The President’s Celebration is an adaptation of Matthew 22:1-14
The Kingdom of God and the Wedding Banquet
The imagery of God’s Kingdom as a wedding banquet draws on Isaiah 25:6-8, where God invites Israel to a banquet, as well as Hosea’s and Jeremiah’s extended metaphors/parables about Israel as God’s unfaithful wife. Jesus seems to have combined the two images – the Kingdom is a wedding banquet; unfaithful Israel is being called to start again.
But this Kingdom of God is not a democracy, because God is its absolute ruler. So God (the Father) is king, Jesus (the Son) is Lord and the Holy Spirit is coming along later, probably to begin the dancing. However, while we on Earth still have kings and queens, they’re no longer the kind of absolute ruler that they often were in Jesus’ day. From a modern point of view, the parable falls into ‘fairy tale’ territory as soon as the king sends in his armies; that’s no longer realistic. H.M. The Queen doesn’t send in the troops if you ignore her invitation, not even if you kidnapped and killed her ambassador. That’s a decision for the elected Prime Minister.
Rebellion against the Kingdom
To seize and kill a king’s servants would have been a declaration of rebellion. Jesus’ parable isn’t just a story about a wedding that people don’t go to (even though they’ve been invited). The version in Matthew is a parable about a rebellion. Some of the invitees are rebelling by ignoring the king in favour of their own desires, others are in active, armed revolt.
King or President?
So how could we take the parable away from the modern ‘fairy tale’ feel? A President can order the armed forces to quell a civil insurrection. However, the wedding of their son (or daughter) is a personal matter whereas the wedding of a king’s son in Jesus’ time would often be a way of demonstrating loyalty to the dynasty. There’s also the point that changing from ‘king’ to ‘president’ loses the imagery of God as Israel’s true king. The Davidic kings (and God’s Messiah) held their positions by God’s appointment – the true king of Israel is God. Jesus is telling a very pointed parable indeed (as pointed as the Parable of the Tenants) because Matthew places Jesus’ telling of this parable in the Temple. One possible interpretation might be that Jesus is accusing the Temple priesthood of rebellion against God (definitely a prophetic thing to do).
In what circumstances might a country’s ruler send in the troops because someone’s refused an invitation to a banquet? When that banquet is highly political. If we take the king’s son in the parable as the heir, the person who will be the Viceroy, will have the king’s power to rule laid upon him – then a modern equivalent might well be the systems where there is a legal delay in the transfer of power built-in. Not the Prime Ministerial system, where the moving vans are on their way the moment a new party wins, but a President/President-Elect system.
Suppose an outgoing President (still in power) organises some celebrations for the President-Elect. They send out the invitations – but some people ignore them, others beat up the messengers and still others hole up in a city and start shooting. This scenario is one where the reader/listener can clearly see that this is a rebellion in the making; an act of rebellion against a lawful transfer of power. An extreme version of ‘not my President’, which can act as a stand-in for ‘not my God’. If the President then has to send in the troops and the city gets burnt to the ground in the fighting, we have moved from ‘fairy tale’ to something we could hear on the news.
The Problem of the Wedding Clothes
Okay, so what about the new invitees and the guest who turns up wearing the wrong clothes? My guess is that the original hearers were meant to suppose everyone invited had time to rush home and put on their wedding clothes. Some commentaries do suggest that it was a tradition for a rich bridegroom to give his guests new clothes, but then the king would be blaming his guest for refusing his gift. This is a possible interpretation (though I can’t find any evidence of such a tradition), but the idea of turning up without bothering to prepare or show respect is also a possibility.
The first group of invitees refused the invitation. This guest comes from the new group; he’s accepted the invitation, but has done so in a way that still shows disrespect. This gives them more of a reason to be ‘speechless’ – they showed disrespect and now they’re being called out for it – than ‘but you didn’t give me a garment?’
Other interpretations are available, of course, but the theme of disrespect is present in the Parable of the Tenants – the owner says ‘they will respect my son’. It wouldn’t be too surprising if Matthew had chosen to place two parables close together because they have similar themes: ignoring what God wants, not respecting God and violent rebellion.
Two Versions
There’s another ‘wedding banquet’ parable in Luke 14:16-24, but there are considerable differences between that parable and the one in Matthew. It’s not told in the Temple, there’s no king and no one gets thrown out of the banquet. Ancient Galilee and Judea were places where writing things down was expensive; most information was transmitted by word of mouth. It’s possible that Jesus’ modern equivalent is far closer to the stand-up comedian on the club circuit than a TV preacher who can only tell a story once. That is, he retold his parables (the gospels are silent on the question of whether he did audience requests, though he definitely had hecklers) and varied them to suit whatever he felt his audience needed to hear.
Previous Parable: Goldmines and Pearls (Matthew 13: 44-46)
Next Parable: Growing From Seeds: Two Parables (Mark 4: 26-34)
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