The Parable of the Great Banquet in Matthew

Last time we looked at the Parable of the Great Banquet as recorded by Luke. It was a beautiful story of God’s willingness to do anything to ensure the Kingdom is as full as possible. Matthew tells a very similar story, but with a few details changed so that it has a very different impact, effectively changing it from a parable of grace to a parable of judgment.

Text

Today’s text is found in Matthew 22.1-14:

[22.1] And again in response, Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: [2] The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who was a king, who held a wedding for his son. [3] And he sent his slaves to summon the guests to the wedding, but they did not want to come. [4] So he sent other slaves, saying, “Tell the invitees: Look I have prepared my feast: my bulls and my fattened calves have been butchered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet! [5] But they made light of it and went away, one to his field and another to his business. [6] But the rest seized his slaves, treated them outrageously, and killed them. [7] And the king grew angry and sent in his troops to destroy those murderers and burned their city. [8] Then he said to his slaves: “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited were not worthy of it. [9] So go into the thoroughfares and invite whomever you should find to the wedding banquet.” [10] And those slaves went out into the roads and gathered everyone they found, bad and good alike; and the wedding seating was full. [11] But the king entered and looking over those seated, he saw there a man who was not wearing the wedding garment. [12] And he says to him: “My fellow, how did you enter here when you didn’t have the wedding garment?” But he was speechless. [13] Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind his hands and feet and throw him out into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth!” [14] For many are called, but few are chosen.

Experience

There’s a classic episode in Star Trek in which the crew encounters a ‘mirror universe,’ a universe parallel to but opposite our own: where at home they lived in a democratic federation dedicated to diplomacy and exploration, their mirror universe featured an autocratic empire dedicated to conquest. Reading the two versions of this story side-by-side feels like slipping between these mirror universes: Suddenly the generous host comes across more like a violent and vengeful dictator. What’s going on here?

The ultimate point of the parable — that God’s Kingdom will be filled at all costs — remains the same, but it’s taken on a much darker tone.

Encounter

It’s interesting that an audience is not specified here; even looking back to the previous chapter, the audience could be seen as a diverse group of religious leaders in increasing opposition to Jesus, or the welcoming crowds; the best option seems to be a mixed audience including both.

In the parable, the stakes have been raised: the host is now a king, and the dinner he’s throwing is now a wedding feast. We get less detail about those on the guest list, but they here they don’t just insult the host with poor excuses but go so far as to murder his envoys, a detail which reminds me of the Parable of the Tenants in the Vineyard. Matthew’s version also adds a new character, someone thrown out of the party because he’s not appropriately dressed. What an odd detail!

Explore

Because this version of the story is so much more challenging than Luke’s, we’ll be spending much of our time in the ‘challenge’ section. But the different details in this story deserve some attention first.

Literary Context

As we saw at the start of the series, Jesus’ shift to teaching in parables coincided with the increased opposition to his ministry. Now, however, Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem and everything is coming to a head. In the previous chapter, the crowds had welcomed Jesus like a king and Jesus had cleansed the Temple — both of which raised the ire of the religious authorities. They question his authority and try to entrap him, and he responds by rejecting their authority by telling two parables suggesting that God has rejected them too. We’ll look at the second of these, the Parable of the Tenants in the Vineyard towards the end of the series, but it bears several similarities to the Parable of the Banquet, including its themes of the rejection of genuine authority by ‘insider’ subordinates including the murder of official envoys, and their replacement by others (SBL; Capon; Case-Winters).

This difference in context goes a long way in explaining the differences in the two tellings: In the first, Jesus is talking to a group of Pharisees when they are still on good terms and Jerusalem is still a ways off. In that context, the focus of the story is on the generosity of God’s invitation and the restoration of the full vision of Isaiah 25. But in this heightened context, with heightened tension and real danger everywhere, the story itself becomes heightened (Capon).

Narrative Details

The ways Matthew’s version raises the stakes make sense within the broader biblical framework. The image of God as a King was a common and ancient image — as old as kingship itself, so it’s a natural progression from God as a landowner (Walton & Keener). Similarly, when combined with the common Old Testament symbolism of God’s relationship to Israel as a marriage, Isaiah’s vision of God’s Kingdom as a lavish feast could readily transform into a wedding banquet. Nowhere is this more vividly shown than in the climactic scene of the New Testament, the ‘Marriage Supper of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19.9ff) (Capon). And again, if, as we saw last time, a host’s honor was reflected in the size and calibre of the guest list, so were ancient weddings as large as possible (Walton & Keener).

The greater the honour, the greater the offense, so the excuses given by the initial guest list are all the more insulting in this scenario. They even abuse and murder the king’s envoys, shocking behaviour, tantamount to open rebellion (Capon; Walton & Keener). Whereas the host of Luke’s version simply ignores the insult, the king here cannot ignore the declaration of war, and so responds in kind, destroying the city. This detail would no doubt have resonated with Matthew’s first readers, who would remember the destruction of Jerusalem (Gale 66; SBL; Walton & Keener).

Where Luke’s version of the parable then focuses on the invitation of those ostracized out of poverty or disability, Matthew’s is more ethically coded, with both ‘the bad and the good’ gathered from the streets. This puts it in line with the parables of the kingdom, such as the Sower, the Weeds and the Wheat, and the Net, with their message of indiscriminate gathering into God’s kingdom (Capon).

