I find such hope in how Jesus conveys to us the Kingdom of God. I feel I want the kingdom of God much more than Christianity. But this chapter (Matthew 22) plain scares me. It is a parable of a wedding, invitation, murder, re-invitation, and throwing out. If I imagine my own wedding, I was indeed sad when someone said they could not come. It was a marvelous celebration for us and one that we wanted to throw open the skies to invite everyone. But I feel it would have been wrong of me to feel murderous to those who refused the invitation. “Love your enemies.”
But I read here, “The king was engraed. He sent his army and destroyed those murderes and burned their city.” Wow.
And in the parable good and bad people were invited instead (which offers hope). But the end of the parable leaves us with this one person, hasn’t figured out that it is the clothes that matter at this wedding, and he is escorted outside “into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For clothes!
I posting here to invite you all to help me through this parable. I have looked at “regular commentary sights” and have not come further into this story. I can not go on in returning to the gospels at the moment because these metaphors are so disturbing to me. I am not really asking for a detailed analysis of the problem of evil, but if that is what you offer to me I won’t refuse.
Do I just accept that I don’t get this, that God is an angry terrible being that strikes his enemies just because they don’t want to attend the wedding. Perhaps I must. Help me along in my pilgrimage. I invite you to speak into this story, breathe new life.
The wedding feast in Matthew 22
Dorothea, if you look at the end of the preceding chapter, you will see Jesus talking to the leaders of the Jews - the chief priests and Pharisees - about the stone which the builders rejected, which becomes the head of the corner. He concludes: ‘Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits’ (Matt. 21:43). They realize that the stories Jesus is telling here are directed at them and try to arrest him (45-46).
This narrative context has to be taken seriously: stories such as the parable of the vineyard and the parable of the wedding feast are told to a particular group of people (the Jerusalem hierarchy) for a particular reason. They are not universal spiritual fables that can be read willy-nilly in any age, under any circumstances. They are specifically about the situation of first century Israel. When the king, therefore, destroys the city of the murderers, we should be thinking of the rebelliousness of Israel and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 that resulted from it. It is a parable about the political consequences for Israel of rejecting Jesus’ offer of forgiveness.
Whatever the problem with the wedding garment was, it needs to be interpreted in the same historical setting. I would suggest that the ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ refrain has its origins in Old Testament texts that speak of the wailing of Jews suffering judgment (eg. Mic. 7:4 LXX; Is. 30:19; 65:19) and the gnashing of teeth of Israel’s enemies against the righteous (Ps. 36:12 LXX; 34:15-16; 111:9-10).
We may still have difficulties with supposing that God would punish his people in such a devastating fashion, but the fact is we are talking about real history here. To take Jesus’ message out of this context and expect it work smoothly in the twenty-first century is quite unrealistic. It would be somewhat like trying to bang a square peg into a round hole.
Re: The wedding feast in Matthew 22
Andrew makes a good point by describing the historic and literary context of the parable of the wedding feast. I find myself still able to see a lasting relevance of the parable to all ages, however, which I also find to be largely true of the rest of Matthew’s gospel. The parable is a warning, in a secondary sense, against presumption on the part of any who would claim to be God’s representatives. This was true for Israel in the 1st century, and remains true for us today.
The consequences meted out on those who refused the wedding invitation in the parable seem as far away from a wedding as possible, but the point of the parable, as it is of many of Jesus’s parables, is to obtain our attention by shocking us. If we lose the sense of shock, and total incongruousness, we lose much of the point of the story.
The historical meaning of the parable is spelt out by Jesus himself, who was addressing the chief priests and the Pharisees in the preceding chapter, and goes on to utter even more threatening words in the following chapter. This was not the arbitrary response of an irascible God, but the end of a long line of opposition to God’s purposes, which culminated in Israel’s opposition to her messiah. This emerges particularly clearly in Matthew 23:30-36. Then there is the heartfelt anguish of Matthew 23:37 - which expresses the true heart of God for His people: “how often I have longed to gather your children together - - - but you were unwilling/you would not.”
The disastrous consequences for Israel which were seen in AD 69-70 were as much a result of her own folly as God’s judgement. The depth of Jesus’s feeling is a measure that this was not simply some local disaster confined to Israel’s history alone. On Israel hung God’s plans for the whole world. Here was the messiah who had come to fulfil those plans, and Israel, in large part, rejected her messiah. God’s anger was not simply selfish rage, like a little child failing to get its own way, but anger that on His nurture of Israel hung the destiny of creation, and this was rejected in the messiah’s rejection.
But just as God demonstrated His glory in the face of Pharaoh’s hardness, so He demonstrated His glory in the face of Israel’s hardness. Israel had come to oppose the very purposes of God, deceiving herself that she was somehow the guardian of those purposes. Paul in particular seems to have understood this in Romans 9-11, and to have experienced it in his own life, and the life of the churches prior to AD 70. Yet mysteriously, it was in the very opposition of Israel to Jesus, and a crucifixion which made the gentile powers equally culpable, that God’s plans for creation were to be fulfilled.
The parable contains a secondary warning to believers of all ages, and in an on-going sense, this becomes for most believers the primary meaning. Let those beware who set themselves up as the guardians of God’s purposes, when either through neglect or direct action, they actually oppose the express purposes, desires and commands of the one they claim to represent. Nothing is so embarrassing as the presumption of a relationship when none exists. This was the presumption of the wedding guest who came without his garment, and is the kind of presumption that Jesus condemns in those who performed miracles in his name, yet failed to have a relationship with him - Matthew 7:21-23.
The same could be said of those who failed to enter by the gate - John 10:7-10. This was as true of many of national Israel’s ‘shepherds’ (kings and priests) historically as it was and is true of all who were and are mere ‘hired hands’ in the days of the early church and today, who like the thief, do not enter through the gate, Jesus, but come (perhaps unwittingly) to steal, kill and destroy. Such could be said of any pastors of Jesus’s flock, who fail to enter by the gate of relationship with Jesus, sharing his shepherd’s heart, and come simply to fulfil their own self-centred ambitions and energies at the expense of those they claim to shepherd. God’s anger has to be seen not as some kind of personal vendetta, but in the light of many who are deceived by those who fail to represent the one whose ambassadors they claim to be.