Last Sunday’s gospel reading focused on a vineyard and its symbolic aspects in the life of the people of Israel. This Sunday the focus is on the parable of a wedding feast.
This parable runs a parallel course with last Sunday’s gospel: invitation, rejection and punishment. And an invitation to others.
The parable rests on a cultural understanding of an invitation to a wedding feast. The king has invited people from his own strata in society, the landowners and the business people, important people. Some reject his invitation, their reasons for not attending being implausible and lightweight. They insult him.
Some of the king’s servants are killed. This shows the contempt for the invitation from a section of those powerful people. Given the circumstances, it leaves the king no choice but to punish those who reject his invitation because his honour is at stake. He kills them and burns their town. He has to show who is boss.
We understand the parable as telling the reader what has happened to Jesus himself. He has invited the powerful members of society, the Pharisees and elders – the leaders of the people - to come to the banquet ‘of a new way of living’ which he offers them and they refuse him. Yet unlike the king, he punishes no one, judgement will come at a later time.
In the parable, the king makes a radical and challenging decision: he invites ordinary people from the street - their reputation or lack of it does not matter. They have never been to such a banquet. On the other hand, the king in showing his contempt for those who rejected his invitation has to consider those who accepted his invitation and will now have to associate with people beneath their status.
Will it work? The gospel is telling us that Jesus like the king issuing the invitation, does something radical and challenging. He invites other people to his party( the kingdom of heaven) meaning the people whom the Pharisees considered unacceptable because they were unable to keep the many laws surrounding worship, people like shepherds, tax collectors.
How extraordinary to invite ordinary people, not even good people, but the kind of people that no one wants to associate with, to a wedding where people are usually from the same class. The message in the gospel is that everyone is invited to the banquet by embracing, accepting and returning the love that God has for them.
St Matthew was writing for a Christian community in which new rules for the community were being worked out: the Jewish people who responded to the news that Jesus was the Messiah, some Pharisees and wealthy people, some ordinary people, some bad people like tax collectors. All were welcome. Then, finally, the pagans were welcome to join.
We are a global church with rich and poor, especially poor; but we believe we are welcome into the kingdom because Jesus has made it clear. All are invited.
Columban Fr Gary Walker is currently living at the Columban house in Sandgate, Brisbane.
