Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

The parable we hear from Jesus in our Office Gospel seems pretty clear on the face of it. There’s a king who invites folks to his son’s wedding feast, but they don’t respond. He invites them again, but no one takes the invitation seriously, and a few even mistreat the messengers. So the king destroys the ungrateful reprobates and basically gathers in everyone off the street (both good and evil) to the feast, one of whom, however (whether good or evil, it’s not said), isn’t wearing the appropriate attire, so the king takes this as a personal affront and has him thrown into outer darkness. Jesus concludes the parable with a gnomic, “many are called, but few are chosen.”

Clearly what Jesus is saying is this: God invites everyone into the kingdom to the eschatological wedding feast, but people ignore the invitation because they don’t quite know what’s good for them, they’re too busy occupied with the things of this world, so God destroys them and then REALLY invites everyone, even folks who don’t deserve to be invited, but if you’re not wearing the right clothes (which is to say, robed in righteousness) then even if you get into the feast, you’ll be kicked out. Because “many are called, but few are chosen.”

Now…there are some profound truths hidden away in that apparently manifestly true and clear reading: God invites everyone, folks generally ignore the invitation and are too wrapped up in worldly things to pay attention to the call of the Sovereign Lord of their souls, but still God invites folks, even those who don’t deserve an invitation (and let’s face it, that’s really everybody). And the presence of those truths tends to fund or validate that apparently manifestly true and clear reading of the story as awhole. But there are also some real problems to that apparently manifestly true and clear reading, as I’m sure you’re seeing.

Read the parable again, or read the summary of it again. There are lots of elements that are weirdly or inexplicably capricious and need to be smoothed over if we’re to make anything that seems like discernible sense of this passage…but in the end, all of our labor will have led us either to explain away or cover over an understanding of God that is, fundamentally, that God is very much like a human king who is capricious, destructive, and in the end, actually rather cruel. And while we might be uncomfortable with that understanding of God, we’re likely to allow it to be our understanding because, in whole or in part, because that’s generally been our experience of power to begin with: that it’s capricious, destructive, and in the end, actually rather cruel. It’s all we’ve known. What else is there?

But there are different ways of reading this passage, and I’m indebted to Lutheran pastor Paul Nuechterlein for this particular reading. What if we were to read the Greek word homoiothe, translated in the NRSV as “may be compared to”, as a more literal "has become like”? “The kingdom of heaven has become like….” What if the subsequent parable comparing the kingdom to a human tyrant is about how we’ve come to understand the kingdom, but not about how the kingdom really is? What if, following Nuechterlein’s reading, we understand that if the kingdom is like anything in the story, it’ll be the thing that corresponds to how Jesus describes the kingdom earlier in Matthew (11:12): “The kingdom suffers violence, and the violent take it by force”? What if that both speaks to our violent expectations of the kingdom…but also gently turns our attention to the one who, speechless, is thrown into the outer dark, who is shut out, cast away, much like the One who, in fact, was despised and rejected and hanged on the gibbet of the cross, the One who, speechless as a lamb to the slaughter (Isaiah 53:7), was led away by human power and killed...because, being love incarnate, he didn’t fit into the death-infected world he came to redeem? What if we’re meant to see the Disheveled Guest, the One Who Doesn't Fit In, as a sign of the kingdom, and not the misappropriated power of a human king? What if being one of the chosen means standing with the scapegoat, with the Disheveled Guest, even if it means enduring with them the outer dark of human scorn or violence?

What if it’s true that God loves us so much that God would rather suffer our violence than inflict violence on us?

Beloved Friend, I offer this interpretation of the passage to you not as anything newly definitive you should take on board (notwithstanding that I believe local and general scriptural context supports it), but as an invitation to consider how very wrong we can be about God…and how discovering how wrong we can be and have been, is actually a very exciting, wonderful, and good thing!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+