It is odd how things stick in your mind and forge a link that triggers every time you hear certain phrases. I had one of those moments at the end of the Gospel reading. When I was at theological college we had a visit from the Bishop of the Arctic. His diocese covered the land of the Eskimos or Inuit people and the North Pole. Lots of snow and ice, polar bears and ice-holes for fishing. He told us that “many are called but few are frozen”, a play on the final sentence from our Gospel today.

That Gospel reading (Matt 22:1-14) is packed with odd questions, not least the last one about many being called or invited, but not everyone being chosen. This is completely at odds with the way we view life today where entry into the heavenly realm is assumed to be a right regardless of what we do or what attitude we have deep within our heart. It is not so much seen as the gracious act of a loving God who wills a relationship to continue as something we can assume and presume. Rather like that misunderstand poem ‘Death is nothing at all’, which I think is supposed to be a parody by Henry Scott Holland but has been turned into a greetings card and from that into a poem to be read at funerals. It is not nothing at all, because if it was we would not carry its pain for many many years and if it is nothing at all then the resurrection was pointless and there is no gospel of redemption. This church would be built on a total fallacy and we are wasting our time. Everything becomes a delusion where nothing matters because everything is as it was and nothing needs sorting out. Deep down we know that to be a fantasy. We need to take a reality check here.

Stories like this one from Matthew’s gospel come as a rude awakening to an age that presumes everything and is lazy in accepting shallow platitudes in place of thinking things through more deeply.

The key to the passage lies in the oddities in it. Why would anyone want to kill a king’s servant for bringing an invite to a party? How can a wedding feast still be ready after a king has mobilized an army, laid siege to a city and burnt it to the ground? Why is a man bound hand and foot before being thrown into outer darkness because he was wearing jeans when he wasn’t expecting to go anywhere special that day? These are trigger images, which would have meant a great deal to the first hearers of this story because of the allusions that lie behind them.

Firstly the feast is the celestial banquet. It is an image of the final consummation of all things, an image of glory and the culmination of history. There are things to be sorted out, injustices to be righted, pains to be healed, sins forgiven and righted. None of us are perfect and to leave us ‘the same as we ever were’ for ever is to sell us short and leave us unredeemed. It is an image of the living dead of horror films and the Christian faith is the complete opposite of this through the picture of a celestial banquet. God has the final victory and not just in the grand scheme of things but he has a victory in us too! This is why we need to keep a proper perspective on all of the ghoul nonsense of Halloween. We need to avoid being drawn into proclaiming the false victory of evil and darkness, something we completely reject. We reject it at baptism. This is why I much prefer at bonfire night to light up the sky with the saints and hope, and forget all the Guy Faulkes stuff, which is just an appalling commemoration. I prefer to proclaim God’s glory and ultimate triumph.

This banquet is set in a wedding. The Son is the bridegroom. He is Jesus himself, but he is with his father in glory. This story follows on from last week’s story about the son being killed by the rebellious tenants. Christ has died, he has risen and been glorified with the Father in heaven. The invitation has just been cranked up several levels to go off the scale in importance. To reject this invitation is daft beyond measure. This is the rejection of the very point of everything, so you have to be pretty twisted to do this, but some manage it!

Then we have the military campaign. This is an off the shelf image from the OT. God’s vengeance is often shown in terms of battles and flattening the city - as in our reading from Isaiah (25:1-9). For Matthew’s first readers this would trigger memories of the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, which they interpreted as God’s judgement on the rejection of Jesus. (It does, by the way, help date Matthew’s Gospel as being written after AD 70.) We would probably want to re-phrase that. Roman powers didn’t particularly need to look to God for excuses to level a city and the Jewish people were seen as a troublesome lot; a land rich in hot heads and zealots.

So the image of smashing up the city turns the focus away from the promised people to include everyone else. This is a bit like Peter’s vision of eating the forbidden food and him seeing this as a call to go beyond the Jewish people to spread the good news of Jesus to the whole world. Christianity moves from being a sect within Judaism to be a faith for all.

Then comes the even more odd part. One man has not followed the dress code. He wasn’t expecting to be invited, so why would he have a suit in his bag? Again this triggers OT imagery of always being prepared. The wedding suit is an allegory for a state of preparedness, of spirituality and being open to a call from God when it comes. The Church includes the good and the evil, just like Jesus’ disciples included the one who betrayed Jesus as well as the future Apostles.

Boy, do we know the Church is a mixed bag! It does contain those whose moral failings are what greet us first when we encounter them; but it also includes tremendous people of high quality, who lead lives of great self giving. It contains the spiritually bankrupt standing next to real saints and people of great devotion. It displays in-fighting and arrogance alongside tremendous tolerance, understanding and graciousness. There is some sorting out to do even within a holy community.

Some of course are put off by this and there is a great deal of scepticism around about all institutionalized religion. Are these people who have rejected the invite or are they those who, in the terms of the story, occupy the main streets, who are invited when the others have rejected it? We should be very careful about drawing too simplistic conclusions about who falls which side of the guest list at the celestial wedding feast.

The punchline comes right at the end. All are called. Everyone is invited to participate in this feast. But some will choose to reject it. Some of those on the first draft of the guest list reject it. Some of those searched out later will reject it. Some of those who accept the invitation will turn out deep down to have only gone through the motions while rejecting it deep down. This is a passage which talks of future judgement where some will be found to have chosen to reject God’s invitation to be with him. But that judgement comes with a twist. Just when we think we can predict who stands where, it gets so much more complicated. That is why I prefer to leave the judging to God and for myself to long for that redemption when he will complete all that he has begun. Whatever, death is not nothing at all, it much better than that and in Christ filled with much more hope than that.

© Ian Black 2002

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