Proper 23A.  11 October 2020.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of compassion and justice, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

This morning, as I reflect with you on the Gospel lesson from Matthew, I do so influenced and encouraged by the Torah story from Exodus. It’s a story of what happens to the people when there is a scarcity of visible leadership, plenty of deep anxiety, and considerable impatience with unknowing. While there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism, commentator Gunther Plaut tells about a midrash that “all ills which have befallen the people since that time are in part traceable to the sin with the golden calf.” [1] Divine anger threatened to utterly destroy the unfaithful nation, but Moses stood up for God’s people and reminded God of God’s promise of abundant life and God changed God’s mind.

I also come to the Gospel text influenced and encouraged by the pastoral authority and liturgical leadership of great women like Euodia and Syntyche in the early church, women who Paul writes have struggled beside him in the work of the gospel, together with…the rest of his co-workers, whose names are in the book of life. In the weeks to come, it occurs to me to urge you all to reread our passage from Philippians at least once a day for the well-being of your soul. It’s the spiritual corollary to taking vitamins or brushing your teeth. It will boost your spiritual immune system.

So what about our Gospel lesson for today? You know there are readings from scripture that just do not lend themselves to the response, “Thanks be to God,” or “Praise to you, O Christ.” This parable of violence, this text of terror, is one of those. This is the third of three parables that the Gospel of Matthew sets in a scene of Jesus teaching in the temple in Jerusalem where religious leaders listened in with growing rage. No wonder they were mad – Jesus had entered the temple on a rampage, overturning tables and chairs, cursed a fig tree and made it wither, and then told three deeply troubling tales.

If we ever want to get in touch with why people in the first century with power and privilege (people like us) found Jesus so offensive and even dangerous, here we have plenty of material. There are parallel versions of this parable in Luke and in the Gospel of Thomas. There’s also a parallel in the Talmud, attributed to a first-century rabbi, which are all non-violent. [2] But Matthew’s version of this story is particularly and uniquely ugly. It is the third in a terrible trilogy in which characters lie, cheat and murder, and decimate a city. Really the whole Gospel of Matthew is filled with both physical and rhetorical violence. [3] It’s worth noting that of all the Gospels, Matthew alone is concerned with an extreme or outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Of course, Matthew was writing to a particular audience – a church in the end of the first century – and as far as scholars can tell, his context was every bit as tense. Jerusalem had been sacked – utterly destroyed by the Romans. The religious practice of faithful Jews had been shattered and there was a lot of blaming and shaming going on, some of which got codified in this Gospel. Real life characters had been lying, cheating and murdering and decimating cities. I imagine this nightmarish scenario speaking to people whose communities were being torn apart by violence. I can imagine a certain appeal to a teaching story where someone who has accepted a generous invitation into a banquet, but who has not decked himself with gladness or put on the garment of compassion and right-relationship, gets tossed out forever – you know, as an extreme warning to get people to behave themselves out of fear of retribution. I get the appeal of that.

And yet that’s not what I think this story is about on a deeper level. I do not believe that the king in this parable represents God and I do not believe that the banquet hall stands for the kingdom of heaven any more than I believe that the proper wedding garment means a gown or a tuxedo. We get so confused by our churchy references in prayers and hymns to God as King or Christ as King because of our own historical access to power and privilege, and the violence of our own kings, that we forget what a radical anti-imperial statement that calling God “King” really is. If we call God “King,” that means that no-one else has authority over us. If Christ is King that means that Caesar is not king: that means military power and wealth are not the ultimate authority. (It means, by the way, that gold is not the god which frees us from slavery.) But our church context, when we hear King, we only mean God. And so when we hear a parable about a King it’s almost impossible not to hear the King as standing for the Source of all Being. The Greek text says “a human king” – the word human [4] (anthropon) is left out of our translation.

