Sermon for the 19th Sunday after Trinity – 15th October 2023: Matthew 22. 1-14

Reader Nelly Paraskevopoulou – St Paul’s Athens

 

May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

Matthew 22. 1-14 

Weddings are happy festive occasions. In many parts of the world they are actually huge, impressive productions, ranging from the traditional to the magnificent. Greek weddings are always important family occasions,.  Weddings also have an interesting symbolic character, mainly focused on fertility with the newly-wed couple at the centre.

In this case though, things go completely wrong and the atmosphere is anything but festive. Servants are slain, a city is burned, and a hapless guest is punished in a terrible way for not wearing the right kind of clothes. Definitely not a wedding anybody would want to attend.  However this parable from the Gospel of Matthew contains an important message, which we are asked to understand. The closing words ‘many  are ‘called’ but few are ‘chosen’. The ‘chosen’ ones being those who met certain pre-requisites. What can these pre-requisites be?

Parables describe situations through stories. Often they may seem exaggerated, but this is just the way Jesus used to reach the hearts and minds of his listeners. The wedding is actually the Kingdom of Heaven. Some were admitted, others were thrown into outer darkness.

 

It is part of a sequence which is introduced by the temple authorities’ question to Jesus at 21:23 and Jesus’ counter-question about the baptism of John.

 

• The first in the sequence is the story about the two sons (Mt 21:28-32) and the follow-up discussion about true obedience – and Jesus’ damning comment about the prostitutes and the tax-collectors entering heaven ahead of those who are professionally godly.
• The second is the parable of the vineyard (Mt 21:33-end), which occurs also in Mark and Luke, and which is clearly intended by Jesus as a potted history of Israel, culminating in his own suffering and death.
• our text (Mt 22:1-14) follows immediately on from the parable of the vineyard, and the desire of the chief priests and the Pharisees to arrest Jesus and it is clearly, in Matthew’s telling, very much influenced by that. St Luke’s version (Lk 14:16-24) comes with a very different setting, a pharisaical dinner-party in Galilee, and without any of the violence.

The message seems clear. God is planning to restore Israel (symbolised by the vineyard – as in Psalm 80 and Isaiah 5) or bring in his kingdom (symbolised by the wedding banquet/great supper) and he is thwarted by the very people he trusted to be his partners in this work.  They have become, as Tom Wright puts it in his book about “Fresh Perspectives on Paul”, part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

 

What is Matthew trying to tell us? What is the meaning behind the description? One thing is for sure. The writer aims at surprise at every turn of events. God’s judgment surprises us, not pleasantly. Any image or thought we may have of a benevolent, loving, forgiving Father, must be re-examined. This story is not about love or forgiveness, it is all about judgement.  But this judgement doesn’t seem to follow any known rules. It seems random. It seems unfair. It seems hard. Most of all though it shocks us out of our preconceived ideas about God’s decisions. We might think that God punishes those who go against his rules. But in this case what were the rules and how were they broken?

 

In terms of 1st-century Palestine, we suspect that the rabbis might be of some help – not to mention the Sermon on the Mount!  Clearly Jesus (and Matthew) is assuming knowledge of traditional marriage customs in the Roman province of Syria, so that he doesn’t have to spell it out. You didn’t turn up to a wedding in your working clothes. You wore what was appropriate to the occasion – and, according to some scholars, that was usually provided by the hosts.  The man who turned up without a wedding-robe would therefore have been either a free-loader who hoped to escape notice, or someone who was willing to insult his host and his fellow-guests.

 

The authorities in Jerusalem did imagine that if they pressed the right buttons in terms of conduct and ritual God would respond as they wished and they did confuse their preconceptions and their arrogance with the will of God.

 

Maybe God is trying to tell us through this story, that we cannot and must not even try to understand his judgement, because it doesn’t follow our human limited way of thinking. It is completely beyond our comprehension. With God it is not a question of a transaction.   It just doesn’t seem to work like that. We might think that by good deeds, faith, worship, generosity, loving our neighbour, we are ‘obtaining’ God’s grace and love. The whole point though might be that God’s grace and love are not ‘objects’ to be obtained. They don’t have a cost. We don’t even deserve them. They cannot be counted, measured, or evaluated. So in the same way we cannot have any expectations that our ‘good’ behaviour will result in any of this. God knows every thought in our minds. So he knows when we are calculating, he knows when we are pretending to be kind or loving, but without really feeling this in our hearts. He knows when our ‘honesty’, our ‘faith’, our ‘morality’ are calculated to win his love and grace, but are not genuine

This is not what he expects from us. If we are to be anything even remotely close to what God created in human beings, if we want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, we would have to change this way of reasoning. go beyond our limited vision, simply let go of our preconceptions, our arrogance, our self centered view, stop trying to comprehend. Only then there might be a chance that we could really receive God’s love and grace, when we are least expecting it. When we stop ‘expecting’ anything.  Not because we are ‘good’, not because we ‘obey’ the rules, but because we give up trying to impress, we surrender, we abandon our ‘self’ to Him.

In this stillness and emptiness, the Holy Spirit can find room in our hearts and souls to restore hope and heal all wounds. Through the Holy Spirit we are closer to Christ, who lives forever in the hearts of those who love him. What a comforting thought that is.

 

Amen