a gig for a son

 

SERMON PREACHED at ALL SAINTS’, GLADSTONE

28^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (September 6^th) 2020

 

 

READINGS

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23                    

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

 

 

It is frustratingly critical that we take a constructive engagement with difficult passages like our Gospel passage today, however much I’d like to wriggle out of it. We need to break them open to find the context in which they were written, and to see if we can extrapolate from their first century world anything for our twenty first century world. Can we? Whatever context Jesus was originally addressing when  he uttered this quite dark parable, that context is lost to us now, and probably was almost lost even when Matthew pick up his quill and turned to a blank papyrus. But when Matthew was writing, not when Jesus was speaking, cataclysms had taken place: the Second Temple had been destroyed by angry Roman overlords, and Jewish confidence was shattered. Things weren’t altogether easy for the Christians, either, for Romans and Jews alike were turning their wrath on us.

Whatever disconnects exist between Jesus’ teaching and Matthew’s re-telling of the parable, the finger is firmly pointed at hypocrisy. Again and again Matthew records Jesus attacks on religious hypocrisy. There is an Empire (a “kingdom”). There is a king. But let’s not too readily think these are portrayals of God and God’s “Empire.” Jesus plays fast and loose with some of his symbols, and Matthew does too. This king is not very godlike (though even the ungodly become signs of God in other Jesus parables!). This king seems a whole lot tyrannical in a way that the God of the Cross (despite dangerous “penal substitutionary atonement” theories) is not. This king throws a gig for his son, but can we equate this with Father God and Son Jesus?

At any rate the invitees reject the invite, in the end doing so with grotesque, picaresque violence. Christians have tragically often found here a form of what we call “supersessionism”: the Jews blew their chance so aren’t we Christians blessed? (Well yes, we are … but not at the expense of their blessedness).

Certainly a city is burned, reminiscent of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. Slaves are sent out to replace the first invitees. But one new guest fails to wear the correct clobber, and God punishes him mercilessly, with stylized brutality. Is this the God we find revealed in the actions of Jesus Christ? Does God brutally punish failures? Much Christian teaching revels in this thought – and to some extent, when the first and second century equivalent of brownshirts or Gestapo come marching for our families in the dead of night that is not surprising. But ion the parable this last dramatic moment emphasizes the punishment of an “insider,” not an “outsider.” This man is part of the new in-crowd, and it is to in-crowd – to us – that these stern scenes are addressed.

In other words, however God may or may not treat those outside the faith community – and God does that by handing them over to the ramifications of their own volition (as Paul tells us in the opening of his letter to the Romans) – God also hands those who are sloppy in faith over to the ramifications of their sloppiness.

So what of us of the Comfortable Western Church? While the Gospel, even Matthew’s starkest Gospel-account with its much wailing and gnashing of teeth – is always Good News of grace, it is clear that we are challenged to look long and hard at ourselves. In a Covid-19 post-Christendom world we are called to do just that: look at ourselves.

The parable is an illustration, not an instruction manual.  God does not “send” Covid-a9 to punish innocent and guilty haphazardly. God does, I feel, “hand us over” to the ramifications of our greed, to our denuding of Planet Earth, to our exploitations of earth’s resources (and even this raises the question of why the poor suffer disproportionately).

In response we are called to show, to shine Christlight by the quality of our compassion and care. We can sidestep the very Matthean gnashing and wailing by turning our shabby wedding garb into love and compassion for the most vulnerable of the earth, the “wretched of the earth.” In the chapters to come Matthew will, with Jesus, turn his gaze on myriad forms of religious hypocrisy.

He calls us to be a servant people, to live in readiness for divine judgement. He calls us to live in readiness and to make goodness and faithfulness to the God of the Cross, the vulnerable compassionate God, the hallmark of our lives. He calls us to be custodians and dispensers – as we will see in Matthew 24: 46 – of God’s goodness. It is by this rather than by empty gestures that we become the bearers of Good News.