A Sermon for the Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost (25/10/20): The Last Two Questions

The Last Two Questions

Matthew 22:34-46 

Something is happening in Jerusalem. It is one of those moments when everyone knows that a crisis is coming. Like one of those hot heavy afternoons, when the air feels thick, close and dense, that can only end in a thunderstorm before evening. Jesus arrived in the city on Sunday. He’d come, surrounded by thousands who were singing songs of hope and expectation. They had welcomed him like a liberating hero. Everyone knows that by the end of this week the storm will break. The decisive moment will have come. Each of the differing groups within Israel knows something dreadful is about to happen. What they all want to know is: Is this the day of the Lord, or is this just another of those senseless disasters that seem to afflict them? And whichever it is, whose side is Jesus on? Before that crisis unrolls, all of the interested, rival parties are manoeuvring for position. They are trying to decide from which direction the wind will blow. They are trying to figure out where they must stand to weather the crisis which Jesus is creating, and how they should respond to him. Singly and in groups the differing parties within the national life of Israel come to Jesus in these days while he is teaching in the Temple. First come the chief-priests and the scribes who were dismayed by the cries of “Hosanna!” which Jesus had prompted. Then the chief-priests come back, this time accompanied by the elders of the people, and demand to know by what authority Jesus is acting. The chief-priests come a third time, on this occasion with the Pharisees, when they realise that Jesus’ pointed stories are pointing at them. After that the Pharisees come back, this time the Herodians come too, with a trick question about paying taxes. Then the Sadducees show up with a convoluted question about the resurrection. And on each occasion Jesus gets the better of their questions and defeats their attempts to make him define himself according to their agendas, as an enemy or as an ally of any of them. Jesus remains an outlier from the groups vying for power among the people of God. He continues to speak, as he has from the beginning, with a voice and an authority that is all his own.

The Pharisees approach Jesus one last time. They have seen Jesus get the better of their bitterest rivals, the Sadducees. The Pharisees still suspect that Jesus might be persuaded to take their side. This is why they have kept coming back to him so often throughout his ministry. They still hope he might join them, and bring the crowds with him. One of them, a lawyer, approaches Jesus as he is teaching in the temple.

“Teacher,” he says, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

This question about the law stands like a bookend to the whole of Jesus’ teaching ministry. When he started out, when people, the Pharisees amongst them, had first begun to wonder about Jesus, he told them:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17)

The law and the prophets are the defining teaching of God’s people. To be God’s people is to hear and obey what is written in the law. To be God’s people is to hear and live by the judgements and promises  that are spoken forth by the prophets. The question that has been raised by Jesus’ ministry all along in the minds of the Pharisees, as well as in the minds of the chief-priests and elders and Herodians and all the rest, the question raised by Jesus for all who would be God’s people is: what do those things mean? Is Jesus in continuity with those things, or does his ministry bring about a fundamental break with the past? The Pharisees define themselves by their meticulous adherence to the law. They are that strange combination, they are both radical and conservative. They take hold of the law, with all that has been handed down with it for 1400 years. They grasp it with a fierce passion, and they demand the same passion from everyone around them. The lawyer’s question asks one last time: is Jesus with them?

But even this question is not altogether straight-forward. It still contains something of the deceptiveness of the questions which the Pharisees have been asking Jesus all the way through his ministry. In the Pharisees’ minds the answer to the question, “which commandment is the greatest?” is “all of them!” The commandment which regulates the fringe on their robes is as important as the one which tells them not to commit murder. Every commandment comes from God, and therefore every commandment must be obeyed with equal determination. Paul, who has something of a Pharisaic turn of mind, knows and later points out that to break one commandment is in effect to have broken the whole law of God. But as the Pharisees, and their friends the scribes, amply demonstrate, the law (and the prophets) is always subject to interpretation.