Finally, Matthew’s version of the parable ends with an extra scene: Once the wedding banquet is underway, the king notices someone not appropriately attired, and casts him out into the darkness. Several sources note that it was common custom for a high-class wedding host to provide garments for his guests to wear (Nuectherlein Proper 23A^; Capon; Walton & Keener). If this is the case, then, his refusal to wear the garment is a rejection of the king’s gift. In a Christian context, this detail has traditionally been read as a reference to the ‘garment of Christ’ the faithful ‘put on’ at baptism (see Galatians 3.27; cf. the Holy Spirit and Uncreated Light of the Transfiguration: Luke 24.49; Acts 10.30; 2 Corinthians 5.2; Ephesians 4.24; Colossians 3.10-12). As Walton & Keener note, “If the first invited guests represent Jerusalem’s leaders at Jesus’ first coming, the rudely dressed man perhaps represents professed followers of Jesus unprepared for his second.” This warning about preparedness is in keeping with early rabbinic teaching (b. Shabbat 153a), as well as Jesus’ parables of judgment — as we’ll see in the coming weeks.

Meaning

Read in this way, all this is just a stronger version of the message of Luke’s version. The king’s stronger and violent response is required by the guests’ stronger and violent rejection, and this does not outweigh the parable’s clear message of God’s indiscriminate gathering into the Kingdom. It’s important to note that “Nobody in the parable is outside the king’s favor; everybody starts out by being, as far as the king himself is concerned, irrevocably in” (Capon). The original guests and the man without a wedding garment are excluded only by their own refusal to participate, whether by laughing at the invitation or showing up unprepared.

Challenge

This reading of the text gives it essentially the same meaning as Luke’s version, just with the heat turned up. But a number of scholars, including some whom I greatly respect, think this is being too kind to it and that we simply cannot overlook the tyrannical behaviour of the king here. Paul Nuechterlein calls this king “an example of the worst kind of dictator, who would even fill his banquet hall for a joyful occasion by using lethal force and terror.” Marr, based on work by Marty Aiken, similarly thinks Jesus is describing King Herod here, not God (Marr). Read in this way, those who make light of the invitation are like those who try to keep a low profile during a tyrant’s reign, while the guests who kill the messenger are those who actively resist him. His violent response is unwarranted and a sign of his derangement, and the order to fill the banquet hall at all costs not a joyous sign of welcome too good to be true but an ego-driven, sword-point compulsion.

We might very well ask where the Kingdom of Heaven is in such a reading of the parable. To Nuechterlein, it’s in the figure without a wedding garment, who becomes a Christ-figure: Both show up and spoil the tyrant’s party just by refusing to toe the line and look and act like everyone else and both are beaten and abused and abandoned. And so just as the Kingdom was to be found in the weed-like growth of the mustard seed or the insidious work of leavening fungi in a lump of dough, here it is to be found in the unlikely form of one who refuses to play along with a tyrant’s whim.

That such an interpretation works so easily should certainly give us pause, but to me it’s unconvincing. On the side of the more traditional interpretation, we have the almost identical parable in Luke that avoids the problems of Matthew’s version and the fact that the details altered at the start of the story — turning him into a king and the feast into a wedding banquet — only heightens the symbolic connections to the God and the heavenly banquet. There is also no hint that he is a tyrant until his acts of vengeance for the murder of his messenger. Additionally, the language of ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ is also found in other judgment settings in Matthew — for example in the explanation of the Parables of the Weeds and the Wheat and the Net.

Really, the only thing the revisionist reading has going for it is that it is less messy. While it would be nice if our Scriptures were tidy and only portrayed God in nice, nonviolent imagery, that’s just not the Scriptures we’ve been given. Yes, the details of this story are disturbing, but I think they fit the high-tension context in which Jesus delivered them, and are in keeping with the language of judgment found throughout the New Testament. Again, some form of judgment is required for there to be any true justice, and Jesus uses the stereotypical, violent imagery of his day to talk about just as often as he subverts it.

Expand

With all this in mind, this version of this parable works much the same way as Luke’s version, though the two differ according to the pet themes of the two authors and the different contexts in which the stories were told. They agree that the Kingdom of God offers a wide and expansive welcome and that the only people who are excluded are those who reject the invitation. But, while Luke characteristically focuses on the welcome of the marginalized, Matthew talks about bringing in both ‘the bad and the good’. In calling back to the Parables of the Weeds and the Wheat and the Net, Matthew’s version also reminds us about the indiscriminate gathering in of God’s Kingdom and the need for us to withhold judgment against others. Additionally, the added detail of the man without a wedding garment precludes the easy finger-pointing about ‘us’ and ‘them’, as it requires us as readers to reflect on the quality of our own ‘garment’, that is the good fruit of a Christlike life, before God.

Summary & Conclusions

In the high-tension, high-stakes context of Jerusalem after the Triumphal Entry, when the religious authorities were actively plotting against Jesus, he returned to a parable he had previously told to another group of Pharisees: one that spoke of those who had ‘every right’ to welcome into God’s Kingdom refusing the invitation and so being replaced by those with ‘no right’ to be there. But the extremity of the context lent itself to a more extreme telling of the story: the lord is now a king, the dinner now a wedding banquet, the original guests now in open and violent rebellion that requires a stronger response in order for justice to be done.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.

^ All references to Nuechterlein in this post are to this page.