Tag Archives: Parable of the Wedding Banquet

Christian Community (4)

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AndrewPalmSunday2I am becoming more and more convinced that we have to pay close attention to the historical fact that Christianity began in the shadow of an empire. Not just any empire but the Roman Empire, the biggest Empire in world history up to that point. This is also true of the Jews. Although they had a brief period of some independence under David and Solomon, the rest of the time, Juda was under the thumb of one empire or another at best and squashed by the boots tramped in battle at worst.

Of the Gospel writers, Luke in particular takes pains to locate the life of Jesus in history. He says that Jesus was born under the reign of the Emperor Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Some scholars have doubted the historicity of this particular census, but it is the sort of thing Empires do for the sake of social control and it sets the stage for the story. Later, Luke says that the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.” (Luke 3: 1) Here we have a list of the very people who ordered the crucifixion of Jesus. These were the builders who rejected the cornerstone, the body of a man who is the Body of Christ.

Most people don’t like to think of cold hard politics at Christmas time, but the angels’ song to the shepherds was a political statement. Augustus Caesar claimed to be the peace broker for the Empire. Luke claims that the new-born Christ is the real peace broker. Thirty-three years later, it becomes clear that the Roman peace is kept through tactics such as crucifixion. Jesus’ parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew’s version helps us draw the contrast between Church and Empire.

Jesus also draws the distinction between Church and empire in his reply to the question designed to entrap him: Must we pay taxes to the emperor or not? The most important element of this little story is that Jesus asks his questioners to bring a coin because he does not have one. He has withdrawn from the economical system. This reminds us that Empire isn’t necessarily about politics; it is also about economics. Jesus’ lack of a coin suggests that the Parable of the Talents, in Luke’s version that portrays the master as violent, the servant who buried his talent might be the figure of Christ who dropped out of the economic order and was cast out. (I believe we should make the most of the talents given us by God; I’m just not so sure any more that this parable, at least in Luke’s version, teaches us that Jesus does not teach that God demands that his enemies be torn to pieces—a sacrificial act.)

What Empire is about fundamentally is power that must be sustained by sacrifice. This brings us back to the first post in this series where I discussed the contrast between Jesus’ way of gathering people and the Empire’s. Empire isn’t just about size. We all know of little fiefdoms all over the places, including (especially!) religious institutions. Since Empire is all over the place in all sizes, we need Church (not limited here to a single faith tradition) of all sizes in all places.

Being Church is not about dropping out of an imperial society. Jesus was living in the Roman Empire whether he liked it or not (and he probably didn’t) and we live in empires whether we like it or not, which I hope we don’t like. The fundamental thing to do is live and act grounded in the love and forgiveness of Jesus, the Risen Forgiving Victim. Virgil Michel, a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Collegeville during the Depression years was a strong advocate of creating parallel economic structures that would be nurturing for everybody involved. If I remember a lecture I heard about him some years ago rightly, Michel invented, or helped invent the credit union. As a leading member of the Roman Catholic Liturgical Movement, he envisioned liturgy as a springboard to social action.

Most fundamentally, Empire cannot be resisted in the Empire’s terms, which is the use of violence of any kind. This is what Jesus showed us in his silence before Pilate. If Jesus really is the wedding guest thrown out into the outer darkness and the penniless servant thrown out in the same way, then we can all join him in the outer darkness which will then lighten up with some help from the Light of the World.

See also: Stupid Galatians, Stupid Us

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King’s Banquet — God’s Banquet

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wineTableFeast1The parable of the Wedding Banquet has often been understood as illustrating God’s offer of salvation that some people reject and so miss out on the fun. That understanding seems to work in Luke’s version but it doesn’t work out so well in Matthew’s. Here, the king’s invitation is met with violence which the king reciprocates with interest and then he bounces a man who isn’t dressed properly and has him thrown out into outer darkness. The severe dissonance of these details inclines me to consider alternate interpretations of this parable.

Marty Aiken has written a detailed paper arguing for just such an alternative understanding. (See “The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.” He argues that Jesus’ listeners would have immediately thought of King Herod when they heard the parable. The king in the parable certainly acts like Herod. These listeners would have remembered Herod bringing an army to Jerusalem and asking the people to accept him as king. If the offer was accepted, Herod would have consummated the deal by marrying the granddaughter of the high priest Hyrcanus. There’s our wedding feast. The people of Jerusalem turned down the offer. Herod withdrew but then came back with his army and stormed the walls without stopping to negotiate. Antigonus, a descendent of the royal family, gave himself up to quell a violent situation. He was carried off in chains and beheaded by the Romans to give him a particularly humiliating death.

With this background in mind, we can see the guests who “made light of” the invitation as representing those who went home when Herod came calling and hoped everything would blow over and they could get on with business as usual. The other invited guests represent those who resisted Herod with violence. Both groups of guests are met with violent reprisals from the king in the parable. The rounding up of guests to replace the first lot is not, then, an act of charity for the poor but a forced gathering of whoever the king’s slaves could find.

With this interpretation, the cryptic scene of the man without a proper wedding garment makes sense as being the second part of the same parable and not a separate parable tacked on to this one. The king seems to be looking for a victim and he finds one handy, one who stands out by his attire. Like most kings, this one knows that the quickest way to unite a people is to focus on a victim. Moreover, this guest seems to be what we might call a nonviolent protestor, which obviously is threatening to the king. This guest’s eerie silence suggests Jesus’ silence before Pilate which Matthew emphasizes. Aiken points out that grammatically, the king could have been the speechless one, which would refer to Isaiah 52: 15 which says that kings will “shut their mouths” because of the suffering Servant. The fate of this guest is the fate Jesus himself suffers which had already been the fate of Antigonus. The Kingdom of Heaven, then, is not the banquet but the place of the victim who is cast out. Aiken recalls Jesus words in Mt. 11: 12, that up to this time, the kingdom has “suffered violence.” And so it does.

All of this is disappointing for those of us who are edified by the idea that God throws a heavenly Banquet and invites all of us to it. I find this image appealing and I don’t want to give it up. We don’t need to. The theme of what scholars call “the Messianic Banquet” is very real. The reading from Isaiah 25 is one example but treading the Moabites down into the dung pit smacks of Herod more than God. The invitation to the banquet in Isaiah 55 is much more positive and clearly is extended to everybody, presumably even the poor Moabites.

The real image of the Messianic Banquet in the Gospels is the feeding of the five thousand and four thousand in the wilderness. Here is a generous feeding to all comers with no reprisals for anybody who happened to stay away. No political force is exerted in the invitation. Nobody gets thrown out for being badly dressed. The poor are not afterthoughts, invited only the replace ungrateful aristocrats. The poor as well as the rich are all invited right from the start. The banquet offered by Jesus in the wilderness, away from the centers of worldly power, shows up the king’s banquet in the parable for what it is. Instead of an offer we cannot refuse, we are given an offer that we do not wish to refuse. This really is a cause for rejoicing always in the Lord, as St. Paul admonishes us.