Jesus loved to tell a good story. He drew the people in, creating characters and situations that, while they were relatable, were often outrageous. He used hyperbole to challenge complacency on the part of the listeners, seeking instead to shake listeners up, and create energetic responses that might be fuelled by anger, pity, or even scandal as Jesus swept normal societal rules aside.
Through the centuries, Christians have sought to interpret and understand these parables, sometimes leading to rather facile, perhaps comfortable interpretations of parables becoming widely accepted. Often these interpretations remove any shock, or challenge that Jesus intended in his parables, instead offering us comfort and security, usually because through them we are the ones who are in the right.
It can be hard to step back from this in order to read these passages with fresh eyes.
This morning’s parable of the wedding feast, and the many invited guests, is a case in point.
A King invites a crowd of guests to his son’s wedding – we can imagine a grand affair. But to the King’s dismay no one accepts the invitation. The slaves are sent out a second time, seeking to entice guests with promises of a sumptuous dinner, only for his slaves to be rejected again, mistreated, and even murdered.
The King is enraged, and in his fury sends soldiers to murder the ungrateful guests, and to destroy their city.
We ourselves, via news broadcasts, are watching cities being destroyed in the present day. It is a terrible, merciless act run through with hatred, creating only deeper division, fear, and hatred. This is how this parable’s King acts.
Determined to have a celebration worthy of his position, he sends slaves out a third time, inviting everyone they can find in order that the King’s banqueting chambers will be filled with guests. Now surely he will be satisfied, reassured of his importance and power.
But he remains full of anger. Seeing one man who is not wearing the correct robes, the King challenges him, but, we are told, this man ‘is speechless’. Perhaps it is his silence that infuriates the King further, for he has him bound and thrown into the outer darkness. It’s a horrific story.
Now, the childhood interpretation I inherited explains that the king in the parable represents God. The first people to receive invitations are the Jews, because they have supposedly ignored God and indeed killed God’s messengers, the Old Testament prophets.
Following their repeated rejection of God’s invitations, new invitations are sent to new people, gentiles – that’s us and all Christians.
This is an interpretation that is still taught, something I find deeply troubling for it is surely an offensive, even dangerous interpretation.
In this the Jewish people get everything wrong, lose their place on God’s A list, and take a backseat to the more faithful and more deserving (Christian) church. It is a violent and wounding angle on the story, that participates in and perpetuates the long, bloody history of the church’s abusive relationship with the Jewish people, Jesus’ own people.
It feeds hatred, and the sows division, something the world is not short of at the moment.
There is a real danger with interpretations we learn and accept as children; that they are never challenged. So in this parable we might see ourselves sitting in self-righteous judgement of all those who are other, who reject the message. Meanwhile we are happy to enjoy a party while others are suffering outside the doors.
It has been said that religion should ‘comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable’. The theologian Amy-Jill Levine suggests that Jesus’ parables deliberately seek to do just this; afflict the comfortable. She writes: ‘If we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, we don’t hear any challenge, we have not heard Jesus’ words’.
So, what might this parable say to us today?
Let’s look at the King portrayed in the parable.
He is self-centred, full of resentment and vengeance, driven by uncontrolled emotion into acts of violence and destruction. He burns a city to appease his wounded ego. He forces people to celebrate his son’s marriage while his soldiers wreak destruction outside.
He casts a man he has invited into the party out into the ‘outer darkness’ because he is inappropriately dressed. Does this King represent a God you would be happy to worship this morning?.
What of the people? Well, I think there are some characters in this parable who we might see as followers of Christ.
The people who were invited first perhaps recognised the tyrannical King as someone that they needed to resist. When they received their invitations they were not prepared to put on their best clothes, and collude with a facade that deceitfully presented a popular leader who celebrated generously with his people.
They were prepared to stand up to his abuse of power and refuse to join in, and the cost to them was bigger than they might have imagined; it cost them their homes, and for some, their lives.
So is God in this parable at all? Could the guest who turns up but refuses to collude with the tyrannical King – symbolised by him not wearing the robe of forced celebration – be a Christ figure?
The one who, when accused, remains silent. The one who, because he holds to who he is and what he stands for, refuses to speak. The one who is bound, cast out into the outer darkness of Gethsemane, Calvary, the cross and the grave – could this character be God?
Parables told by Jesus, like poems, are not fixed in their meaning but invite our thoughtful participation. They speak to different times in different ways, and we should not shy away from wrestling with their truth for us here today. They should make us uncomfortable. They are meant to show us who God is, and who God isn’t, and how we can join in with God’s work today.
Today’s news is filled with stories of leaders across the world who demand loyalty and cast out any who refuse to fall in; leaders who believe their power gives them a right to destroy the lives and cities and communities of those who oppose them. There are, it is terrible to say, many to choose from – I wonder who comes to your mind?
But alongside stories of the leaders, there are also, often unreported in the media, stories of those who resist, who refuse to join in. Often at great personal cost.
I was struck this week by the story of Daouad Nassar, a Palestinian Christian from Tent of Nations, a farm close to Bethlehem, farmed by his family for over 100 years. He was speaking to participants in a walk of witness between Liverpool’s two cathedrals on the eve of the Labour Party conference, calling for a just peace in the Holy Land.
‘Our approach,’ he said, ‘is non-violent resistance. Even when they cut down our trees, damage our water tanks, and threaten us with guns, we refuse to be victims or to hate; we refuse to be enemies. We have to believe one day justice will prevail… When we see people in the UK joining the struggle and walking with us, we feel encouraged… Martin Luther King said the Church should not be the rear lights, but the headlights for justice.’
At the end of the walk Bishop Ruth Worsley led prayers from the steps of Liverpool Cathedral. ‘We have been reminded of the precious gift of hope,’ she said. ‘Hope for our communities and for our world … May we cherish one another, speak the best for all, and build a community where all can flourish and have a place… We commit to living our lives in ways which reflect your grace; may we be people of faith and forgiveness, of peace and justice, of hope and joy.’ Amen