Who Is Invited to the Wedding?

20 Pentecost, Cycle A  Proper 23, October 15, 2023
Exodus 32:1-14  Psalm 106
Philippians 4:1-9 Matthew 22:1-14

Lectionary Link

The biblical record is a history of sorts of various people who discover relationship with God.  History is presented in before and after linear ways and in such presentations, one can be left the impression that God becomes something more after than what God was before.  And this may seem true in the progressive understanding of God in human awareness.

The parable of Jesus about the invitation protocols for a great wedding feast illustrates the difference between prior understandings of God and more enlightened understandings of God.

Since the Hebrew Scriptures indicate that a people had a distinct identity built around the story of their discovery of and relationship with a singular unique God, such a storied relationship could give them or any people a sense of being first and favored of all humanity in the eyes of God.

By the time Jesus was telling his teaching stories, much of his crowd were aware of the favored people, such that people believed that God had A listers, B listers, C listers, and outcasts.

We perhaps need to understand the parable in a reverse way.  God is love.  There is and has never been outcasts with God.  Everyone has, always, already been invited to the God wedding, the wedding of divine with the created order by virtue of creation bearing the image of God.

But this divine wedding of God has not always had ideal and universally promulgated invitations.  Israel discovered their invitation in their covenant with God as consummated in their receiving of the laws as their wedding vows with God.

In the record of the people of these covenant vows with God, they are honest about their failure to keep the vows even while maintaining their sense of having an exclusive lock upon who has access to this great on-going wedding feast of God's immanence in the created order.

In a linear presentation of the history of relationships with God, it can seem that many people have not heretofore been invited to the knowledge of this great marriage of God and creation.  The fact that the seeming previously uninvited are finally invited, is not the truth of an always inviting God; it is truth of how people come to the awareness of God.  It is the history of how some people presume to hoard or presume an exclusive relationship with God which is not offered to others.

The parable of Jesus establishes the fact that God invites everyone to the divine presence in the created order.  This universal invitation challenges those who believe that they have some exclusive privilege with God.

The parable also highlights in a rather enigmatic way God's egalitarian and social leveling ways.  In the wedding of God, God provides the dress for all to meet the dress code, the equal grace that is provided for all, irregardless of their ethnic, social, or economic condition.  In the parable one guest treated it as though it were the Met Gala, in wanting to stand out in his unique garb trying to make his statement about being "better dressed" than the others.  The punishment seems harsh but it is only evocative about there being no replacement for the equality of grace in the invitation and the entrance into the realm of God.

We are invited today to regard God, the way that Jesus did, first as the One who has always, already universally invited all to be aware of the divine realm in which we live and move and have our being.  And we are invited to don the social leveling garment of grace which has been provided for us and everyone to meet the appropriate dress code for the perpetual celebration of the marriage of divine with the created order.  May God help each of us know that we and everyone else has been invited to this great event of Love of God for us and our world.  Amen.