The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Matthew 22:1-14
The year 70 of the Common Era, or 70 years after Jesus’ birth, was a devastating year for the Jewish people. Only two other times in their history rival it: First, the destruction of the temple and the city of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the exile of many of its people to Babylon, including the last king in the line of David. The second is the Holocaust, when the majority of European Jews were slaughtered over just a few years’ time.
But in 70 CE the very foundation of Judaism crumbled when the Romans razed the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the rebuilt temple, the second Temple, which was then one of the greatest structures in the world. The Temple was the very heart of Jewish faith. God dwelled in the inner sanctuary of the temple complex, the Holy of Holies. Outside that sanctuary, the priests offered sacrifices. The Court of Nations, where Jesus and his disciples taught, where he turned over the tables of the money changers, was the largest gathering space in the city. And it needed to be, because hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world made pilgrimages there for the high holy days.
After 70 CE, Jews no longer had a home. God no longer had a home. They were back in the wilderness, wondering what home and covenant and faith now meant.
Those Jews included the evangelist Matthew, or the author who we call Matthew. Most scholars agree that he probably wrote his gospel around 75 CE, fully in the wake of this devastation. And not only that, but Jews had also been in conflict with each other, both before and after the fall of the city and temple. Matthew and his community believed that the messiah promised by the prophets had come in Jesus, but the majority of Jews in Jerusalem weren’t on board. It was a schism similar to our own Protestant Reformation, where European Christians split on fundamental beliefs about God and the Church. Though the Jewish split played out at a much smaller scale and slower pace.
This was an inter-Jewish struggle in Matthew’s time. The word Christian would not be used in our scriptures until the Acts of the Apostles, likely written at least five years after Matthew. Paul, who died around 65 CE, didn’t use the word at all in his letters. Because it didn’t exist yet. But it did appear in Antioch, not Jerusalem, around Matthew’s time, but as a derogatory term critics used to describe followers of Jesus.
This brings us to our parable today.
A king is giving a wedding for his son and sends out messengers to all who were invited to gather them to the celebration. But those who were invited reject the king and mistreat his messengers. So the king kills them all and destroys their cities.
Then he sends out his messengers again and says, this time invite anyone, good or bad, so that we may celebrate my son. So that’s what the messengers do, and the hall is filled with guests.
But one guest is not wearing a wedding robe, and he can’t explain why. So the king throws him into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
This is all what the kingdom of heaven may be compared to, according to Jesus. Well, actually Jesus according to Matthew.
The most common and straightforward interpretation of this parable is that God is the king and Jesus is the son whose wedding, which is the salvation his resurrection created, God is celebrating. Those who are the invited guests but who reject the invitation are the Jews. The burning of their cities and the murder of those inside represent the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. When the messengers are sent out again, God tells them to invite the Gentiles, whether they’re good or bad, to the wedding, into salvation. But one guest shows up not ready to step into that salvation, and so God throws him out.
I don’t love it. I don’t love the idea of our God destroying people and cities out of anger, or throwing people into the outer darkness because they didn’t show up the way God expected them to. I don’t love that this is yet another text in our New Testament that Christians have used for millennia to judge or dismiss or persecute our Jewish neighbors.
And here I must say, I don’t think Jesus ever said any such things. I think we’re hearing from a frustrated, heartbroken Matthew trying to make sense of his city and his faith now shattered into pieces all around him. And I think he does in this parable what so many of us do when we are overwhelmed by despair or fear: we lash out.
It’s so much easier to jump into anger—which feels like you’re doing something—than to allow ourselves to experience deep sadness. It’s so much easier to assign quick blame than to sit with uncertainty, with not knowing why this all happened or what to do next.
In this parable, Matthew is lashing out. He’s so compelled by his own belief in Jesus the Jewish messiah that it’s frustrating to him how his fellow Jews aren’t following his lead. Not only that, but his own community of Jesus-followers is becoming more isolated and cut off from their own people because of their belief. So he turns those hard feelings into anger and gathers it into a violent parable, saying that because the invited Jews rejected the invitation, God punished them all by letting Jerusalem and the Temple be destroyed. This is actually a point Matthew makes a few times in his gospel. It’s those other Jews’ fault, he’s saying. They’re the reason our lives and our home are in shambles. God has turned away from them and will seek out the Gentiles instead. Of course, in this parable, not even the Gentiles are safe from God’s judgment.
Matthew is just another vulnerable, hurting person in the world, coping in the ways he knows how, which is to write about his teacher and messiah, and use that writing to work out his own stuff. It just so happened, though, that his writings got popular.
And also it’s important to say that Matthew never intended to write a biography. Neither did Mark, Luke, or John. They were explicitly writing interpretations of who they themselves understood Jesus to be. And the people reading their writings at the time had no expectation that their stories would be factual. That wasn’t the point. Everyone knew these were all variations on the same theme. That’s why we have an accepted New Testament canon that tells three stories of Jesus—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—that generally line up but each emphasize different aspects of Jesus’ character and priorities, and one story, John, that barely lines up with the other three and gives a very different picture of Jesus.
Each gospel writer had their own beliefs about who Jesus was—and, more importantly, who they wanted Jesus to be. They each brought to their gospel their own specific situation, their own pain, their own ideas about how the world should be.
And I think that’s good news. I mean, if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can do it, that means we can do it. We can find Jesus in our own specific situation, in our own pain, and in our own ideas about how the world should be. Now of course, we read and learn these scriptures in community, so that we don’t become so entrenched in our own interpretation that we can’t see from other perspectives. Again, that’s why I think the early Church leaders gave us four different gospels.
Jesus will not be defined only by Matthew’s parable of vengeance, nor will he be defined only by John’s beautiful rendering of Jesus as the Word, nor will he be defined only as Luke’s social justice warrior. Because Jesus is all of these things to each of us and to our community at some point.
What these stories do share is a belief we’ll say later in worship:
Dying, you destroyed our death.
Rising, you restored our life.
Christ Jesus, come in glory!
Those are the bones of our faith. The Spirit puts flesh on those bones through all our varied scriptures, some commanding us to do one thing and another celebrating people doing the exact opposite; some that are real letters to very specific communities and others fantastic, sprawling epics explaining what their authors see happening around them.
We get to encounter God in all of them. When we’re angry, to read Matthew’s parable and know that the evangelists got angry, too. When we’re having a disagreement with a fellow church member, to read Paul’s letter today and know that people in his church community had conflicts, too. When we’re feeling afraid and tempted to let go of God and turn to money or drinking or shopping, to remember that the Israelites also created an idol when they were feeling abandoned.
God finds us in our faithfulness, yes, but also in our mess. Amen.
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