Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 15th,
A+D 2023
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill
City and Custer, South Dakota
Come to the Wedding Feast! – Matthew 22:1-14
Come one, come
all, come to the Wedding Feast of the Beloved Son of the King!
What’s that you say, you have nothing to
wear? You feel you cannot come, that you are not
worthy, because you have no garment fit to wear to the King’s wedding
feast? No worries, the Father of the
Groom knows you. He knows you and your wardrobe
better than you know yourself. And so, with
His invitation to the Wedding Feast, He provides your wedding garment. So, come, come to the feast and rejoice!
Our Lord used many parables to proclaim the
coming of His new kingdom, I think because they are vivid and memorable,
treasured human activities that God can use to help us understand and believe
in His divine act of salvation. Planting
and growing and harvesting wheat.
Fishing. Building a house upon
sand or rock. And as we just heard, a
wedding feast, a joyous family celebration following the beginning of a new, no
holding back, all-in-for-love relationship.
Now, God’s Kingdom and His plan for your
salvation do not work exactly like a normal farm, or a fishing boat
operation. The Church of God is not
literally a building. And the wedding of Christ and His Church is unique, not
like any earthly marriage. But all that
is good and joyful and true in a wedding feast and a marriage is used by the
Holy Spirit to help us understand the depth and height and length of the love
of God for His Church.
It is challenging for us when God mixes and
stretches His metaphors. Throughout the
Bible, God uses human activities and institutions to describe His relationship
to His Church. But He never allows
Himself to be bound by earthly rules or realities. The Lord expresses truths that go beyond
earthly limitations, for our good.
For example, the entirety of all Christians,
taken together, is called, in the singular, the Bride of Christ, the one for
whom He laid down His life, in order to present her pure and spotless before
His Father.
At the same time, each individual Christian
is invited to come and dine at the wedding feast, to don with great joy the
garment provided by the Father, and join in the party, celebrating the wedding
of the Son, along with all the other invited guests. How can it be that we are collectively the
Bride, and yet individually we are also invited guests, called to enter into
the wedding feast with joy?
Don’t try too hard to figure it out. Rather, ponder both sides of God’s
salvation-as-marriage metaphor to understand just how great the Good News of
Jesus truly is.
Christ desires to win His Bride, and so in
love He comes and does more than we can fully grasp to win her hand in
marriage. Even though she had repeatedly
rejected Him, He still lay down His life, taking all her sins, that is, all our
sins, taking them upon Himself, in order to win her hand. The dowry paid,
the victory won, the joyful banquet prepared, now the Father calls out to all
humanity: Come one, come all, come to the Wedding Feast of the Beloved
Son of the King!
But some prefer their busy-ness and worldly
things more than the free invitation.
They scorn it, rejecting the message.
Some abuse and even kill the Father’s messengers. They come to regret their mistake.
Nevertheless, the Father will have His
banquet hall filled. So He sends His
messengers to call out to one and all, regardless of their worthiness, the evil
and the good, even providing them with the wedding clothes they need to attend
the feast.
To all those who rightly understand the
filthy rags of their sinfulness and their need for a Savior, the Lord reveals
the depth of His love. Because it’s true:
You are not worthy. You have nothing fit
to wear to God’s wedding feast. And for
precisely this reason, the Father of the Groom, who knows you better than you
know yourself, sent His Son to weave a robe of righteousness for you, woven
from the Body and Blood of Jesus, broken and poured out for you, for the
forgiveness of all your sins.
Implicit in the invitation to the Wedding
Feast of Jesus Christ is the truth that the Groom, sitting at the head table at
the right hand of the Father, proudly bears scars in His Body, scars that
proclaim your unworthiness is forgotten, it is washed away. Christ’s robe of righteousness has been given
to you in your Baptism. His holiness
covers you. Believe this good news, and
come rejoicing to the feast the Father has prepared!
There are two unpleasant interruptions of
our happy parable. First, neither God
nor we can take any pleasure in the destruction of those invited guests who
scorned the Father’s invitation. Their condemnation
is just, they knowingly and openly rejected the invitation. But it is sad and grim, nonetheless. Protect us from foolishly rejecting your
invitation, dear Father in heaven.
Harder still perhaps is what happens at the end of the parable. A guest is found by the Father, a guest who
has entered into the banquet, but without the wedding garment he had been
given. That’s a no-go. He is cast out from the bright wedding hall,
into the outer darkness, to suffer for his unworthiness.
Why?
If the Father desires all to come to the feast, why does He throw this
man out?
Because the wedding garment the King gives
to each guest is absolutely necessary.
The wedding garment is necessary, for you, and for me, and for any other
sinner, necessary for us to sit at the wedding feast, that is, to enter into
God’s kingdom. Because on our own, in
the clothes of our own deeds, we are unworthy sinners. The wedding garment is, as we have already
observed, the very righteousness and holiness of Christ, which is granted to
you by faith in the invitation, faith in the promise of Christ, that, even
though we all are sinners, who sin and deserve the eternal condemnation of God,
in Jesus we have perfect forgiveness and eternal life.
To try to enter into God’s kingdom, into the
wedding feast, without wearing the garment Christ provides is to try to enter
based on our own righteousness, our own holiness. Which is impossible, because we have
neither. But, God in His grace and mercy
has provided the way, the way of Christ and His blood bought righteousness,
which He shares with all who hear and believe His Word. Repenting of our sins and resting in the
grace of Christ, our seat at the eternal wedding feast is assured. But if we try to claim our own right to
enter, if we try to weave our own wedding garments, we have nothing to
say. If we should reject the Father’s
mercy, we would damn ourselves.
The eternally fateful error of the guest who
tried to come in his own filthy rags is the fundamental error that Christians
most often fall into. Self-righteousness
is the error we must all be constantly vigilant against. As you clearly stated in your call to me to
be your pastor, I have the responsibility and privilege of declaring the truth
of Christ, of announcing the free invitation to the wedding feast, to all who
will listen. I do this as the public
minister of this congregation. And every
Christian is also called to be ready to declare this truth, the reason for our
hope, to anyone they meet in their daily lives.
So, through our words, and prayers, yours and mine together, we look
forward to welcoming many people to the Wedding Banquet. The Church calls all people to repent of trusting
in dead human works, and to trust instead in the free gift of the Bride Groom,
Jesus Christ.
And so, what joy we have today. For the heavenly wedding banquet is not some
far off event, to which we can only look forward. No, the Eternal Feast has begun, and we have
access to it every time we eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ for the
forgiveness of all our sins.
The same Christ who will host us at the
heavenly banquet is also present
here, feeding us week after week. At the Lord´s Table, as humble as it may seem
to our eyes, we truly receive a foretaste of the feast to come, and divine strength
for our remaining pilgrimage on this earth.
In the age to come, our banqueting will be in
the visible presence of God, fantastic beyond our dreams, and without pause. Oh, how we long for that promised vision to
become sight! And yet we also rejoice
today, for in each Supper, eternity breaks into our time and space, to wash us
clean of all our sins, again, preparing and preserving us for the eternal
wedding feast of the Son, Jesus Christ.
So, every chance you get, come. Come one, come all, come to the Wedding Feast
of the Beloved Son of the King. Come
confessing your sins, and eat and drink forgiveness, rejoicing in your
beautiful wedding garments, woven for you by Jesus, Amen.
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