Exodus 32:1-14 Psalm 106:1-6, 20-24 Phil 4:1-9 Matthew 22:1-14
This week, Janet, Judy and I took communion to dear Jean, who is 94 and mostly housebound. Jean has read her Bible three times from cover to cover. “Probably more than that,” she said. Then she asked me, “I still don’t understand a lot of it. Do you?”
And I had to say: quite often, no. Sometimes the longer we spend with scripture, the more we notice what we haven’t understood. A familiar story becomes strange again.
That is very much my experience of this morning’s gospel. I think I understood it better in Sunday school, when we cut out paper robes and put them on cardboard men. There was a wedding. You needed the right clothes. We had scissors and glue. It seemed straightforward. Now, I’m less sure. Before we reach the robes, people have been murdered. A city has been burned. And somehow the banquet is still going ahead.
This time, I found myself wondering: what did that room smell like? Roast meat. Bread. Wine. And surely, smoke. The king answers violence with violence. Then he sends his servants out again: the food is ready. Come and eat.
In the middle of death and destruction, come and eat?!
I find that deeply troubling. I don’t have an explanation that makes every part comfortable. Perhaps we can admit that together.
But there is something about this invitation. When the original guests refuse to come, the servants go out into the streets, and they gather everyone they find: the parable says, “both good and bad”. Both. They aren’t instructed to assess people’s worthiness. They are told to bring them in. The feast fills with people who hadn’t expected a place. There is room before everyone has everything sorted. And yet Matthew won’t let us stop at the open door. There is still that troubling wedding garment. Why invite someone in, then throw them out?
Christians have understood the garment in different ways. One explanation sees it as a life changed by the grace received. We cannot earn our place at the feast. But accepting the invitation involves more than occupying a chair. If we receive mercy, will we learn to practise it? If we are welcomed, will we make room for others? That helps me hear the challenge. It doesn’t make the guest’s punishment less disturbing.
So, I need to hold this story beside another meal: the one Jesus himself will share within days. We are in the last week of his life. He has entered Jerusalem. Tensions are rising. Conflict is intensifying. Arrest and death are approaching. At the Passover table, the familiar food will carry the memory of liberation. But I imagine other things hanging in the air too: anxiety, suspicion, danger, love, irrepressible hope. Jesus will give bread to people who will deny, betray and abandon him. Judas will eat too.
Whatever we struggle to understand in the parable, we can look at what Jesus does. He feeds people whose lives are unfinished. People who will fail him. And when human violence falls upon him, he bears it in his own body.
The preacher Nadia Bolz-Weber wonders whether we might better recognise Jesus in that bound, silent guest, thrown into the outer darkness. What if that darkness is Calvary? It is a question to sit with. Even there, among the rejected and cast out, Christ comes to meet us. His table gives us somewhere to stand as we wrestle with this story. We receive a welcome we haven’t earned. And that welcome begins to ask something of us.
I felt that in a small way this week.
Kennie was bitten hard by her best friend at daycare. She wept. The teeth-shaped bruises were awful. I asked whether her friend had said sorry. “Yes,” she said, “and I said, ‘It’s okay,’ because sometimes, Mummy, when people say sorry, it’s good to say, ‘It’s okay.’” Later, at bedtime, she wanted to pray for the child who had bitten her. And she wanted me to do it. I was still furious. “Okay,” I said, “but this is going to be quite a stretch.” Apparently, our bedtime prayers had been taking root. Now they were asking something of me. The bite wasn’t okay. Kennie needed comforting and protecting. But the child who hurt her was still someone we could bring before God. Mercy, with the hurt still real.
Since my commissioning service, when Bishop Hans preached, a phrase has almost accidentally become our slogan: open the doors wider, make the tables longer. Open doors, long tables. And look —we have plenty of chairs, plenty of space at the table. But making room in our hearts may take more work. It may be quite a stretch. But we don’t have to understand everything before we come. We come, good and bad, and discover that the welcome we receive can, will, change us.
So we come to this table with the smoke still hanging in the air: our hurts, our fears, our anger, our hope. And Christ gives himself to us here. If we dare to accept the invitation, receiving his welcome teaches us to make room for others.
Open doors. Long tables. And grace for the stretch.
Amen.
