Rev. Dr. Chris Ayers
Just what we need: Jesus telling a parable about someone who wasn’t dressed appropriately. It’s not like Christians need to be encouraged to focus on the trivial and insignificant.
At Wedgewood Baptist Church we participate in the Room In The Inn Ministry (a program of Charlotte’s Urban Ministry Center) on Saturday nights so we can invite our homeless guests to not only come to worship on Sunday, but to be some of our worship leaders. Invariably, when we extend the invitation, one of our Room In the Inn guests will say, “But I don’t have clothes to wear to worship.” We inform them that at Wedgewood we don’t care what folk are wearing, and we don’t believe God cares what they wear to worship either.
Jesus tells a parable about someone who didn’t wear the right thing to a wedding. Attendants are told to bind the guilty party. Bind him hand and foot. Throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Looks like the fashion police have arrived.
What a strange parable. First, it tells of people who refuse to attend a wedding banquet. (What happened to the invitation to the wedding?) Then it reports the individuals who delivered the invitations to the wedding banquet are mistreated, some even killed.
This is serious stuff.
So far it makes sense. God sent prophets and some people simply didn’t buy into the scheme, going so far as to kill some of the prophets.
Then the parable goes downhill fast. A King (God) destroys the murderers and burns their city. How Kinglike but how un-God-like! The King (God) notes that those who had been invited were unworthy. So the King proceeds to invite everyone to the wedding banquet, both good and bad people. We expect the invitation to go out only to worthy people (who don’t exist), but now anybody and everybody is invited. The wedding hall is filled. God’s grace is amazing.
Now that’s a nice parable. End it there. Unfortunately the parable goes on like a movie that has one too many scenes.
The King (God) noticed a guest isn’t wearing a wedding robe and the King (God) goes berserk. Off to the outer darkness for such a fool, he (God) says.
So much for grace.
And then we are informed “many are called, but few are chosen." The ultimate religious delusion: I am chosen, you are not.
Apparently the parable is addressed to chief priests and Pharisees.
Could it be that the parable is addressed to us also?
Perhaps the God portrayed in the parable is more like the God the chief priests and Pharisees believed in than the God Jesus revealed.
