The deceptive disobedient son, then the greedy killer caretakers, and now the contrary and insolent wedding guest (Matthew 22:1-14), all illustrate to us the fundamental rule that we shall be judged by our Lord on the basis of our deeds and actions. Our life and practice must harmonize with our faith.
The invited wedding guests
The example of the wedding feast, so common to every community of any time and clime, provided Jesus with a handy experience with which to visualize certain vital truths pertaining to the kingdom of heaven. The wedding banquet serves in the Old Testament as portraying the celebration of God’s saving love for humankind. The news of God’s reign is brought to the chosen people: some who heard the good news welcomed it, while some others rejected it and excluded themselves from God’s banquet.
This simple and outright original similitude became embroidered later. The evangelist in his final redaction already had a full-blown allegorized version of the parable or illustration for his Christian community. The groom, the king’s son, is our Lord Jesus Christ. Special people, the Jews, have been particularly invited to the wedding celebration. Similar to the parable of the killer caretakers, the group of servants sent to insure their coming to the banquet were the prophets first, then the Christian disciples and missionaries. The invited guests’ refusal to come and their preferred concerns, plus their maltreatment of the servants, dramatize the ferocious rejection of the Christian message on the part of the Jews. The burning of the city of the unworthy invited guests refers to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D.
The expanded list of guests
Again, similar to the parable of the murderous tenants where the vineyard would have to be entrusted to more worthy caretakers, here the wedding’s banquet hall will have to be filled with add-on guests. The sending of the servants into the main roads “to invite to the feast whomever” they encounter pictures the expansion of the Christian mission to include the gentiles. God’s design for the fulfillment and salvation of humankind cannot be thwarted by the intransigence of anyone. The joy of the wedding feast is there for the taking and now available to all, not only to the few but also to the many. Some may blindly refuse to have any part in it, but the human need and quest for it is undeniable out there in the streets where the good and the bad mingle in search of happiness. The invitation from above is universal; some may have received earlier notice than others, but no one is off-hand excluded and the invitation will eventually reach the others too as intended by the king.
To secure the particular attention of his Christian community as he delivers to them the two-edged message of the parable, Matthew adds as postscript to the original what could have at first circulated independently in the form of a moralizing second parable: the misfit guest. Among Christians are likewise some individuals caught up in worldly interests practically ignoring the call of the Gospel, while others in some power play of their own both resist the message and even try to throw a wrench into the proclamation of the Good News. But the case of one who carelessly and insolently appears at the wedding banquet without the appropriate attire points to those Christian believers who do not take seriously the imperatives of a true Christian life while outwardly affiliating to it.
Alálaong bagá, the white festal garment for a wedding banquet may as well be in reference to the white baptismal dress, the outward sign of Christian dignity and identity. “Bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven,” is said to the newly baptized (cf. the wedding bride’s “bright, clean linen garment,” Apocalypse 19:8). Not living up to that commitment produces nominal Christians who can be found in great number in every age. The condemnation of the contrary or incongruous guest is a certainty before the judgment throne of God. The same confrontation with the truth obtains in our approach to the banquet of the Eucharist, a foreshadowing of the eternal communion with the Triune God. How many of us do ostensibly but insolently sit at the banquet of the Lord without the festal garment of fidelity to the Gospel and instead mask a life of lies marked by the absence of Christ-like love?
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