Jesus’ answer though does not come as a surprise:

“You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

And Jesus, as he always does, gives more of an answer than his questioner is really looking for:

“And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

There is no controversy here. No one among the people of God disputes that these commandments stand at the forefront of the law. Their remit is so extensive as to include the intention of every other one of the 612 commandments in the law as well as everything found in the prophets. To be God’s people, in the time of Moses, at the moment Jesus stands in the Temple, and in all eternity, requires one thing: to love God. It requires that his people attend to reality, to what is really real, to what stands behind all that we experience in history and in each moment of our lives, and to know that it comes from God. To be God’s people is to know that this is all what God has done, and that it is good, and we shall love God for it.  And God’s people will love God with the intensity of heart, soul and mind, with the singleness of purpose that the Pharisees and Jesus both demand.

Yet God is an abstract. Our neighbours are real. The first commandment in practice can only be obeyed in the second. Each neighbour is made in the image of God, it is in the neighbour that God’s people encounter God. It is only by always seeking their well-being, in showing the same loving kindness shown by God, that God’s people can express their love for him. In practice, all of the law and prophets are built on this. It is hard to know who God is. It is hard to know what to do for our neighbours. The law and the prophets tell us.

The law and the prophets are but one pillar that supports the house of God’s people. The other is the hope in God which the prophets inspire. The other is the promise that God’s people will be free to serve God in holiness and righteousness without fear. The other pillar in God’s house is the promise of peace. This is what all God’s people look forward to and live in anticipation of. And this hope had become focused in the figure of the Messiah, the one anointed by God to bring about God’s reign and to establish that peace.

The crowd has already made up its mind. When they sang “Hosanna” as Jesus entered Jerusalem a few days ago they declared their belief that Jesus is the one. He is the one appointed by God to answer that prayer, “Hosanna! Save now!” This is why everyone knows the crisis is upon them. In the next few days it will become clear whether the crowd are right or not. But the chief-priests and the elders and the Herodians and all the rest are still trying to pick a side. Is the crowd right? Is Jesus the Messiah?

Is this the day of the Lord? Or is Jesus about to bring disaster down on all their heads?

Time and again Jesus has answered his opponents’ questions with a question. And he does so again.

“What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

Here is the question about that other pillar. Who is the Messiah? What will he be like? What have we seen before that will help us to recognise him when he comes? The answer to Jesus’ question, like the answer to the Pharisees’ before it, is hardly controversial. Everyone who has paid half-attention to the prophets knows the answer to that:

They said to him, “The son of David.”

There is no one among God’s people who disputes this. This is what God’s people are looking forward to: The establishment of God’s reign on earth under a king who has the same quality of closeness to God as the great king of the past. A thousand years ago a king reigned who gave to God’s people a brief period when they were free to worship God with fear, and when among them there was peace. Of the titles which people gave to Jesus, “Son of David” was prominent among them. Though as it happens it is not a title which Jesus uses of himself. Jesus doesn’t disagree with the Pharisees’ answer, but he does wonder what it could possibly mean. He has one last question, the final exchange in the long to-and-fro between Jesus and his opponents:

“How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord?”

Jesus reminds his questioners of a time when speaking prophetically in a psalm David had said:

“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.’”

Everyone agrees that David is talking about the Messiah there. God says to his anointed one to sit in the place of honour until all that God is seeking to accomplish for him is finished. But in that sentence David refers to the Messiah as “my Lord.” Yet a son cannot rule over a father. The replacement cannot be greater than the original. At first sight Jesus appears to have disappeared down the rabbit hole of obscure word games that the scribes and the lawyers seemed to find themselves in. But he is in fact pointing to a fundamental contradiction in the way the Pharisees were believing in God. Indeed Jesus points to a problem for all God’s people. Being God’s people is a “tradition.” That is, it is to receive something that is being handed on. This is why the question of the law and the prophets is so important. They are the substance of what is being handed on. Loyalty to those things are what define God’s people, there is no disputing that! But the problem with tradition, the problem with receiving what is handed on is that it tends to make God’s people (small ‘c’) conservative. They look to the past and allow it to shape their present and their future. But the past is too narrow a vision to understand what God is doing. It is not enough to call the Messiah “the Son of David,” even though Jesus’ followers are still right to use that title for him. Jesus is never just a replacement, a copy, of an illustrious original. At first sight the question: “How can the Messiah be David’s son if David says. . .” at first sight that question seems like a strange, obscure question to finally silence Jesus’ opponent. But it does! It does because it finally and conclusively demonstrates that when Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” he means something different than when the chief-priests and elders and Herodians and Pharisees and everyone else who looks to past mean when they say they are looking for the kingdom of heaven. And it is an irreconcilable difference. Jesus has not come to restore anyone’s idealised past to them.

