There are some parties you just wouldn't want to go to. And the wedding party in today's parable of Jesus is precisely one of those. Now wait a minute, you might be thinking, isn't this a parable of the kingdom of heaven, and therefore isn't the king in the parable meant to be God, and the wedding feast a picture of heaven, and we, the people that king invited? And doesn't the parable tell us quite clearly that we really ought to want to be at the party if we don't want God to reject us? And it's understandable if you were thinking those thoughts, because that's the way this parable has been taught for many, many generations.
A wedding party you'd want to avoid - the latest in my series of talks borrowing heavily from William Herzog's genre-defying Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (reading the parables as a form of social analysis and theological reflection 'on the gory details of the way oppression served the interests of the ruling class'), and various Girardian writers usually sourced from Paul Neuchterlein's essential lectionary site. Today, The Parable of the Wedding Banquet in which, I was keen to demonstrate, the king in the story isn't meant to be seen as God, he's meant to be seen as a king, 'A man with an army on a drive for power'. And that the parable mirrors the real-life behaviour of King Herod the Great on his rise to power.
But sometimes Jesus tells parables to illustrate not so much what the kingdom of God is like, but what we human beings are like, in stories from everyday life which have a ring of truth for their listeners. Like those of the vineyard workers, owners, tenants, we've been grappling with in recent weeks. Difficult stories of dangerously driven men willing to resort to violence against the 'other' to fulfil their desires. To discern what Jesus wants us to learn about the kingdom of heaven from these parables we have to read between the lines, just as to discern what he wants us to learn about the kingdom of heaven from our experiences in daily life, we have to develop an eye for seeing what God is doing in the gaps, an ear for listening for God speaking to us through the nuances.
This week's talk owes an enormous amount to Marty Aiken's tremendous paper 'The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet' [download Word doc here]. My talk is here.
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