The Wedding Banquet
“The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.”
After reading the Gospel text several times, reading several commentaries on it, thinking about it, and discussing it with the Ben group, I came upon this sentence in the introduction to yet another commentary: “The parable of the wedding banquet is one of the toughest texts preachers face.”
Good thing I’m not a preacher.
There are several puzzling things in the reading (and I don’t intend to address all of them). The original wedding guests, who were invited, but don’t show up, seeming to choose their everyday activities over a royal wedding. Their violence toward the king’s slaves. The king’s violent responses.
And then, there’s that wedding robe. That seemed particularly strange to me at first, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been around Berkeley for so long. And maybe, in these times when complaints about what guests wear to a wedding are subjects for ridicule, it’s just a little hard to put this in context.
I remembered something that happened when my son, Geoff, was a teenager. He started high school at Saint Mary’s with very little experience of church or religion. One of the requirements at Saint Mary’s was attendance at a monthly liturgy, where the boys were required to wear neckties. Geoff didn’t much like wearing a tie, although he never really complained about the liturgies. Finally, he asked his religion teacher, Brother Kenneth, why they had to wear ties.
Brother Kenneth was somewhat old fashioned. He wore a black cassock to school every day. He was also a dedicated teacher who encouraged his students to ask him anything. He told Geoff that dressing for the liturgy showed respect for God.
Looking back, I’m surprised that I know about this conversation. Even more telling, a year or two later we were invited to a memorial service for an adult Geoff had been close to, and he was concerned that he didn’t have the right clothes to show proper respect for her.
So yes, there are times, even now, when what you wear matters.
I also remembered hearing something about wedding robes in Jesus’s time, and a quick check confirmed that a king of that era would have provided wedding robes to his guests. To refuse to wear one really would be disrespectful to the host.
The commentaries I read warned against interpreting this parable as an allegory where each person or group represents something or someone specific.
But the opening sentence, the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son, certainly encourages us to see the king as God.
When the invited guests don’t come, the king sends his slaves out to the streets, to gather up everyone they see. And they do, both good people and bad.
I imagine this crowd of regular people who’ve suddenly found themselves invited to a royal wedding. As they file into the banquet hall, someone welcomes each of them and offers them wedding robes. Many are delighted and accept the robes graciously.
But here’s this one guy who refuses to put on the robe. When the king sees him, he gets extremely angry and has him bound and cast into the outer darkness.
What does this mean for us? What is the proper attire for this banquet? And what does it mean to refuse to wear it?
After reading all those commentaries (more than once), I’m going to try to put it in the words (my own) that finally made sense of it for me:
I think that God invites us all to the Kingdom of Heaven. And the robes that he offers us are what Paul refers to as the mind of Christ, that is, to try to live as Jesus taught. If trying hard isn’t enough, then this is a small wedding indeed. But if we reject that gift, thinking that our earthly accomplishments are good enough to justify us, we have no place in this Kingdom.
I’m wondering if it’s not exactly a punishment to be excluded, but more like a natural consequence. If you’re not willing even to try to love your neighbor as yourself, why would you want to dwell in a place where that’s the fundamental law?
