Free Tickets; Expensive Event
(Matthew 22:1-14)

21st Sunday after Trinity (Proper 23), 12 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

In addition to being a cathedral chaplain here at St. John’s, I have another job where I regularly have to plan and organize, and often attend, big events. Here in Hong Kong, people often go to dinners, eat breakfasts, attend parties, and go sailing on junks with people they barely know, and we call these things “social.” But we are more accurate when refer to them as “obligations,” as in, “Sorry, I can’t attend. I have a prior obligation.” We are obliged to go to them because of our jobs: to network, to develop contacts and relationships, to grease the skids of our business. We all know these events-- some of us as guests; some as hosts or organizing staff; some as support staff, actually preparing or serving the food and drink, providing the entertainment, or cleaning up afterwards.

Make no mistake -- in a place like Hong Kong, “social events” are about power and money. How many of us find ourselves at events we might not have attended had the event not involved our boss, a possible major contributor, or a client? How many of us have dutifully served for hours as “party stuffers” – props to make the event look lively, full, fun, and attractive? How many of us have had to scramble to get more guests to come when we get an unexpectedly high number of “regrets” to an RSVP? How many of us have had to wear uncomfortable but stylish clothes, or funny-looking uniforms serving at such events, simply so that they “look right”?

Occasionally the events work and we actually enjoy them, which is, after all, the whole point—you make what might be an otherwise unpleasant task or adversarial relationship into something more pleasing and conducive to cooperation.

It is about just such a “social” event that today’s Gospel reading from Saint Matthew is about. Jesus recounts a parable—a comparison that tells us about our relationship with God by drawing a parallel with something from regular life—a detail, practice or story—sometimes mundane, sometimes unusual.

The parable as told here has a real edge, and at first blush appears to be about a bunch of seriously disturbed people. A king orders the senior members of his court to the prince’s wedding banquet. This provokes serious insubordination by some, who simply blow the invitation off, and outright rebellion by others, who proceed to kill the king’s messengers. At this the king flies into a rage and sends in the troops to wipe out not only the rebelling nobles but their city as well. He then orders his staff to scramble to find someone—anyone— to serve as party stuffers. Once the random passersby are seated at the party, the king notices that one of them isn’t wearing just the right attire for an event of such dignity. He again goes a little crazy, and orders his people to tie the poor man up “hand and foot” and throw him outside into the darkness, where there is nothing but “weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew ends with a moral to the story: “Many are called, but few are chosen” that is, “the invitation may have gone out broadly, but only those who accept the invitation and come in proper clothes can stay for the whole party.”

Now over the ages there has been no shortage of capricious, erratic leaders who behave in ways that encourage rebellion, murder whole villages, abuse their staffs, and change their minds about guest lists and appropriate evening dress at the last minute. But Matthew is not trying to say that God is like one of these sadly familiar characters. His description of the original invitees’ bad RSVPs, both insubordinate and rebellious, and the bit about the poor man in the wrong clothes underscores that the story is about how the guests behave, not the king. It is about how we respond to God’s invitation and then act at the event.

The Gospel of Luke, written about the same time as Matthew, tells an earlier form of the parable, one that is also preserved in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

Here is how the original parable probably went:

A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many guests. When all was ready, he sent his servant to summon the guests. But one by one, they all began to give excuses for not coming. The servant reported this to his master, who in a rage commanded his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here anyone you find. I want my home to be filled for the banquet.’

When Jesus originally told the story, everyone knew that one of the great images of the Hebrew scripture for God’s saving act at the end of time was that of a great banquet. Even though there were plenty of passages that said, like today’s Old Testament reading, that this banquet would be for people of all nations (Isaiah 25:7), many of the religious teachers around Jesus taught that this would be an exclusive event limited to God’s people only.

Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12)

But not everyone wanted a God as generous as the one Jesus described. They would quote scriptures that “proved” God was picky and exclusive. Jesus would reply by quoting other scriptures, where God looked more loving. He reserved his deepest anger for people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13). He told other parables to explain why it was that despite God’s overwhelming goodness and generosity, some people were right with God and others were not.

One is the story of The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: a “religious” man goes to the Temple and prays, “Thank God I’m not like the sinners around me.” Beside him stands a traitor—a collaborator with the occupying Romans, a man who profits from the sufferings of God’s people. The traitor stands far off due to his shame. He won’t even lift up his eyes to God because he fears that God might give him what he deserves. “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he prays. And Jesus says that the traitor went away right with God while the so-called religious man went away as stone-cold-hearted as he came (Luke 18:10-14).

