Expect More
Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
I have been conditioned by the American entertainment I consume to always expect a happy ending. Although I gravitate towards a glass-half-empty worldview, I can’t deny that I like it when things “resolve” at the end, ideally in a neat and tidy (and unreal) manner. Similarly, I want a gospel that unconditionally accepts us as we are, with all our blemishes and deficiencies. I want to equate Jesus’ call to “come and see” to “come as you are.” Perhaps I’ve been drinking too much of the San Francisco kool aid, as I’ve called this city home for the last 25+ years. San Francisco’s acclaimed mantra of hospitality is that all are welcome, come as you are. Here, we’re not going to judge you or ask you to change. You can stay as you are. I’ve had increasing dissonance with that kind of laissez faire mindset. Yet, this also sounds roughly parallel to what we’ve consumed as North American Christians – that our individuality, our unique situation, is supreme over all else. The North American church has been “deformed” to unconditionally accept and not question personal choices, especially when it relates to family, money, sex and politics. This brand of Christianity wants to preserve autonomy and casual relationships. So we can choose the terms of our belonging.
This week’s gospel reading in Matthew follows Jesus' exuberant red carpet parade into Jerusalem. He just booted all the street vendors out of the temple the previous day. Now he returns to the temple and is confronted again by religious leaders who question his authority. We get the last of a three-parable series that Jesus narrates to the religious leaders, days before he is arrested and murdered. Perhaps for that reason, Jesus’ words seem harsh and narrow, like the two parables he just told.
Imagine inviting your non-Christian friends to church and this is what is preached. You squirm in your seat and wish that you had invited your friends on a different Sunday. Ugh. Jesus, couldn’t you have been more hospitable and inclusive? Couldn’t you have told the “more digestible” Luke 14 version of the banquet story where no one is banished into the darkness where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”? Yet, in his usual unsettling manner, Jesus addresses us – the over-educated, power-wielding, privileged people of God. He challenges our presumptions about hospitality, who is invited to the Feast and who is worthy to dine with the King.
The first-to-be invited wealthy guests reject the King’s invitation to his son’s wedding banquet and subsequently kill the King’s messengers. So the King orders military action to crush this first set of invitees and burn their city. Harsh retribution for some declined invitations. He then commands his slaves to scour the streets and invite everyone, good and bad, to the party. The social justice-trained lawyer in me would’ve liked the parable to end here. Voila. The rich are judged. The King’s Table is filled with a mishmash of guests from the margins. Jesus stands with the poor. Yay! The end.
But nope. Jesus has more. The King expects more. The invited guests are offered more than just their favorite foods and drinks.
The King then confronts one who belongs to the second set of guests because the man is not wearing a wedding robe. The guest has nothing to say in response. So the King orders him expelled, tied up and tossed out, to be devoured in the terrible darkness. Then Jesus throws in his final, narrow punchline, “For many are called, but few are chosen.” Imagine the friends you invited to church are now looking for the exit signs. They’re wondering, “Why would I want to join this party if you get ejected for not wearing the right clothes?”
I confess I am bothered by this ending. It feels unreasonable and unfair for the King to expect this poor guest to have a wedding robe when he was yanked off the streets hours before to join this party. What if this guest is unhoused and suffering from an untreated mental illness? Or he is a 16 year old migrant who just crossed the border after fleeing heinous atrocities in his home country? Or he is a 50 year old black man, just released after spending the last 30 years in prison?
Since this story is meant to be understood as an allegory, let us presume that the wedding garments were made available to all the guests and that, for whatever reason, this particular guest chose not to wear one. Scholars equate the wedding robe with the Christian life. All are invited to join the Feast. We come by grace, not deserving to be invited. Yet, when we choose to dine at the Table, the King expects and requires something of us. We are asked to give up on ourselves, to strip down the layers of clothing that we cling to for security. Our accomplishments and credentials, our rights and privilege. The scripts that we live by: meritocracy, human ingenuity, family or nation first. Unforgiveness. Pride. Vanity. The stripping exposes our vulnerability.
We are offered a new beginning. We are invited to join something that is bigger than ourselves, the Church.
We want a gospel that says that showing up is enough (though I agree that showing up is half of the Christian life). Accept Jesus into your heart, join the party and you’re in. No change required. Keep living the way you’ve been living before.
I am grateful that Jesus invites us to more than just showing up. “Come,” He says, “but if you want to stay, I expect more from you because I have more to invite you into.” So unlike the San Francisco mantra which doesn’t require anyone to change and elevates pluralism as the ultimate Kingship, Jesus calls us toward a dying to self and renewal when we join the Church. Together as people called by the King, we are invited to choose loving (and often costly) discipleship, without which we will never fully enter into and enjoy the Feast. Jesus wants more for us because the Kingdom is abundant, overflowing with love and goodness and mercy.
The Isaiah reading describes the bountiful feast of rich foods, where God will “swallow up death forever.” The King not only invites us to come as we are, with our fractured stories and jagged scars, but He also invites us to more — to be made new and whole. Psalm 23 tells us that our heads will be anointed with oil, our cup will overflow and we will dwell in the house of the Lord our whole long life. Our past is not erased. Nor do our scars disappear. Yet, by the mystery of His grace, all of who we are is incorporated into the Book of Life. We are transformed from invited guests to children of the King. But we have to say yes to that invitation for more, to that process of dying to self and being raised up in new life with Jesus. The King offers us new clothes – new beautiful, royal, celebratory clothing. So we can sit down at the Table with all the other guests, the Church, and together partake in the lavish Feast He has set before us. Come and see. Let us put on our wedding garments and dine with the King.