Pentecost 20 – 2023
Matthew 22:1-14
Marian Free
In the name of God who gave us life, Jesus who challenged cultural norms and the Spirit who gives us courage to stand for what is right. Amen.
I have just finished reading the novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. The novel is an account of a number of children whose lives intersect during and after the Second World War. One sub-plot concerns a ‘school’ that trains (increasingly) young boys to join Hitler’s war. It is, as you can imagine a particularly brutal place. The boys are selected according to their Aryan appearance and physical or mental abilities. They are expected to do everything they are asked without question – even when it involves jumping from a great height into the arms of the boys below or beating a fellow student with a rubber hose because he is deemed to be the weakest in the group.
Frederick does not really belong – he is physically small and needs glasses. It appears that his presence at the school has nothing to do with him and everything to do with his father’s position. He is resigned to having no control over his life and we learn that he was only accepted into the school because his mother helped him to learn the eye chart by heart. Frederick has an air of resignation, he does everything required of him and bears, without complaint, the beating he receives for being singled out as the slowest boy in the group.
One winter’s night, all the boys in Frederick’s year group are taken from their beds and made to stand in the courtyard. Snow lies on the ground and the boys are freezing. While they wait, wondering why they are there, an emaciated and ragged prisoner is paraded before them. After the prisoner’s crimes are listed, the boys are a given a bucket of water in turn and ordered to throw it on the prisoner. For fear of the consequences everyone complies. Everyone that is, except Frederick. When it comes to his turn, Frederick empties the bucket on to the ground. He is given another bucket – which he empties and another. “I will not,” he says.
Several nights later his bunk mate, Werner, notices that Frederick is not in his bed. When Werner goes to the infirmary in search of his friend he is confronted by bloodied sheets, but no Frederick. Years later Werner discovers that Frederick had been beaten so badly by his fellow students that he had suffered brain damage and was confined to a wheelchair. The compliant child discovered that there was a point beyond which he would not go. His non-compliance had the most awful consequences.
Resistance is costly as the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize can attest. Narges Mohammidi is an Iranian activist who is serving 30 years in prison as a consequence of her struggle for human rights (democracy, freedom, and equality) in Iran. Not only has she been imprisoned but she is not allowed any contact with her husband or children. Narges is only one of thousands who resist oppression, cruelty and injustice and who pay a terrible price for struggling for justice.
Today’s parable about a king who prepares a wedding banquet, guests who not only offend the king but who offer poor excuses or worse, beat and kill the slaves, a king who retaliates by killing the offenders and razing their city and inviting others (good and bad) to the banquet, and who finally tosses a hapless guest into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is a bloodthirsty, vengeful story worthy of Game of Thrones and tells us nothing of God’s love, goodness, and mercy.
Taken at face value, this parable is notoriously difficult to understand, especially the addition about the guest without a garment. While it is possible to bring some cultural factors into play in our interpretation – refusing a king’s invitation being an attack on the honour of the king and the king’s vengeance a means of restoring that honour – we are still left with a capricious and violent king whose reaction to being slighted appears excessive – both in terms of the reaction to the original guests and the response to the underdressed late comer. It leaves us wondering what the parablecould possibly tell us about the kingdom of God.
Many of us grow up missing the detail of the aggression of the insulted king, but very aware of the ‘rudeness’ of the guest without the appropriate clothes. You, like me might have memories of Sunday School lessons in which a teacher told us with some authority that there was a custom of a host providing wedding dress for the guests. We were led to believe the king (God) was absolutely justified in treating the ‘ungrateful’ guest in the way that he did. The takeaway from the parable was that we should be – be grateful or else!
There are many scholarly attempts to come to terms with this parable, but I was particularly taken with Debie Thomas’ reflection . She questions her/my Sunday School lessons and the attitude that it fosters – the arrogance that believes that the unclothed (not us) deserve a shocking and vicious consequence for their ingratitude. She asks: “do we really believe in a God as petty, vengeful, hotheaded, and thin-skinned as the king in this parable?” (and what does it say of us if we do??)
Debie wonders: “Here’s one possibility: What if the “God” figure in the parable is the one guest who refuses to accept the terms of the tyrannical king? The one guest who decides not to “wear the robe” of forced celebration and coerced hilarity, the one guest whose silent resistance leaves the king himself “speechless,” and brings the whole sham feast to a thundering halt? The one brave guest who decides he’d rather be “bound hand and foot,” and cast into the outer darkness of Gethsemane, Calvary, the cross, and the grave, than accept the authority of a violent, loveless sovereign?”
This is an interpretation that I can live with, one that honours the parable’s intention to shock us out of our complacency into a new and radical way of thinking. The depiction of the heedless, selfish guests, the affronted king and the excessive response becomes a description of the world as it is, and the underdressed guest is the one who resists aggression and who pays the ultimate price for his resistance.
What is our image of God and what price are we prepared to pay in our resistance to a violent and divided world?
Swallowsrest 