Matthew 22 ; Come to the Wedding Feast

Life can get prickly.

Chapter 22 begins with an allegory, a parable. I can't help but assign the part of the banquet invitees to Jesus' Jewish co-religionists of his time and place, the part of the host to Jesus himself. But then, every parable seems to have layers of meaning that I could be missing.

God inviting, invitees drifting off instead to other things, to other religions, to the day-to-day could be said to be an—if not the—overall Biblical theme. The event to which all are invited is a banquet, a feast, a joyous meal with friends. Why anyone would forgo the invitation is amazing, so much so that their reluctance makes them “undeserving.”

And so the invitation is thrown open to whoever out there in the streets is hungry and is willing to come in. If I'm reading the allegory correctly, Matthew is saying that if the original invitees are not willing to come to the feast, the door will be thrown open to the whole world instead.

Here, one can easily put too fine a point on it; it is allegory, after all, not history or prophesy in the normal sense. The one who sneaks into the banquet and is thrown out may have been one of the invited originally, but since he appears without the sign of the redeemed, is rejected. “For many are invited, but few are chosen,” a puzzling aphorism indeed, seemingly at odds with the generalized invitation in the streets and byways for people to come and dine. To be invited, then screened for “choosing,” must have made more sense at the time of writing.

Antisemitism has ancient roots going back to well before the time of Christ. The parable above—along with other references in the New Testament—have stoked the fire of Christian Antisemitism in modern times and one wants to be careful in the reading of these and similar passages not to generalize the animosity toward Jewish authorities being focused on in this parable to Jewish ethnicity generally.

Hatred easily finds excuses.

For years now, some Mennonites have taken tax-withholding actions in view of their non-resistant, non-violent stand. To pay for guns is not separate from deploying guns, goes the reasoning. The question put to Jesus by the Pharisees is highly political: in a time of Roman occupation, is this tax that applies only to us occupied Jews something we should pay, or not? We often use this passage when kingdoms seem to clash, i.e. political reality conflicts with religious conviction. Unfortunately, Jesus' answer is again equivocal; it settles nothing in terms of current or historic ethical/religious questions, except that it seems to say that since we live under political/economic systems: we ought to pay what dues we owe for the services they provide and serve God in the best way we can. Discernment is required here.

Sadducees didn't expect to be resurrected after they died; many sincere Christians today also interpret scriptures about resurrection and the afterlife metaphorically, not literally. Jesus informs the Sadducees that heaven has no genders, no marriages, but that we will be like the angels (assuming we're not Sadducees, that is). He takes the opportunity, however, to challenge them on the resurrection with a somewhat quizzical reference to Exodus 3:6, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” In a way, this reference could lead one to believe that eternal life is not essentially an individual matter, but more a matter of the survival of the “God-Nation” carried forward generation by generation by the faithful people of God.

The chapter ends with Matthew's sardonic, “from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.” The obvious inference is that his teaching was so forthright and profound that the Pharisees and the Sadducees admitted defeat. But first, they must test him on the law: those precepts, commandments, points of pious observations by which they lived. Jesus' answer speaks as loudly today as it did then: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

How easy it sometimes becomes for us to nuance these basic precepts when “loving your neighbour as yourself” rubs up against “but this is the law.” The purpose of every law, rule, commandment has—in the end—the goal of promoting love for God and for the children of his creation.

Too often, we insist on adding a but.