Sermon for Proper 23, Year A
Okay, so that was a really tricky parable! It’s pretty high on my list of “things I wish Jesus had not said.”
At first glance, it looks like a story about a violent megalomaniac who murders people for declining a wedding invitation, and then has his troops go out into the city and bring a bunch of random people in, but then kicks one of them out because he didn’t happen to be wearing a tuxedo that day.
If this doesn’t sound fair to you, don’t worry, you haven’t missed the point. It means that you’re paying attention.
This is a parable that requires quite a bit of unpacking, but lucky for you, you just happen to have a resident Bible nerd to do it. So let’s jump right in.
Jesus spoke this parable during Holy Week, where our gospel readings have been for the last several weeks.
In the reading that we heard last week, we heard the parable of the wicked tenants, who would not give the vineyard owner the fruits of the harvest when the time came. And when the vineyard owner sent his servants to collect that produce, they beat them up, mistreated them, and killed them. Finally, they did the same to his own son.
You can see the parallel between last week and this week. The king’s servants sent out to deliver the invitation to the wedding were also beat up and killed by those who did not want to accept the invitation. Their rejection came with violence. The king then answers with even greater violence.
This is one of those areas where a parable is not exactly an allegory, so it’s not just that the king symbolizes God, therefore everything the king does is what God would do. That’s not how parables work. I think we can see this quite plainly because, at the end of Holy Week, Jesus will be rejected and killed by the established authorities, but he does not return violence for violence. Instead, he prays for the ones crucifying him, saying, “Father, forgive them.”
The world answers violence with more violence, but Jesus shows us another way.
The really remarkable thing about this parable is that, after this initial rejection of the invitation, the wedding feast still goes on. The invitation is then extended to the people in the streets, far and wide, “both good and bad.” Everyone is welcome here.
The elites turned down the invitation, but the common people accepted it. Nobody there earned their seat at the table. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They’re at the feast because grace made room for them.
Jesus is creating a community that is a sanctuary, a place that is safe from the ongoing power struggles in the world today. In his feast, belonging is given rather than earned.
But then, we have this coda at the end of the parable, where a guest is kicked out for not wearing a wedding robe.
Why would the king expect a random guy from the neighborhood to be dressed in a tuxedo, if he was just on his way to the grocery store?
This is where the parable is more metaphorical story than party planning advice. This character has accepted the invitation to the party, but refused to participate in the celebration.
Here is a modern equivalent: I’d like you to imagine a wedding where the mother of the groom disapproves of the bride, so she comes to the wedding dressed as if she was going to a funeral: black dress, black veil, head cast down, weeping tears of grief. It would be pretty clear to everyone that she was sending a message with the way she was dressed. She’s saying, “I’m physically present, but I am not joining this celebration.”
I think the same thing is true of this man who did not have a wedding garment. He is deliberately choosing to reject the meaning of the celebration. Jesus ends the parable by discussing some rather stark consequences for this rejection.
The king says, “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Jesus follows up with, “For many are called but few are chosen.”
I don’t think this warning is about hellfire or damnation. I think this is about the danger that we face when we show up to the celebration in the Church of Christ, but refuse to participate in that celebration.
Grace is free, but it is not cheap.
This story is more familiar to me personally than I would like to admit. When I was in seminary, I had very high academic ambitions.
I planned to get a PhD, write many important books, and have one of those tweed blazers with the patches on the elbows. I wanted to prove that I was the smartest person in the room, so I tried to dominate every classroom discussion and get the professor’s attention.
My girlfriend at the time was disturbed when she saw this behavior. She said, “This is not who I know you to be.”
There was a second problem with my strategy for being the smartest person in the room:
Namely, that I was not in fact the smartest person in the room.
There was always someone who was just a little bit smarter than me, a little bit quicker with their response, and a little bit better at playing academic politics with the right professors.
I was getting really frustrated, and I began to question whether an academic career might not be the right place for me, after all. I asked my roommate one night, “Do you think that maybe ordained ministry might suit me better than a career in the academy?
He laughed in my face and said, “I think just about anything would!”
I thought my problem was that I was losing the game of academic competition. But I realized later that the real problem was the game itself.
I was turning seminary into another contest for recognition.
I was turning theology into another way to win.
But Jesus was offering me something much, much better.
That, I think, is what the symbol of the wedding garment is really about.
In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul encourages the people to clothe themselves with compassion, kindness, humility, patience, and above all, love. This is the clothing of a follower of Christ. This is what it looks like when someone participates in the gracious celebration of the community that Christ has created.
If you’re going to come to the party, you need to dress for the party.
You don’t need money or status.
You don’t need a spotless past.
You don’t need to prove that you earned your spot there.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “When Christ calls a man (sic), he bids him come and die.”
Sometimes, the thing that needs to die in us is that need to win, dominate, and be right. To make other people smaller than we are.
We think of grace as a lovely and feel-good concept, but the fact is that grace is very offensive.
It offends us twice:
First, it offends us because it lets in the people that we think don’t belong there. The people who don’t look like us, think like us, pray like us, vote like us, or love like us. The people we’d rather not have in the room.
The second way that grace offends us is that it asks us to give up those struggles for power and one-upmanship that made us think that we belong more than those other people.
Grace is free. But it’s not cheap.
What grace costs us is the power struggle that we thought we needed in order to have a place at the table.
Because we don’t earn a place at God’s table.
Grace gives it to us.
