11 October 2020 - Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

So for the second Sunday running, I’m preaching on a rather violent parable from Matthew’s Gospel.   Last week, a landowner sent his slaves to collect the produce due to him from his vineyard.   They were murdered by the leasehold tenants, and the same thing happened when he sent his son.   This week the poor old slaves are sent out by a king, not to collect produce, but to issue an invitation to a wedding banquet.  More maltreatment and murder follows, however, before the king, in retaliation, obliterates an entire city.  

All this is a far cry, we might think, from those lovely parables in Luke’s Gospel, where a shepherd finds a lost sheep, and a father welcomes home a prodigal son. Actually, many parables have dark undercurrents, including the ones I’ve just mentioned (for example, consider the resentment of the elder son, and the possible culpability of the father in fostering this).   Jesus’s frequent use of parables in his teaching is never about telling cosy stories, but rather about using imagery, drama and metaphor to lodge in the mind of his hearers, get them thinking hard, and overturn their assumptions and preconceptions.   As the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has observed, how much more powerful it is to tell the story of the good Samaritan, than simply offer a moral exhortation.  However worthy - ‘you should treat other people, whoever they are, as you would like to be treated’ – such exhortations can come across as bland and preachy, whereas the parables are vivid, and retain their freshness and power; including the power to shock.

So what of these disturbing parables in Matthew?  They certainly seem full of hyperbole and overreaction.   It may be that you can recall receiving an invitation to a party you really didn’t want to attend, but it’s unlikely you murdered the postman.  Or perhaps you have had the reverse experience of issuing invitations to a party, and some of your invitees never bothered to reply or show up.  Annoying, hurtful even, but I doubt you arranged for their houses to be burnt down. 

Is the parable really suggesting that God does act in this extreme way, with the king a stand-in for the Almighty?  That hardly seems to fit in with the nature of God as revealed by his Son throughout the four Gospels.   As ever, the parable is thought provoking and disturbing; in this case clearly having its roots in conflicts within Judaism about how to react to an itinerant rabbi called Jesus.  

A renowned scholar of the parables, Joachim Jeremias, observes that the killing of the invitation bearing slaves seems ‘motiveless’.   Here it’s worth recalling that this week’s banquet parable follows on immediately from last week’s vineyard parable.   For whatever reason, the message brought by the slaves is extremely unwelcome.   And when those who turn the invitation down in such an over the top way are deemed ‘not worthy’, a second set of invitations is issued. 

So what is the difference between the first set of invitees, and the second?   It has nothing to do with their moral qualities – the second set are a mixture of ‘good and bad’.   The point is rather that the king is desperate to have a well-attended banquet.  He wants others to join in with the joy and celebration, and to be part of his kingdom and his life.   The instruction is clear, ‘invite everyone you find’.

As an expression of the calling of the church, that instruction is hard to better: ‘invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet of the Son’, the very same banquet in which we share in this Eucharist.  ‘Everyone’: that’s a challenge.   Not just the well disposed and sympathetic, but also those who don’t see the invitation as relevant to them, or indeed are actively hostile.   One of a number of reasons I’m excited about our grant from the Cultural Recovery Fund for Heritage, announced on Friday, is that it will enable us to research who currently visits the Cathedral, as well as who does not, and why not; and to look at overcoming barriers to participation. 

Those of you who have familiarized yourself with the Cathedral’s new Vision will recognize connections with several of our strategic objectives, where they speak of identifying and overcoming barriers, and widening engagement with our life and heritage. 

In the parable, the key difference between the first set of invitees and the second, is that the second actually arrive.  They are physically present, and in rather greater numbers than the current Covid guidelines for weddings.  Just showing up does count for a lot.  But it’s not everything, as that guest without a wedding robe found out.   Again, the parable describes a pretty extreme reaction; even we did have a wedding guest who was meant to be wearing a dress suit, and instead turned up in shorts and a T-shirt, we probably wouldn’t bind them hand and foot and throw them into outer darkness.  Most of us will have had the experience of misjudging the dress code for an event, but I doubt there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

So what is going on in the parable?  Many interpretations have been offered, but the most straightforward is simply that in Jesus’ day, guests coming to this kind of banquet would be expected to wear festal garments.   What you wore indicated your full participation in the joy of the feast.   As well as being physically there, you were also attentive to the nature of the occasion.  You were ready to celebrate and join in with the party.   After all, this is a wedding banquet for the king’s son.  As Karl Barth observed in the second volume of his Church Dogmatics, the guest who was not prepared to be festive ‘declines and spurns the invitation no less than those unwilling to… appear at all.’

Well here’s a challenge for our times.   We may not feel particularly festive at the moment, and the national mood is rather gloomy.   Nonetheless God’s invitation invites everyone, including us who are present here this morning, to be open to the deep themes of thanksgiving, joy and hope at the heart of the divine life.  Matthew’s parables of the vineyard and the wedding banquet may contain violence, violence of the kind that Jesus himself experienced, but they also speak of bearing fruit, and of communal celebration.   And so in this Eucharist – the very word means ‘Thanksgiving’ – we give thanks that in Christ not only are we all invited to the feast, but invited to invite others, including those not currently inclined to come.   Neither they nor we are worthy, but God wants to share with everyone the joy of the ‘kingdom of heaven’.  AMEN