Twenty-eighth Sunday In Ordinary Time
MATTHEW 22:1-14 (Isaiah 25:6-10a; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20)
Another kingdom parable, and so it begins, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to….” The first kingdom parable ends at verse 10. Up to that point the “kingdom of heaven” is probably the Church on earth. Matthew attaches another short parable in which the “kingdom of heaven” is judgment and the afterlife, eternity with or without God. In the first parable a king prepares a wedding banquet for his son. Invitations to the wedding had been sent, but without a response. So the king sends out his servants to urge them to come to the banquet, “but they would not.” He sent a second delegation but with greater urgency – dinner and everything else were ready, “Come to the wedding.”
Various responses: some made light of it by going to their farm or business instead of honoring the invitation. Others turned homicidal, tortured and killed the ambassadors of the king. The king was justly angry. He sent an army, destroyed the murderers and burned their city. The banquet was ready, food getting cold, but no one to eat it. The king sends out his servants (those not yet murdered by invitees) into the streets to bring in whomever they can find, “bad and good,” until the banquet hall is full. Thus ends the parable as Jesus may have spoken it, except for a change Matthew made to reflect a major event that occurred thirty-five to forty years after Jesus’ time – the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army in 70 A.D. The purpose of the parable as Jesus spoke it would have been to warn his critics that in their rejection of him and his proclamation of the kingdom of God they were rejecting a final opportunity. Their ancestors had ignored, harassed and sometimes killed the prophets. Now God was giving them a final chance.
There are other forms of this parable, one in Luke and another in a second century gospel called “The Gospel of Thomas.” The latter never made it into the New Testament. It contains mostly sayings attributed to Jesus, some of them probably more original than those in our four accepted (canonical) Gospels. But Thomas also contains teachings that do not accord with the traditional teachings of the Church. Our concern here is Matthew’s version and the probable meaning he attached to it to instruct his Christian Community.
The marriage feast is based on the first reading of this Sunday, Isaiah 25:6-10a. The Lord God throws a party “for all peoples,” a feast of “fat things full of marrow, and the finest wine.” (Fat and cholesterol!) The son in Matthew’s parable is Jesus. Those invited are the people of Israel, God’s own people from whom the Son takes his human origin.
The first set of servants: the earliest of the Old Testament prophets, like Elijah and Elisha of the ninth century B.C. plus Hosea, Amos, Isaiah and Micah of the eight century. The second set of servants might be the later Old Testament prophets such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second and Third Isaiah and others. Above all, the second set includes Jesus’ apostles, disciples, Christian missionaries. Of these later prophets and Christian agents some were ignored, harassed, and others martyred. We think instinctively of Isaiah’s warnings to his king and people, of the persecution against Jeremiah with threats of death from his own fellow-citizens. We think of Christian martyrs: Stephen, James, Simon Peter, Paul and the martyrs of Rome in 64 A.D.
When Matthew inserts the invasion and burning of the city, it is the capture and destruct-ion of Jerusalem, and the burning of the temple by the Roman army in 70 A.D. He ig-nores the politics and oppressive situation of the Jews under Roman occupation that led to rebellion and destruction. Instead he interprets the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the temple as God’s punishment because of the harsh treatment of the proph-ets, the Christian missionaries, and lastly, of the Son, whose “marriage banquet” the King, the Father in heaven had prepared. The concept of the marriage feast, as noted earlier, originated in Isaiah 25. In both Testaments a marriage feast is a symbol of eternal life with God. That the marriage feast is that of the Son of the king is a New Testament concept originating with Jesus and the Church. The banquet hall filled with guests from the streets is Jesus’ concept of God’s Good News going into the streets to gather into the Church those who had not been originally invited, the Gentiles, or as Matthew writes at the end of his gospel, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”
When Matthew described the guests gathered from the streets, he noted that both “bad and good” entered the banquet hall. This serves as the introduction to the short parable he attaches. The King enters the banquet hall. He notices one guest different from the rest, a man not wearing “a wedding garment.” He asks the man how he got into the banquet. No answer! The king orders him bound “hand and foot, thrown out in to the dark, where people will weep and gnash their teeth.” Weeping and gnashing of teeth in the darkness is one of Matthew’s beloved expressions (six times), which tells us something about the author’s personality. The wedding garment symbolizes good works, so important to Matthew that he will take up this subject at length in the three parables of chapter 25. The instruction of this short parable: not everyone who gets into the “kingdom of heaven” (the Church on earth) will stay there, that is, will also enter the kingdom of heaven which is eternal life with God.