By the end of the week, the storm breaks. Silenced, the opponents of Jesus, chief-priests, scribes, Herodians and all the rest conspire together. They contrive to have Jesus killed by the Romans. By Friday evening Jesus is dead and buried. On Sunday morning God does what God has never done before: he raises Jesus from the dead, to die no more. God gives a sign and a promise to all who would follow Jesus that they will share in his life. Jesus is vindicated. His opponents picked the wrong side. This is the day of the Lord

To be God’s people is to receive what has been handed on from the past. The law and the prophets stand unchanged and everlasting. Loyalty to that teaching is what defines the people of God. Their life is founded on, and built up from that double commandment: Love God; love your neighbour. And Jesus is the one who brings about the fulfilment of the promises made by the law and the prophets. Jesus does establish God’s reign in which God’s people can worship without fear and in which they can experience peace. But the past gives too narrow a vision of what God can do. God’s action in the world is never simply a repetition of what has gone before, nor is it ever a restoration of what is thought to be lost. What God does in Christ is new every morning.

Amen.

The Last Two Questions by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (18/10/20): A Trick Answer to a Trick Question

 A Trick Answer to a Trick Question

Matthew 22:15-22

Jesus’ answers the question which the Pharisees put to him:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that the emperor’s and to God the things that are God.”

There is a fundamental question which God’s people must always answer, how does God’s people live in the world. How do God’s people live and remain faithful and obedient to God in the face of all the powers that exist in the world? How do they retain their identity as God’s people? But also how do they fulfil the mission which God has given? How can God’s people engage with the world and do in and for the world what God wants them to. The two sides of those questions are in tension. They seem to pull God’s people in opposite directions. One impulse among God’s people is to stand apart from the world as separate and different and distinctive, as a way of maintaining their identity. The other is to become immersed in the affairs of the world and engaged in the needs of the world and its politics.

Opposition to Jesus produces strange alliances. Often it is a case of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” The Pharisees and the Herodians could hardly be further apart. They truly are strange bedfellows. It is a curiosity to find them united in an attempt to embarrass and discredit Jesus. They represent opposite poles of the answer to the question of the place of God’s people in the world. The Pharisees are the ones pulled in the direction of separation. Their mission among God’s people is to call them to faithfulness to God.  The Herodians represent the opposite impulse. They are the ones who accommodate themselves to the world. They engage with the world and its politics on the world’s terms Despite their opposition to one another, both the Pharisees and the Herodians recognise Jesus as a threat to them and their influence among God’s people. Jesus presents a third radical way of being faithfully God’s people in the world, that is in opposition to both the separatism of the Pharisees and the accommodation of the Herodians.

The question which the Pharisees take to Jesus is a trick question. They intend that Jesus either embarrass or incriminate himself with the answer which he must give. They wish to use his sincerity and forthrightness against him. But their question is as insincere as the compliments their followers pay to him:

“Teacher we know that you are sincere and teach the way of God in accordance with the truth and show deference to no one for you do not regard people with partiality.”

