Church Staff
 
In Matthew 22:1-13, Jesus tells a parable about a community meal for some important people who all back out. He invites religious separatists to join him in eating with sinners & outcasts, i.e. to share his messianic banquet symbolizing God’s reconciliation of all peoples. Matthew turns Jesus’ parable into an allegory to explain the Roman destruction of Jerusalem & to legitimate his church as the replacement of Judaism in the story of salvation history.
Three things are important here. First, God is patient, for God wants everyone to grow up, to become fully & truly human, which means to live in love with God & others as Jesus shows us. Second, every rejection of God’s call to true humanness, a positive outlook on life & a genuine love for others, gets rejected by God. Deeds God can’t use to develop a just, peaceful, & caring world are finally relegated to the trash bin of history. Third, what trips up avid believers is substituting “carriers” of our religious ideas or theologies (i.e. some church tradition or the Bible) for God. It’s far easier to be a “true believer” in something than to grow up to become a “true disciple of Jesus” – someone whose mind & heart are informed by Jesus, someone who seeks to live in openness & compassion like Jesus, & someone who joins Jesus’ mission to transform the world into God’s realm of righteousness & love.
All of this comes to the personal level in the king’s encounter with the believer with no wedding garment, i.e. no loving deeds, no fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22), & so not a true disciple. This man thinks attending, joining, or believing something is enough, but God requires us to get past the “carriers” that have brought Jesus down across the ages to us. We need to encounter the risen Jesus & grow into the new life of self-giving love he offers.