If we can get free from trying to see how this king might stand for God, we might be able to remember that already in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus has taught that folks do not need to worry about what they are to wear. We might be able to remember that Jesus has already taught that everyone is welcome in God’s realm and that God’s mercy and compassion are extravagant and abundant. We might be able to remember from the stories of the Exodus, that what God has always wanted for God’s people is freedom from violence and oppression (and that God changes God’s mind away from retribution and toward mercy frequently.) And if God has done it before, God will do it again. If we can get free from trying to see how this king might stand for God, we might see that this king has issued an offer that people are not free to refuse – this king is more like a mafia boss. This king is more like a brutal dictator, a mad tyrant. More like – well – Herod.

We might remember that earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, Herod the Great told the wise men from the east that he wanted help finding the child Jesus so he could pay Jesus homage (when what he really wanted to do was annihilate Jesus) and when that plan failed, he ordered the slaughter of all of the children in and around Bethlehem. We might remember that Herod the Great’s son, Herod Antipas, imprisoned John the Baptist and when Jesus heard the news he said, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” Later, Herod ordered John the Baptist to be beheaded at a large banquet. And finally, we might remember that it’s Jesus, according to Matthew, who beckons, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Here’s what I think. If this parable is to be read as an allegory, I would say that it’s a sad allegory of the Church and not of the realm of God. And if God is in this allegory, God is not the king. If God is in this allegory, then God is the One (capital O) who is bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness when we, the ones invited to the banquet, discover that God does not appear the way we think God should appear. It is the Church which ties up God hands and feet when God doesn’t behave the way we think God should behave. It is we who throw God into the outer darkness. For Matthew, it was Jesus, God incarnate, whose hands and feet were bound and Who was hung out to dry. It’s not many verses from here, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, that Jesus teaches that what we have done to the least and the lost and the last, we have done to him.

Before Jesus tells this story, he says, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to….” As it turns out, it may be compared to this horrific story, and it will be found to be nothing like it at all. The Realm of God is not like this at all. I think what’s being illustrated with this parable is that the kingdom of heaven – the Realm of God — suffers violence at the hand of tyrants (tyrants out there and the tyrants that live inside of every one of us). This is not a teaching about God being “violent for a good reason.” This is no Gospel justification for brutality. Rather, this is a story of the way that God suffers because of the violence of the kingdoms of this world—even and especially violence done by, or supported by, Christians in the name of God.

And so when we get to the end of our worship service today let’s remember that the standard of the realm of God, to which Jesus testified with his whole life, is never violence. The toil we are being called to is the work of beating our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. When we lift high the cross, what we are to be proclaiming is what Jesus was living and dying to get people to see –the miracle of God’s abiding love even – and especially — in the midst of chaos and confusion, tyranny and violence; that no amount of evil can triumph over God, that is, Love (with a capital L). It is an absurd premise – that in the midst of so much hideous cruelty and death, love could be so powerful, but there it is. And we know that this premise is true – but we forget, don’t we? It’s so hard to remember, to hope and to engage in acts of lovingkindness without the encouragement of community, and so take encouragement in that this community is offering today to remember love, to hope for love, to look for resurrection and fullness of life for everyone without exception.

1. Citing San. 102a; Exod. R. 43:2 in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, W. Gunther Plaut, ed. (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 645.

2. Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 1990):

This may be compared to a king who summoned his servants to a banquet without appointing a time. The wise ones adorned themselves and sat at the door of the palace, [“for”], said they, “is anything lacking in a royal palace?” The fools went about their work, saying, “can there be a banquet without preparations?” Suddenly the king desired [the presence] of his servants: the wise entered adorned, while the fools entered soiled. The king rejoiced at the wise but was angry with the fools. “Those who adorned themselves for the banquet,”, ordered he, “let them sit, eat and drink. But those who did not adorn themselves for the banquet, let them stand and watch.

3. Richard Swanson makes this point in “Provoking the Gospel of Matthew: A Storyteller’s Commentary”, cited in “Bible Workbench” 21:6, p. 33.

4. anthropon

5. W. Martin Aiken, “The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.” presented at the Colloquium on Violence & Religion Conference in 2003, Innsbruck.

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