They don’t mean it. The “disciples” of the Pharisees are a strange group. This is the only place they appear in the Gospels. Surely disciples, followers, of the Pharisees are just Pharisees? What appears to be happening here is that the leading Pharisees are plotting against Jesus, but realise that Jesus will suspect a trick if they go in person. So they send their less prominent and less well known disciples, who Jesus might not recognise, to pose their trick question. What they say about Jesus is true. It’s just that they don’t believe it themselves. If they did, they would know that it wouldn’t matter who asked their question, Jesus would always give the same answer. That is what sincerity means. Jesus is always truthful. The Pharisees and their disciples say things they don’t actually believe. They are hypocrites.

The disciples of the Pharisees ask their masters’ question:

“Tell us what you think, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

This is the way in which the question of the relationship between God’s people and the world takes a concrete form for the people of Jesus day. God’s people are living in a world dominated by the power of the Empire. Just as God’s people have always and will always live in this world which is dominated by the latest shape that that power takes. The question for God’s people is; can they accept that rule? To what extent can they allow themselves to acquiesce or even be co-opted by that power? Jesus of course knows that the question is a trap. It is a trick question. It is meant to present him with an insoluble dilemma, between defending the sovereignty of God and accepting the actual power of Empire in the world. And of course, as he always does, Jesus sidesteps the trick question and turns the tables on his opponents:

“Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites. Show me the coin used for the tax.”

Jesus’ questioners, the Pharisees, again demonstrate their hypocrisy. They are caught in possession of a denarius, the silver coin with its idolatrous graven image of the emperor and its blasphemous inscription that declares Caesar both Lord and Saviour. But perhaps on this occasion their hypocrisy is less willful, it is merely the product of the impossibility of their project. There is simply no way to separate yourself from the world. Their puritanism is unobtainable. There is no space in the world where it is possible to live apart from the world And it’s not possible to construct such a place. Try as we might we can’t make ourselves separate from the messy compromises that are necessary simply to live in the world.

Jesus’ answer is every bit as much a trick answer as the question is a trick question. His reply is subtly ambiguous:

“Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus is carefully disingenuous. His answer can be interpreted in opposite ways depending on your outlook. And as such how you hear those words exposes what you really think. It is an ingenious reply to the question which was trying to trap him. The Heriodians can hear Jesus say:

“Engage with the world, accept the world the way it is, and deal with it on its own terms, pay the tax to Caesar and see what you can accomplish after that.”

The Pharisees can hear Jesus say:

“Hand that filthy lucre back to Caesar, get that idolatrous and blasphemous currency out of your purses and give it back to where it came from and have nothing further to do with the world after that.”

Or of course they could both hear it in the opposite way, and take offence at Jesus’ answer. Jesus pushes the question of the relationship of God’s people and the world back onto his questioners and onto everyone who is listening to him. And their response is Jesus’ judgement against them or their judgement against themselves. But Jesus has also cleverly avoided the trap which the Pharisees have set for him. He has not said anything for which he could be held accountable for in the courts of the Empire. He has not said in so many words: “Resist the Empire, do not not pay its taxes.” But nor has he said anything that shows any disloyalty to God. He has not said in so many words: “Accept the sovereignty of Caesar, acknowledge that the Empire rules here.”

This of course appears to leave us with a problem. Jesus’ answer is just as ambiguous to us as it is to the Pharisees and the Herodians. Jesus does not give us anything here to help us navigate our relationship with the world and its rulers. He doesn’t help us at this point decide how we are going to live as God’s people. Except, he does tell us how to do that in everything else he teaches. His answer here is ironic, even satirical. His listeners should know better than to accept his answer at face value. He, the Pharisees and even the Herodians all pray everyday, the Shema, the words from Deuteronomy that announce the basic faith of God’s people.

“Hear; O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

There is only one God. Israel knows no king apart from God. God’s sovereignty is absolute and universal. There is nothing over which God does not rule. So when Jesus says: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God’s." It cannot be taken at face value. There is nothing that isn't God’s which could be given to anyone else. In that way Jesus is close to the Pharisees. He shares with them the absolute insistence that God’s people owe loyalty and obedience to God alone. Jesus more than once reminds his listeners that it is not possible to serve two masters:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” (Matthew 6:24)

The Pharisees are right as far as their loyalty to God and their recognition of God’s sovereignty is concerned. But they are wrong in their desire to withdraw from the world or to create a separate sacred space in the world. There are not two kingdoms. The world and our lives cannot be divided into sacred and profane spaces.

