard owner. An expectation is rejected by those who should have known better, and now the king finds other people who will attend the feast just as the vineyard owner found other tenants who would replace the wicked ones who had rejected the landowner’s appeal for a proper response.
There is nothing particularly difficult to understand in this parable or, for that matter, in any of the earlier stories. Even the religious leaders understand the point. Upon hearing this third parable, they know they’re being cast as the ones who rejected the invitation to the feast. Matthew writes, “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew that he was speaking about them.”
However, rather than take to heart Jesus’ efforts to dislodge their stubborn mindset and to open their blind eyes, the religious leaders do the opposite, becoming more hardened in their attitudes and more intent on disposing of this troublemaker from Galilee. They may have to wait a while, fearful of how the attentive crowds that have followed Jesus might react, but their intentions are clear. They aren’t going to sleep until he is gone for good.
Although this third parable falls into familiar territory, a few things should draw our attention even if we’ve seen them before. The first thing to see is that the invitation was extended at the start to those expected to respond in a positive way. When the king sent his servants to the invited guests, they were those within his circle, those with whom he had a close relationship.
This is important to understand because their refusal to come to the feast is all the more shocking because of the bond that they had shared with the king. Again, the story points the finger at the Jewish leaders–those expected to be most receptive to God’s word and his plans–but they were the very ones who refused to come to the feast.
On the other hand, those people who were not invited at the start, the ones outside the king’s close circle, were the ones least expected to be given an invitation, but who, in the end, received an invitation when the earlier invitees refused to go. Again, Jesus’ is pointing to the social pariahs that were open to his message and in this way accepted the invitation.
We find them also at the end of the parable of the two sons when Jesus concludes the story with this verdict addressed to the religious leaders, “Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.” Now, they are the street people and the faceless people who had been discarded and dissed because of their physical and moral disfigurements and who are welcomed into the banquet by the king after the prim and proper have refused to attend.
As with the others, this parable is meant to shock us out of our complacency and our lacklusterness, startling us with the revelation that those least expected to enter the kingdom of God are, in fact, the ones at the front of the line, while those most expected to sit at the banquet table are bringing up the tail end of the line.
Perhaps no one has been able to capture this disconnect between the expected and the unexpected better than Flannery O’Connor, the Southern writer in the 1960s, who penned a short story entitled “Revelation.” It is the story of Mrs. Ruby Turpin, a self-satisfied, deeply judgmental Southern woman who constantly categorizes people by race and social class.
Seated in a doctor’s waiting room one day, Mrs. Turpin, after making a series of offensive statements, finds a textbook hurled at her by a college student named Mary Grace who is fed up with the older woman’s antics. Later in the day, Mrs. Turpin stands in her farmyard, watching the pigs in their pens, all the while arguing with God, demanding how in the world that girl could have addressed her as a wart hog.
As the sun sets, Mrs. Turpin is given a spiritual epiphany, a revelation, as she stares into the sky overhead and sees “a vast, marching horde of souls” traveling along a bridge of light into heaven. Much to her surprise, leading the procession are the exact people she has looked down upon all her life, the misfits and marginalized that she has dismissed as inferior every time she set her accusing eyes upon them.
At the rear of the line, she sees the respectable citizens like herself, the social crowd that she has always been a part of, the folks with good manners, clean clothes, and lily-white souls. Her eyes are opened to the truth in that moment, an unexpected awakening that shattered everything she held as certain and upended every assumption she had cherished about people beneath her.
One other point we should make before leaving this particular story of the wedding feast. That concerns the many excuses and escapes that the social elites and the polished politicians offered to the king for their refusal to attend his son’s wedding feast. The explanation offered in the story was that “some ignored the invitation and went away, one to his farm, another to his business. The rest laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.”
As with the parable of the evil tenants in the vineyard, we find here all manner of the ugly reasoning that the human heart can concoct for its rejection of God’s ways. It seems to be an inherent and intrinsic part of our makeup, more than a flaw, more than a failure, this almost instinctual excusing of ourselves in the face of our refusal to walk with God.
We find it in the Garden of Eden after the couple has consumed the forbidden fruit. When confronted by God with the question, “What have you done,” the man offers the pitiful excuse that “the woman gave me the fruit so I ate it.” Faced with the same question, the woman answers, “The snake tricked me, so I ate it.” In other words, neither accepted responsibility for their rejection of God and his ways.
Instead, each offered a rationale, a seemingly sound explanation, a screen behind which they could hide. Of course, it didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now, although it’s not for lack of effort on our part. We continue to offer excuses for our willful rejection of God’s invitation to us to join him in his life and at his table, finding a hundred-and-one ways to get around the ugly truth that we want to do our own thing, not the work of God.
It is interesting to note that the parable as Jesus tells it in Matthew’s gospel, unlike a similar one in Luke’s gospel, has the king destroying those who have failed to respond to the invitation, burning their city to the ground. Scholars often see this as a direct reference to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman forces in the year 70 A.D., the city walls destroyed and nothing but rubble left of its grand Temple.
Perhaps so. Regardless, the point is the same then as now. Our lame excuses and the feeble lies that we tell ourselves will not benefit us in the end if we have chosen to reject God and his ways. Everything we considered important will become ash, leaving us with little to nothing to offer to God for our days in his vineyard, and no excuse in the world will change the truth that we didn’t do the work expected of us.
–Jeremy Myers
