Exodus 32.1-14, Matthew 22.1-14
The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 15 October 2023, Austwick
If you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus says, then listen to the parable of the king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. But if you think that the king in the parable represents God, then you may struggle to understand. For this king is a tyrant, a despot despised by his people, who retaliates vengefully against those who don’t accept his invitation, and tortures those who resist. [1]
Doesn’t this make you want to ask Jesus, “How exactly can this be compared to the kingdom of heaven?” This story of an enraged king who burns down a whole city in anger: how can that be compared to the kingdom of heaven? Does this mean that God is vengeful and violent? [2]
We could easily reach that conclusion, reading the Exodus episode when the Israelites create the golden calf and God starts acting like an enraged king, violent and vengeful, when he realises that his people have rejected him for another, needing Moses to remind God of who he is: of the history he has with the people, and the promises he made them, so that in the end he relents.
But, as I’ve said before, scripture holds many different views of God, sometimes in tension, [3] and in the story of the golden calf, God is first and foremost the rejected one, cast off by his people.
In that story, the golden calf represents the same sort of worldly power as that which is wielded by the king in Jesus’ parable: a lavish, indulgent power which demands to be idolised. The golden calf is only created by the people’s own jewellery but it demands the people’s worship, just as the king in the parable demands the loyalty of the common people whose acquiescence enables his excesses.
The people turn their backs on God and turn to an idol of their own making instead. God is powerless to stop them, and just like the man punished at the end of the parable of the wedding banquet, here God finds himself thrown into the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth.
Let us go back to the parable, to consider what happens if we compare (or contrast) the kingdom of God with the man who is not going along with the festivities, the man who is not wearing the wedding clothes, who is speechless in response to the king who then has him bound and thrown out into the darkness to suffer. What a big difference, to our understanding, this makes.
We should remember that in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is telling this parable when he is already in Jerusalem, just a few days before he will stand speechless before Pontius Pilate, the imperial power, and then he will be bound hand and foot to the cross, where he will weep and gnash his teeth.
So, if we want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus is telling us, don’t look to the rage-filled, violent and vengeful king with an army at his side – that is the kingdom of this world – there is nothing new there; instead look at the unarmed, speechless man who is bound and cast out into the darkness. In other words, Jesus is saying, “If you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like - look at me. Learn from me.” [4]
These are the Gods we choose, say the people of Israel, and says the Church, the ‘Israel of God’. [5]
Is this your God, O Israel: the enraged king, violent and vengeful towards those who disobey him, who will burn down whole cities in his anger; or is it the one who is expelled with the outcasts, and who bears the punishment of the world with grace?
Is this your God, O Israel: the golden idol you create, expecting it to make you whole, who you trust to remove your suffering, who you think will give you the truth; or is it the one who embraces suffering with you, who helps you face up to your unknowing, and to fully accept the difficulties of existence? [6]
Now, we may not want to see Jesus as the bound outcast who is suffering and weeping and gnashing his teeth, but he wanted us to see him that way, the way he became on the cross.
Something happens when we see Jesus in this parable as the person who dared to defy the tyrant and because of that was singled out, exposed, and abused. What happens is that we start to see the courageous people in our world who will call out the bully, and we start to see the people who are singled out, exposed and abused.
Because Jesus identified with them in this parable – and on the cross he became them – we cannot not see them anymore. We begin to notice outcasts, we begin to notice people who are singled out and mistreated for not wearing the right clothes or having the right skin or carrying the right papers, or saying the expected ‘right’ thing.
Our sympathies begin to shift: we find ourselves not so worried about the king’s wedding banquet and what to wear to it, and more worried about how we will tend to the man that was thrown out, to the woman who was abused, and to the child who was put to shame. [7] Less concerned to maintain our own position in life and more concerned to stand alongside them, where they are.
The Booker Prize nominated ‘Apeirogon’, by Colum McCann, is not about the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. It is about the hurt and the loss of young lives, and about fathers who have to come to terms with that. It is about two men who forge their grief into a weapon for peace-making: two fathers, one Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and the other Israeli, Rami Elhanan.
Bassam’s ten year old daughter Abir was killed by a rubber bullet outside school, having just bought some sweets, “the lost expensive sweets in the world” said her grieving father. Rami’s fourteen year old daughter Smadar is blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber, whilst shopping for the new school year.
Bassam and Rami find each other, two ordinary men whose accident of birth threw them into having to live through dehumanisation, injustice, inequality and the deep deep pain of the heart. Yet, Bassam is a Palestinian who studies the holocaust. Rami is an Israeli who is against Israeli occupation. They now spend their lives telling their stories in schools, monasteries and to groups worldwide.
They are one, but they’re not the same. They get to carry each other. [8]
They say that “… it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy any more, he just can’t be.” [9]
And that can also be how the Word of God works on us, converting us to a new way of seeing and a new way of living – more courageous and more compassionate. There is a banquet for us (point to the altar) but it is not the banquet of the rage-full king; it is the banquet of the Good Shepherd; it is the banquet of Jesus who is gentle and humble in heart; it is the banquet of God who intends to wipe the tears from every face and swallow up death forever. God calls us to come to this banquet. To come as you are. And to expect your heart to grow in courage and compassion. [10]
Notes
[1] See my previous sermon, The Church is the party no-one wants to come to: a lament. 11 October 2020.
[2] Julie Morris, The Banquet. Church of the Epiphany, Oak Park, CA, 15 October 2017, referenced in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Proper 23a. (Available to view on the Church of the Epiphany YouTube channel). Adapted.
[3] See my previous sermon, Good: or only on our side? Questioning God at the Red Sea Crossing. 17 September 2023.
[4] Julie Morris,The Banquet. As above.
[5] Galatians 6.16.
[6] Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking the addiction to certainty and satisfaction.
[7] Julie Morris, The Banquet. As above.
[8] U2, One. Remembering Pip Wilson, whose funeral took place on the day this talk was composed, and for whom One was something of a theme tune, and an opportunity often taken for communal ‘human becoming’.
[9] Steve Stockman, Colum McCann, Apeirogon. Soul Surmise, 22 August 2020.
[10] Julie Morris, The Banquet As above.
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