The Herodians better understand that you must be involved in the world as it is. This is the only world in which we can live, and this is the world in which we have to work out our relationship with God and with our neighbours. Where the Herodians fail is in respect to the sovereignty of God. They concede too much to the power of this world. They engage with the world on the world's terms and use the world’s methods, and as a result utterly compromise the mission that God has given his people. One of the other fundamental teachings which Jesus, the Pharisees and the Herodians all share is the Great Commandment, part of which follows on immediately from the Shema in Deuteronomy:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,and with all your soul, and with all you might” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

And the other half is from Leviticus:

“. . . but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

Jesus’ answer to the question of God’s people's relationship with the world and its powers is already embodied in that ancient commandment. This is the commandment which Jesus says stands above all other commandments, and remains binding on God’s people. The Pharisees and the Herodians both fall short of the fullness of that commandment, but in opposite directions. Separatism fails to fulfil God’s call on his people by not engaging with the world and therefore failing to love the neighbours God has given us. Even as separatism seeks to fully acknowledge and abide by the sovereignty of God. Accommodation fails to fulfil God’s call on his people by not recognising the absolute and universal sovereignty of God. Even as accommodation seeks to be realistic in its dealings with the world and the power that is in it.

Jesus doesn’t give a simple answer to the question of how God’s people should live in the world. He doesn’t because there isn’t one. Nor could or should there be. And that is part of the problem. And that perhaps is why the impulse which drives the Pharisees and the Herodians and everyone like them is so powerful. Being God’s people in the world isn’t easy. But that doesn’t mean we should avoid the question. Instead Jesus offers us a challenging adventure of expressing our loyalty to God and our love of our neighbours in the actual circumstances of our lives. He calls us to live out the fulness of the great commandment, and to do that by following him where he leads.

Amen.

A Trick Answer to a Trick Question by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (11/10/20): Accepting the Invitation and Going Properly Dressed

 Accepting the Invitation and Going Properly Dressed

Matthew 22:1-14

There is a picture which is repeated all the way through the Bible of what God is offering people. It is the picture of a banquet. Jesus says - on more than one occasion:

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a banquet for his son.

This picture comes up again and again in Jesus’ description of what God’s rule will be like. It will be something like a family gathering. It will be a bit like the party you might have for a big birthday or to celebrate a christening or of course a wedding reception. There will be the best sort of food, with the richest most satisfying flavours, things we enjoy eating, in part because we only eat them at a celebration. But perhaps more important than the food there will be the sense of togetherness. Everyone we know and love, everyone who is important to us, will be gathered together, with a really strong sense of connection with one another. And all of this will take place in that atmosphere of joy and celebration  that those sorts of occasions create. Our experience of that kind of celebration, weddings and christenings and birthday parties, at their very best, offer us a sense, a small taste of the kind of life God is offering us together under his rule. That is what Jesus came to offer. That is why we call it Good News.

Of course in the story which Jesus tells the invitation which the king makes doesn’t get the kind of response that we might expect:

He [the king] sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.

The people who the king invited, it seems, have no need of the meal, not even the grand meal that the king is offering. They have better things to do instead.

