Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. ‘Then he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.” ‘But they paid no attention and went off – one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, ill-treated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. ‘Then he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. ‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, “How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?” The man was speechless. ‘Then the king told the attendants, “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ‘For many are invited, but few are chosen.’
Matthew 22:1-14 NIVUK
Wedding celebrations are a lot of fun. I don’t get invited to many, but when I was a missionary I remember one in Pitești with a lot of fondness.
Two of my good friends were getting married. There is a tradition in Romania that the bride is ‘kidnapped’ during the wedding meal and the groom has to pay a ‘ransom’ for her to be released.
At this wedding, the bride was whisked put the wedding and driven down the highway to a field outside of the town, yelling for help the whole way (but totally in on the joke). When the conspirators reached the field, they called the groom and told him that, in order to get her back, he should promise to give her flowers every day for the first week of marriage.
The groom tried to negotiate. ‘What about for three days?’
The bride snatched the phone from her ‘kidnappers’ and snapped, ‘Look! Do you love me or not?’
At our own wedding, I got a glimpse into how much preparation goes into it, with food, table decor, flowers, music... It’s a huge deal. People spend a huge amount of money just on one meal.
Which makes this parable all the stranger, because this is a king hosting the wedding meal, and yet his subjects, given the opportunity for a lavish free feed, don’t seem to be all that interested. In fact, some of them seem quite opposed.
So what could Jesus be talking about here?
Jesus talks about three groups of people who simply don’t get it and don’t respond correctly: the apathetic, belligerent and contemptuous.
But what are they responding to? And why do they behave this way?
Firstly, we need to understand the symbolism of the wedding feast. We see this in Revelation:
Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting: ‘Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.’ (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s holy people.) Then the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’ And he added, ‘These are the true words of God.’
Revelation 19:6-9 NIVUK
This is a picture of an eternal wedding celebration. But who are the celebrants?
Well, in Revelation symbolism, the lamb is Jesus (Revelation 5:6,12; c.f. John 1:29), and the bride is the church (Revelation 21:2,9, 23:17; c.f. 2 Corinthians 11:2).
So the eternal wedding feast is a celebration of love between Christ and the church.
And the invitation to come and join in the feast?
That is none other than the call of the Gospel.
So, then, we have three negative reactions to the call to accept the Gospel here.
The first is the apathetic reaction:
Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. ‘Then he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.” ‘But they paid no attention and went off – one to his field, another to his business.
Matthew 22:1-5 NIVUK
Luke expands this out:
‘But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, “I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.” ‘Another said, “I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.” ‘Still another said, “I have just got married, so I can’t come.”
Luke 14:18-20 NIVUK
Often, in those days, two wedding invitations would be issued: one to tell you it was happening (a bit like a modern ‘save the date’ card), and another to say it was happening right now.
Neither appears to have been met with a positive response. The first call is ignored; the second is given a low level of importance. The temporal pleasures of work seem to be more important.
This mirrors one of the soils from the Parable of the Sower:
The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.
Matthew 13:22 NIVUK
These people don’t come because they are locked in the drudgery of their routine and don’t want the frivolity of the party.
They come because it seems extraneous to their life on earth and don’t see why they should go.
Does this ring any bells?
These are people who build their own kingdoms and play no part in God’s. They only see the need to feather their nest. They are not at all concerned with soaring in eternal skies.
Within these few verses there is a stern challenge for us. Will we respond to the call when it comes, or are we too busy with our workaday, humdrum, nine-to-five, living-for-the-weekend life to heed the call of the Lord?
Apart from apathetic, the next reaction is a good bit more violent. It is the belligerent reaction:
The rest seized his servants, ill-treated them and killed them.
Matthew 22:6 NIVUK
Jesus is making a very unsubtle comment here that I imagine any Jew in the audience who knew their history would pick up on.
In this one sentence, He is comparing three messengers with the prophets of old, who had tried their utmost to get Israel and Judah to repent and turn from disaster, but they had not listened. And Jesus was not shy in confronting them with this awful part of their history:
‘Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.” So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
Matthew 23:29-32 NIVUK
‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
Matthew 23:37 NIVUK
But He wasn’t just comparing these messengers to the prophets.
No, He was also comparing them to the disciples because, disturbing as it might seem, the Jews had learned nothing and were about to repeat their history all over again:
Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town.
Matthew 23:34 NIVUK
He was also talking about us – about those of us who find ourselves vilified and abused for simply telling people about Jesus in a respectful way. There are those – and they are pretty vocal nowadays – who, with hellish zeal, are very keen to silence the Gospel by any means possible. They are, in the truest sense of the word, antichrists. And they will persecute people who have done nothing more offensive that live the Christian life and communicate the Christian Message.
Don’t believe me? Open Doors believes that in 2022 at least 360 million Christians ‘experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination’. According to the Pew Research Centre, in their 2020 report, Christians are the most persecuted group in the world, with government hostilities and social hostilities against them having risen in 150 countries across the world.
What Jesus prophesied here is real and it is happening right now. There is no question at all about that.
But if we think that Our Father God will simply stand by with His hands in His pockets while His people are discriminated against and killed, we should think again.
