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In Matthew 22:1-14, Jesus tells a parable saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come.”
Look who is throwing it: a king. What if you got an invitation from a billionaire friend to his son’s wedding at his mansion? All expenses paid for you and your family, a weekend of dining on nothing but the finest and dancing to first-class live music. Just think of how the paparazzi descend upon celebrity weddings because they know the opulence and fanfare to be seen. This would be the party of a lifetime. Would your reject the invitation? Yet in the parable, that is what happened. It was not any old wedding; it was a king’s feast, but those invited yawned and said, “Nah. Not for me.”
But the king is gracious and persistent beyond belief. Jesus continues, “Again [the king] sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, see, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’ But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.”
Everyone blows off the invitation. So, Jesus explains, “The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So, the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
So, what does it all mean? First off, since the parable is about the Kingdom of Heaven, the king is God the Father and the son is God the Son. The people invited to the banquet are all who hear the Gospel, who have been given the invitation to be saved by Jesus. Those attending the banquet are members of the Christian Church on earth, and the slightly confusing part is that the bride is the one, holy, Christian, and apostolic Church of all times and all places: the Bride of Christ.
We have to use the whole Bible to fill in the details that led up to this wedding and wedding feast. This has not been a fairy-tale courtship, where the bride was a pure virgin who was swept off her feet by a prince. This courtship has from the beginning been totally one-sided, and it is really hard to believe the great love of the Groom for His Bride.
In the Garden of Eden, God brought about a perfect marriage between the Bride and Groom, God and Mankind, but the Bride cheated on the Groom with Satan and tried to break off the marriage with God. Yet God did not give up, and sought to bring His bride back home. He chose Israel to be His people, His Bride, His beloved with whom He would dwell. He pledged His faithfulness, and Israel pledged hers. Yet again and again, Israel played the adulteress.
Finally, God took matters into His own hands, literally. God the Father sent God the Son to be conceived by God the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary in order to reclaim His Bride once and for all. The Groom was faithful in all the ways that the Bride had not been, by perfectly obeying God’s Ten Commandments, fulfilling all righteousness. Then Jesus willingly laid down His life to pay for the Bride’s sins and purify her, dying for the sins of His Bride, and then rising again so that He could bestow the gift of Holy Baptism on His Church, the Baptism by which sinners are washed clean and guiltless in His holy blood.
That sets the stage for the wedding feast, and all of us have been invited, all of us who believe and are baptized have been brought in; the good and bad among us, no distinctions made by the King. Actually we are all bad. We have all sinned and fallen short of being worthy of this wedding banquet, so it is a total gift that we are invited at all. Why would we ever refuse such a generous and gracious invitation from our King? Repent and believe the gospel. Amen.