Jesus comes to feed us. His invitation is readily accepted by those who are hungry. Those who are too busy and who are well fed are less like to accept what he has to offer. This is the real challenge for the Gospel and the church now. Most people don’t think they need what it has to offer. Most people are happy to think that they have or can get everything they need from their own resources. And that they can do that without having to respond to the kind of invitation which Jesus is making. It is not the case that we must people must be made to feel bad before the gospel can make them feel good again. We perhaps don’t need to convince well-fed people that they are hungry. Although the truth is perhaps that they are in ways they have never grasped. We don't have to convince the well fed that they are hungry, but rather we should remember that what we have on offer is a great celebration. In spite of what we sometimes say, the kingdom of God is not just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. But rather it is the open invitation to the grandest celebration imaginable. It is a call into a life lived with the sense of joy and togetherness that the best of family gathering creates. You don’t have to be particularly hungry to want to go to that sort of meal.

Jesus’ stories are never quite the quaint tales that we expect them to be. Often they seem to leave the safe, reassuring familiarities of the world we live in and enter a world of frightening possibilities. And this story takes a really shocking turn. It seems it was not enough simply to reject the generous offer to join in a celebration, to accept the hospitality and generosity that was on offer to them, some of those who had been invited actually became abusive:

They . . .seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.

And then things go from bad to worse. The king reacts as kings tend to, with the violent assertion of his authority:

The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burnt their city

All this seems like things have spiralled out of control. The refusal of an invitation had turned into a pretext for abuse and violence. Which in turn produced a terrible reaction. Which lead to more death and destruction. This all seems rather over the to. It is too much for what in the end was meant to be a party. What kind of a world is it where people would mistreat and even kill those who were only offering an invitation to be part of a celebration. What kind of a world is it where these kinds of thing can happen to those who were only extending welcome and generosity.And what kind of a king would wage war against those who would refuse his invitation.

Shockingly we might have to say: This kind of a world! Despite the strange extravagance of Jesus’ story the world we live in is actually the kind of world where those sorts of thing happen. Jesus’ story to begin with points to the history of his own people Israel. The Old Testament is filled with exactly that kind of reaction to God’s repeated invitations to his people. Over and over God’s messengers were mistreated by the very people they were sent to make the invitation to. Jesus at this point is also addressing the chief-priests and the Pharisees who are refusing to respond to the invitation he is making. And as the story unfolds in the next few days, that is exactly the way that Jesus is treated by them. The chief-priests and the Pharisees seize him, mistreat him and hand him over to be killed. And of course it hasn’t stopped there. Those who would still call the world to be a better place, who make the invitation to celebratory community, who make the call to live in the world as God intends it to be, who call for the hungry to be fed as all are at a party, and for everyone to be welcomed, as justice demands, still often they fall foul of those who have different, usually more selfish, visions of the way the world should be. And still wars are waged for reasons as seemingly trivial as turning down an invitation to a party. Particularly tragic are those conflicts created by those who would claim to speak for God, from whatever perspective, representing God from whatever religion. There are who take into their own hands the violent defence of God’s honour against those who they perceived to have insulted God, like those who turned the king’s invitation down and had their city burnt down. Tragically there is no shortage of people willing to take what they assume to be God’s rightfully indignation into their own hands!

But the gospel remains Good News. Another common feature of all these stories is God’s persistence God’s determination that there will be a celebration and it will be full of people of every kind:

Then he [the king] said to his slaves, ‘The wedding feast is ready but those who were invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invited everyone you find to the wedding banquet

One of the prayers in the communion service talks about the communion being: a foretaste of the banquet prepared for all people. The good news is that the invitation which God makes is universal. This is what we call grace. God wants everyone swept up into that great banquet. The invitation is being made to all people, in all places and at all times. Everyone is invited to take a place in this great celebration. The ongoing mission of the church is to make this invitation. “Come and be part of this - all are welcome.”

Sometimes we misunderstand the church. That it is only for a certain sort of person, usually a reckoned to be a bit better than others. It is a false picture that people both on the inside and the outside of the church have. On the inside we sometimes think ourselves rather privileged, somehow special to have received an invitation. Such an attitude, however unconscious it might be, is of course off-putting to those on the outside because it sometimes gives Christians a superior air. But sometimes also people stay away from church because they think they don’t belong, that somehow you have to be a certain sort of person to have share in this invitation. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. Jesus’ story gives a picture of who it is that is being swept up by the invitation that God is making. And it punctures the presumption that those who receive the invitation are in anyway superior to anyone else:

Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests

“Both good and bad,” I find that picture both realistic and reassuring. It is realistic because we all know that people involved in church are a pretty mixed bunch. But is also reassuring because it is a reminder that God’s call to be his people, to be swept up into his celebration, is truly inclusive. Anyone and everyone can be part of this. 

