A sermon preached at St. Francis by the Lake Episcopal Church, Canyon Lake, Texas.
The lectionary readings for the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost are here.
Once more, Jesus spoke in parables saying …. Jesus tells the parable we read today in succession with the parables we’ve read the past two weeks. For us it’s taken three Sundays to read them but imagine standing and listening to them all at once in the course of just a few moments. Do you remember the first one? A man asks his two sons to work in a vineyard, one said yes and didn’t go and the other said no and then did go and Jesus asks “which did the will of the father?” And last week’s reading has the people given the responsibility of tending the vineyard brutally treating the vineyard owner’s slaves and killing his son and Jesus wraps it up by saying the rejected one is the key to everything in life.
Jesus’ parables aren’t random stories told to entertain the crowds but intentionally crafted tales designed to intentionally disrupt our thinking and worldview. Jesus wants us to ask questions of ourselves and the world. Parables are one of the ways Jesus tries to open our minds to wonder about possibilities and opportunities to become who we are created to be.
Where Jesus tells the stories and to whom are important for our understanding. And, we must never forget that we are always in the crowd of folks listening in. For this string of parables, Jesus and the disciples are in Jerusalem. He’s been speaking in and around the Temple for a couple of days, upsetting the temple leaders and elders with his “the Kingdom of Heaven is like” tales.
The leaders are stuck between a rock and hard place – they want to silence Jesus because he is threatening their power and control of the people but they also fear the reaction of the people if they do anything to harm Jesus. Their own reaction should clue them in that their perceived power is just a house of cards, but I don’t think that metaphor had been invented yet. In any case, the leaders are in a pickle and Jesus continues with yet another “The Kingdom of Heaven” story, even more outlandish than the others.
A king is hosting a wedding banquet for his son and not a single person whose been invited to celebrate with them shows up. Not one. So the king sends out his slaves to remind the invited guests and they are met with excuses by some and shear violence by others. They are “too busy with their everyday affairs to celebrate with their King but not too busy to abuse and kill the king’s messengers.”*
It is left to our imagination to discern why these folks choose to ignore the King’s invitation with their excuses and why some react so violently: do they have contempt for the king, do they not take the king’s invitation seriously, do they think their work is so important that they can’t take time to participate in the celebration? I wonder, what would be my reason for doing so? What would be yours?
Whatever their reasoning, the King is outraged and sends his soldiers to annihilate them, a bit of an extreme reaction, but no more extreme than beating or killing the one who is delivering the invitation. At first glance, a violent response to violence may seem appropriate, but when in the history of ever has it been proven that violence ends violence? A lesson we need to seriously ponder today … but I digress.
Back to the parable – after his outrageous response, the king doesn’t cancel the wedding banquet. I mean, why should we let a good party go to waste just because of a bit of violent outrage? So the king sends his servants to bring in everyone they can find “both good and bad” to celebrate. And while circulating among his new guests, the king encounters one who isn’t dressed properly.
Let’s step out of the story for a bit to explain the custom of wedding robes: There were specific robes that guests would wear to a wedding banquet, they were simple garments so as not to show off the particular social station of the guests; the focus after all is the bride and groom. A bit like our custom to never out-dress the wedding party. But, since the servants just invited folks off the street, the new invitees wouldn’t have had time to properly dress for a royal wedding so the attendants must have given them the customary clothing as they entered.
So, the king is circulating among his new set of guests and encounters one with no robe. He would have been given a robe as he entered but for some reason he refused to put it on. Did he not take the celebration seriously? Did he harbor contempt for the host? Did he consider himself too important, much like the original invitees? We don’t know because when confronted, he’s speechless. I wonder, what would have been my reason for not putting on the robe? What would be yours?
The king, true to form, has an extreme reaction to this non-compliant guest. And Jesus ends this parable with the statement “many are called, few are chosen.” We must be careful how we hear these words some 2000 years later. The words translated as ‘invited’ and ‘called’ have the same root. And chosen can mean ‘selected’ but it can also mean ‘the best’ which seems to make more sense along with Jesus’ ultimate equalizing proclamation that the first shall be last and the last first. Remember the parable of the workers in the vineyard who showed up at different times and all received the same? How does that disrupt our thinking?
Whatever the specific definition of these words, we can be certain that Jesus is in no way giving us permission to pat ourselves on the back because we made it into the banquet with the right clothes on. Jesus may have started this parable directed at the temple leaders who think more highly of themselves than they should, but he ends it looking at all of us – the “good and the bad” invited into the banquet from the Main Street of our typical, ordinary lives. We’ve done nothing to earn the invitation, yet God chooses us. And that is good news worth celebrating!
Everyone is invited, and in answering the invitation, we are also given the responsibility of being a gracious guest. We don’t get to run the vineyard our own way and we don’t get to rewrite the rules of ‘love God and your neighbor’ to suit ourselves. We are called and chosen and we are given the full abundance of the Kingdom – we are given our true identity as God’s beloved children. But we can never let that go to our heads, we are no better or worse than anyone else at the table. Amen.
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