and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
28th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 15th) 2023
READINGS:
Exodus 32: 1-14
Psalm 106: 1-6, 19-23
Philippians 4: 1-9
Matthew 22: 1-14
I mentioned last week that the Bible
can be awfully problematical at times. In the context of the Matthew passage
this week I fins myself muttering “Really, Jesus? At the very least could
you not have just stopped at the the end of the bit about a wedding hall full
of guests?” So I did! If you check against a lectionary you’ll find a rather
toxic four verses follow, but for now I feel it’s better to stop with the sense
of God throwing open the doors of the banquet and ushering in the flotsam and
jetsam of society.
Which may or may not be you and me. If
we start thinking God owes us a favour and isn’t it lucky for God that we’re
here, then we may belong in the omitted passage. For there, the God-figure
tells a bloke wearing the wrong suit that he’s there on false pretences, and in
typical Matthew style he is thrown out to join a bevy of teeth-gnashers and
wailers.
We make light of a doctrine of judgment at great peril. There are forms of Christianity that say any old cloth will do. That I can live my life however I like, exploiting whoever I like, preying upon whoever I like, sneering at or bullying whoever I like, and, in good kiwi style, “she’s right,” or as they say in some parts of Australia, “she’s apples.”
No – God is not a plaything, nor made in my image: to
think that of God is to contravene that commandment about using the name of the
Lord in vain, and God gets very grumpy about that. I don’t think, as I
have said many times before, that God airily waves a nonchalant hand at the
atrocities that we are seeing on both sides of the Israeli-Arab borders. I
don’t think those who are sexual predators, especially sexual predators in the realms
of faith, are airily dismissed as mere miscreants: such people desecrate the
very essence of God.
But I do think we can grasp great and
for want of a better word “eternal” hope in the over-the-top scene of the
wedding banquet. Jesus in fact engages in a sort of dark humour in these
passages, at least as they were recounted by Matthew decades later. No king is
really going send a son chooffing off to face heinous murderers who have
already killed all the king’s key players. Even tyrant kings are not that dumb.
Well not often, and not when it clearly puts them at a disadvantage.
No: for all Matthew was writing for a
persecuted audience, and therefore tended to tell his Jesus stories in such a
way that the community could believe that persecutors would receive their
come-uppance, for all that, there is a wonderful generosity in the parable of
the wedding banquet. For the God-figure here throws open the doors of
blessedness to you and to me, to our forbears and to our descendants.
The nonchalant and the murderous characters of this Jesus Parable are not the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, those who didn’t
get his messiahship. They are you and me and all who claim faith but who by our
words and actions close doors faster, almost, than God opens them. We are,
where we get it wrong, the nonchalant and the murderous.
Paradoxically we can also be those, the
good and the bad, who are invited as a second option to join the feast of God. For
all humanity is here invited to receive the mad generosity of divine love. We
just have to accept the invitation. And live it.
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