Twentieth
Sunday after Trinity
October
9, 2016
Matthew
22:1-14
The Selective King Who Chose You
In
the name of the Father and of the ☩
Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!
Imagine
treating your wedding banquet as though you were trying to get your
used car lot off the ground. Wedding guests are selected with great
thought and care; used car salesmen will take anybody with money.
The
kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for
his son. (Matthew 22:2)
This
is how Jesus' story starts: the king prepares a banquet for his son.
He carefully selects the guests and when the time comes, he sends
messengers to tell them. But they all declined—some just walked
away and other got violent.
The
rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. (Matthew
22:6)
Then
the king does what we'd expect any king to do.
The
king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and
burned their city. (Matthew 22:7)
So
far two regular things have happened (a king throws a party and a
king punishes murders) and one mildly unexpected thing (all the
king's subjects refuse to go to his party).
But
then Jesus' story gets very strange.
9[Then
king said to his servants:] 'Go to the street corners and invite to
the banquet anyone you find.' 10So the servants went out
into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both
good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. (Matthew
22:9-10)
The
king's servants are sent out and scoop up anybody they can find. So
the story begins with the king being very selective in a way we
understand. We understand thinking about all the people you know and
selecting which of them you want to spend time with a very special
day. We get that. We can relate to it.
But
then the king becomes selective in a very different way. We might
hear Jesus' story and assume that the king in his anger has become
careless and thoughtless. We might think that guests who end up at
the king's banquet for his son are there by accident. Listen to verse
nine.
[Then
king said to his servants:] 'Go to the street corners and invite to
the banquet anyone you find.' (Matthew 22:9)
He
very deliberately sends out his servants to select anyone they can
find.
Jesus'
king is the one true God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—and God doesn't
select in the same way we do. We hear the king bringing in all these
corner bodies and we sinfully see a mistake. (Some of us might know
that the corner bodies are us, so we end up getting ahead of
ourselves and missing the point.)
The
point of this story isn't that Jesus will take anybody. (He does
because He died for all, but that isn't the main point here.) The
point is that God carefully chose You to be with Him.
He
doesn't love you just the way you are.
He
doesn't select you because of the way you are.
He
hates you the way you are.
But
He selects you for His feast and
makes
you new and lovable and desirable.
Why?
Because
of His Son's death and resurrection.
Jesus
makes you into a good guest by putting good clothes on you.
He
has clothed [you] with garments of salvation and arrayed [you] in a
robe of His righteousness. (Isaiah 61:10)
These
garments of salvation and this robe of His righteousness is placed on
you at your Baptism. Jesus takes His death and His rising from death
on you; He writes you into His story.
This
explains the end of the story here. We already know that the king can
be harsh when the circumstances call for swift action. At the end the
king gets harsh again.
11But
when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who
was not wearing wedding clothes. 12He asked, 'Friend, how
did you get in here without wedding clothes?' The man was speechless.
13Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and
foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.' (Matthew 22:11-13)
In
those days the rich would provide clothing to their banquet guests.
Garments were provided for the days of the feast. And in the story
the king sees a man who was not wearing the clothes that he had been
offered. When confronted, the man has no answer. And the king has him
thrown outside.
What's
the unexpected thing here? It's that the man thinks he pulling this
off. He's walking around like John C. Reilly wearing a tuxedo T-shirt
and clown pants. He just looks ridiculous.
Or
to picture it another way, following the words of the story, he was
naked. “He wasn't wearing wedding clothes.” Just like the
Emperor's new clothes, a man struts around shamefully thinking that
he looks good. But the king calls out his arrogance.
The
ridiculous-looking man at the banquet symbolizes those who think they
can be a Christian based on their own goodness.
The
person who thinks they are a Christian, but refuses to go church is a sham Christian.
The
person who thinks they are a Christian, but doesn't receive Jesus'
body and blood for forgiveness is a sham Christian.
The
person who thinks they are a Christian, but hates their parents is a
sham Christian.
God
will expose these fakes in His time and He will cast them into hell.
Praise be to Christ that you are able to look into the mirror of
Luther's Catechism daily and examine what clothes we are wearing:
Jesus' wedding clothes, His righteousness or our own invented
goodness that rejects Jesus.
We
have been trained to be very selective. Another word for this is that
we are picky. God is picky, too. Carefully listen to Jesus' final
thought at the end of the story:
For
many are invited,
but few are chosen. (Matthew
22:14)
God
has called many, indeed all, to be with Him, but few are chosen. This
means you. You are chosen. Not because you are worthy and righteous
on your own, but because
God
made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might
[wear as wedding
clothes] the
righteousness of God.
Alleluia!
Amen!
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