The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
Matthew 22:7 NIVUK
Again, Jesus does not miss and hit the wall.
It happened during the Exile. In 597 BC Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. They had been warned – very frequently too – that they could not get away with treating the Lord and His people so poorly, but they ignored the warning.
It happened in 70 AD, no more than forty years after Jesus rose from the dead. The Romans took the city and reduced the Temple to ruins – just as Jesus prophesied (Matthew 24:2; Luke 21:6).
I believe it happened again in 1989, when political changes saw a sequence of states rather had openly defy even the existence of God topple like dominoes.
There is a very serious, sombre message here:
Don’t mess with God. He will not mocked. He will repay.
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.
Revelation 6:9-11 NIVUK
Sing the praises of the Lord, enthroned in Zion; proclaim among the nations what he has done. For he who avenges blood remembers; he does not ignore the cries of the afflicted.
Psalms 9:11-12 NIVUK
It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Hebrews 10:31 NIVUK
If are being persecuted, we ought to pray for our persecutors (Matthew 5:44), because if they don’t repent, the consequences of what they were doing will be more severe than they could even contemplate.
So we’ve seen apathy and belligerence. The last negative reaction here might seen a little strange, and it might not seem obvious at first, but it is contempt.
‘Then he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. ‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, “How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?” The man was speechless. ‘Then the king told the attendants, “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ‘For many are invited, but few are chosen.’
Matthew 22:8-14 NIVUK
You see, it would be awful for the king’s son to have a wedding with no-one to celebrate it with other than his wife, so the king sends out his servants to bring in anyone who will come.
Jesus here is pointing to what is about to happen after Pentecost. Paul explains it well in Romans 9-11. The Jews received the invitation – the clarion call of the Gospel – first, before anyone else. They had the chance to respond. Some accepted it. Most did not. So God reached out to the Gentiles, in the hope that, when they received salvation, it would make the Jews jealous and they would also want to be saved.
So the story here mimics the Jewish rejection of the message of the Gospel, and the Gentiles’ receipt of it and belief in it.
But what about the odd part about the man who is ejected from the party? What could that be about?
This is where other books of the Bible help us a great deal.
You see, I do not believe for one second here that Jesus is enforcing a dress code. He is not saying that people in a suit and tie or a nice ankle-length skirt go to heaven and those in ripped jeans, t-shirts and shorter skirts go to hell. That is an incredibly shallow interpretation.
If we believed that, then Judas could have been saved by wearing a tuxedo.
Let’s be serious.
Clothes in the New Testament are an important symbol. They symbolise a new life in Christ. There are two aspects to it. There is positional righteousness, where we are made right with God through Jesus Christ:
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:26-27 NIVUK
But this positional righteousness must also create in us a desire for practical righteousness, where we seek to do things that please God and commend Him to others:
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
Romans 13:14 NIVUK
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:22-24 NIVUK
So the guest who turned up to the wedding in his ‘civvies’, while everyone else was dressed in their Sunday best, is an image of someone who has all the outward trappings of Christian life (they talk the talk, they go to church, they have similar political and moral leanings) but have never accepted Jesus as their Saviour and have never been born again.
These are people who are there for the ride, the good time and to say they had a front row for history in the making, but couldn’t give two hoots about actually being changed.
Like those who followed Jesus for a while, but left when the teaching became too hard.
Like the crowds who shouted ‘Hosanna!’, then just days later, ‘Crucify!’
Like Judas.
And if you think about it, that is profoundly disrespectful.
After all, how would you feel if someone turned up to your wedding in their work overalls?
You would feel insulted, right?
Even more if you had actually paid for the wedding feast.
Much, much more if you paid for it in blood, with your Son’s life.
Jesus’ point here is that if we think we will fool God by pretending to be His followers just by turning up to church and acting like a Christian, then the game is up. He will catch us out. And then He will throw us out. Don’t ever think that He won’t.
So it’s time to stop playing around. It's time to be real with God.
This parable is deeply challenging. It’s message is plain, simple and direct: we need to accept the invitation of the Gospel.
We cannot think, even for a moment, that we can get away with prioritising temporal needs over responding to the call.
Neither will we escape if we persecute and try to silence those who bring the call to us. That will never work and will only bring about our destruction.
But let’s also never think that we can fool God with some kind of half-hearted decision to follow Him, where we listen to His Word as if it was some kind of pleasant symphony, but then do nothing about what it says.
This parable dug right into the heart of what was happening right in front of Jesus, two thousand years ago. But at the same time, it’s bang up to date.
You have the invitation from Jesus to follow Him and join the eternal wedding feast right now, in your hand.
What will you do with it?
Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank you for your generous and graceful invitation for me to join the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. I accept your invitation. Come into my heart and my life and teach me what it truly means to follow You. Amen.
Questions
1. Do any of these reactions to the wedding invitations seem reasonable to you? Why/why not?
2. Why do you think Jesus is so specific in His imagery about this being a King, throwing a wedding feast for His Son? What image is He trying to reflect?
3. What might get in the way of you accepting Jesus’ invitation? How can you resolve that?
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