On other occasions Jesus ends his story there. The kingdom of heaven is a banquet to which everyone, especially those who are not normally invited to parties, to which everyone is invited. But this time his story takes a second really shocking turn:

But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man who was not wearing a wedding robe

The under-dressed wedding guest is dealt with swiftly and harshly. He is grabbed by the king’s servants. He is tied up. And he is thrown out.

Our naturally reaction of course is to sympathise with the ejected guest. “Poor fellow, one minute he’s been swept up into this glorious celebration, and the next he’s being tossed out of the banquet, He is treated so harshly and only because he wasn’t dressed right!” We want to make excuses for him: “Maybe he was too poor to have any fancy clothes.” “Maybe he didn’t have time to go back and get changed, after all remember what happened to the last group of people who made excuses when the invitation came around.” We want to see an injustice here. That the judgement against the man is false and unjustified. But by now we should realise that Jesus’ story isn’t about a real party. And the wedding garments that the man was lacking aren't just smart clothes. The man in question is thrown:

into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth

I don’t know of any venue: a pub or a club, or church hall that has a door that opens into “outer darkness.” Jesus’ words are of course a metaphor for something much bigger and important, something we might call existential. This has all been about the way God reaches out to us, and how we might respond. The “wedding robe” is being dressed in the kind of life that God calls us to live 

At the end of this month there is an anniversary that we don't celebrate because we hardly know it's there, though perhaps we should. The 31st of October is the anniversary of the start of the Reformation, which some traditions within the church do recognise and commemorate. The date (like most historical anniversaries) is somewhat artificial. It marks the date when Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg which marks the beginning of his break with the Church of his day. And this became the immediate catalyst that brought about the break in the Church into Protestant and Roman Catholic. What Luther emphasised, and what we celebrate as the distinctively Protestant insight, is that salvation is by grace through faith, not works. That is the first part of this parable of the wedding banquet: Grace is the universal invitation. And faith is the willingness to accept the invitation. “Faith alone” has been the great totem of Protestantism.

Two or three years ago a survey was conducted, asking Christians of both sides of that historical divide Protestant and Roman Catholic, what salvation required: faith? Works? Or a combination of both? The outcome was, to those conducting the survey at least surprising. A majority in both traditions and in more or less the same proportion, most Protestants and Catholics agree that a combination of both faith and works is required. That is in the metaphor of the story: Accepting the invitation that has been made by God, but turning up in the right clothes. Perhaps as Methodists we should not be surprised by this, and indeed welcome this as what we thought all along. Wesley got into trouble with the very “protestant,” "reformed" Church of England of his own day for suggesting just that faith need to become real in the lives that believers live. He posed his famous questions to those who would be Methodists: "Who shall be members of the society?" His answer puts the invitation to the banquet in its negative form: "all those who desire to flee the wrath to come." But he goes on: "Who shall remain members? Only those who bear fruit worthy of repentance." In the terms of Jesus’ parable: only those who put on a wedding robe. The answer to Wesley's questions is the same as the answer to the challenge which Jesus' parable makes: The banquet is for those whose lives are an appropriate joyful response to the invitation they have received. That is the fuller insight of both parts of Jesus’ telling of this parable

The mission of the church was and always will be to make the universal invitation. God invites all to take part in the great celebration that is his rule. But also the church is a movement of discipleship. It is us helping one another to “dress appropriately,” to lead lives worthy of the gracious invitation we have accepted

Amen.

Accepting the Invitation and Going Properly Dressed by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.