Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-10
You get the feeling that there must be
some sort of backstory.
A king sends messengers
to invite you to his son’s wedding
but you, for some reason, refuse.
The king sends more servants,
and this time you kill them.
The king then sends an army
that kills you and burns down your city.
What the heck is going on?
Why are all of these people
acting in such inexplicable ways?
I know that there can be
a lot of tensions around weddings,
but this is ridiculous.
Of course, we have no way
of knowing for sure
what the backstory might be:
perhaps long-standing hostilities
between the king and the invitees;
perhaps some cultural context
that is now lost to us.
But we don’t need to know the backstory
in order to get the main point of the parable:
God is inviting us to the banquet of life,
the wedding feast of the Lamb,
and if we refuse that invitation
we do so to our own detriment.
Jesus draws on the imagery
with which the prophet Isaiah speaks
of the fullness of life that God wishes for us:
“a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
Why would we refuse?
What would keep us from saying, “yes”?
But that is in fact what we do.
Like the people in the parable
we often respond to God invitation
with either indifference or even violence.
Throughout history, we human beings
have studiously ignored God’s invitation
to live the values of God’s kingdom:
the values of compassion and peace,
the values of concern for the weakest among us,
the values of generosity and self-sacrifice.
We human beings have even sought to eliminate
those whom God sends to remind us of this invitation,
not least Jesus himself, whom we hung on a cross.
I think today we can simply read the news
and see that we continue to shout each other down,
demonize those with whom we differ,
ignore those most in need,
and treat life as if it were a game
that you win by defeating those who differ
and grabbing all you can for yourself.
When God is offering us abundant life
why would we act in such inexplicable ways?
So we might ask, what is our backstory?
Our backstory is what Isaiah calls
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
Our backstory is the story of fear,
the story of mistrust and lack of faith,
the story that is told in Scripture
of our first ancestors
who were offered the abundant life of paradise,
if only they would trust in God to provide,
but who instead sought to become
their own gods, their own providers;
it is the story of faithless people
who preferred slavery and death
to reliance on God’s goodness;
it is the story of wars waged
in order to win for ourselves
what God wants to give us without cost.
This is our backstory;
this is who we are:
offered life, we chose death
rather than trust in God to provide.
But our backstory is not the whole story.
The good news of the Gospel
is that our past is not our destiny:
in Jesus God is writing for us a new story,
a story in which God will destroy death forever
and wipe away the tears from every face.
The parable of the wedding feast
should be read as a warning,
not a prediction.
Through God’s grace,
our story can be the story,
not of the old Adam,
the story of fear and faithlessness,
but the story of the new Adam,
the story of Jesus Christ,
who entrusted himself
fearlessly and faithfully
to the hands of his Father
and won victory over death.
The story of Jesus,
the story of God’s beloved
whom fear and death could not defeat,
can become our story.
And with this as our story
we can say with the psalmist,
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want….
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side.”
With this as our story we can say with Paul,
“I have learned the secret…
of living in abundance and of being in need.
I can do all things in him who strengthens me.”
We can become living signs of the abundant life
that God wants all people to share in;
we can be God’s invitation
to the wedding feast of the Lamb.
I am convinced that so much
of what plagues our world
grows out of fear and mistrust:
fear and mistrust of each other,
but even more fear and mistrust of God.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that the Lord will provide for all peoples
a rich feast, a banquet of abundance.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that only goodness and kindness follow us
all the days of our lives.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that God will fully supply whatever we need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
But this does not have to be our story.
Let us pray today that God, through his Spirit,
will draw us into the story of Jesus,
the story of God’s reign,
so that we can hear and answer
his invitation to the banquet of life.
And may God have mercy on us all.