It is in this context that Jesus tells the parable of the Great Banquet. His point is that God’s banquet is open to all, not just those originally invited. Some people, thinking they’re too important, may actually turn aside God’s love. Jesus, as a Palestinian Jew, loved and respected the Law that set his people off as God’s chosen ones. But he knew that the Law was not enough. Human beings could take even something as holy and pure as God’s Law and twist it into something ugly and oppressive. That is why he is so insistent, in his stories and deeds, on what St. Paul later calls grace and how we must be aware of our need for it.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is a good Jewish Christian who follows Jesus in all of this. But he is also lives in a world where the Church has already been opened up to gentiles, and trying to understand how God could have let Jerusalem and the Temple be destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Matthew tends to blame this national catastrophe on the rejection of Jesus by the religious leaders—that is probably why he adds the nobles’ murder of the king’s servants and the destruction of their village. Matthew is also afraid that some Gentile Christians have taken liberties with very basic things that should not be taken advantage of. His detail about the proper wedding attire underscores that regardless how broad the Church has grown, there are still be standards for the gentile late-comers to God’s banquet.

There is nothing so holy or good that we human beings, left to our own resources, cannot manage to mess up. In his day, Jesus stressed that we can twist God’s Law into something ugly and oppressive. Matthew, in his, said we also can misuse God’s grace, and twist it into an excuse for cheap self-will. You know what I’m talking about. How many of us haven’t wondered at some point whether we might go ahead and do something we know in our heart is deeply wrong thinking “it’s O.K., I’ll repent later. God will accept me back.” Phillip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing about Grace?, calls this twisting of grace into an excuse for sinning as “the loophole of grace.”

Just before and during World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship used the term “cheap grace” to describe using God’s grace as an excuse for spiritual laziness or mediocrity in following Christ. He argued that we should dutifully and joyously follow Jesus out of gratitude for his grace. Such gratitude for expensive, precious grace on Jesus part requires a lifelong commitment to the way of the cross: self-sacrifice and service. Bonhoeffer had been studying and working in the United States but then returned to Nazi Germany in order to serve his fellow German Christians and witness against the wrong that was overtaking his country. Unrelenting in his witness, he was ultimately executed brutally by the Nazis.

It is precisely “cheap grace” and the “loophole of grace” that St. Matthew condemns in his image of the man caught without proper wedding clothing. This celebration can have no party poopers, no half-hearted acceptance of free tickets, no cheapening of the event by haughtiness of the original invitees or inattention by latecomers.

To summarize in other words: in order to accept the invitation, we have to be open to receive it. St. Augustine says, ‘God gives where He finds open hands.’ You can't receive the gift if your hands are already full, or are clenched tight.

In yet another parable, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a narrow path and a tight gate, which at any given time only a few can manage to squeeze through (Matt 7:13-14). This is because in order to get through such a tight fit, people have to be willing to abandon all the baggage they are carrying, whether riches, resentments, self-will, sins, or even what appears to be good things if they are getting in the way.

This is a far cry from the loophole of grace, from “cheap grace.” Yancey tells of a friend who asks, “will God forgive me of the really bad thing I’m about to do?” After a lot of thought, Yancey answers, “Of course [God can forgive you.] . . . Forgiveness is our problem, not God’s. [But] what we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later?”

Likewise, C.S. Lewis said that asking God to forgive our sins without also sincerely wanting to amend our lives is like asking God to change us without changing us. Cheap grace, the loophole of grace—these simply misunderstand what is at issue in grace, and what is at issue in sin.

What does accepting grace, freely offered, look like in practical terms? It looks like me admitting that I am helpless and hopeless. It sounds like the sincere phrase “I am sorry and I humbly repent.” It feels like a heartfelt cry, “I throw myself totally on the merits of a merciful Jesus.” None of these are payments in a transaction, or actions that merit God’s favor. None of them provide excuses to cheapen the price with which we were bought. They are simply acceptance of grace offered. In the long run, a life lived in that grace starts bearing what St. Paul called the fruits of the Spirit: we begin to follow Jesus in self-sacrifice and grace toward others.

I myself have known God’s grace. At a particular time in my life, all was hopeless and helpless, through my own “thoughtlessness, weakness, through my own deliberate fault.” Marriage was unraveling, health was fading; career was careening. I found that I had to surrender to God, and accept my own powerlessness. Then gradually, steadily, God worked wonderful changes. I am still far from what God wants. But I live each day in gratitude that I am not what I was.

I suspect that many of you have had similar experiences. If so, continue in faith and gratitude, and share the invitation to the party through your actions and words.

If you have not had such an experience, then please listen to this call to God’s banquet, you random passerby. The tickets are free. But they are not cheap. And neither is the celebration. The banquet is priceless, the bread the finest, and the wine, a vintage that makes our hearts gladder than any other.

Come to the banquet, and let’s try to wear the right clothes.

In the name of God, Amen.