Pentecost 20 - Year A (2026)

Exodus 32.1-14; Psalm 106.1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14

Jesus said, ‘When the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’

There is a member of the congregation who has asked me a number of times: when are you going to preach about the occasions when Jesus talks about people being cast into outer darkness, about the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I suspect she speaks for many – certainly for me – in finding such passages immensely difficult, difficult not least to reconcile with the Gospel of radical inclusion, love and forgiveness that we often preach in this place. Faced with the parable of the wedding feast from Matthew’s Gospel that we just heard, and in particular with that final flourish, it would certainly be ducking the challenge not to try together to make some sense of it. Or at least to explore the uncomfortableness, and the questions, it leaves us with.

The parable of the wedding feast is told in both Luke and Matthew’s Gospel. In both tellings, an invitation is issued to join a great feast; in both, those who are first invited find various reasons to turn down, or refuse, the invitation. And in both, the host reacts with anger, and tells his servants to go out into the streets and invite all whom they find to come to the feast; so that the banquet becomes full of those not first invited, and instead with the unexpected – in Luke’s version, the poor, the lame, the crippled and the blind.

That’s where Luke version ends, with the vision of the kingdom being full, not of the smug and self-righteous; not of those who presume they are meant to be there, but when it comes to it, can’t be bothered; but of those who have been surprisingly compelled to come in, the last and the least in the eyes of the world. It’s a vision of the kingdom that feels familiar, comforting even. We gather each week around the table of Christ to share in the heavenly banquet; and we pride ourselves in thinking that all are invited; that no-one is excluded; that it is a feast for all.

So Matthew’s extra addition, this little coda, about the man, who despite being invited and present at the banquet, subsequently finds himself cast out into outer darkness for not being properly dressed – that comes as quite a shock and jars against our desire that all are welcome. Even if he should perhaps have shown that he was up for enjoying himself – to be cast into outer darkness seems a little over the top.

And the first thing to say is that that is the point. Jesus’ parables often work because they are over the top – they push things to an extreme in order to reveal, starkly, what is at stake, what is going on. The language of outer darkness and the gnashing of teeth – like so much other religious language – is not to be taken literally; but it is there to make us sit up and take notice – to ask what is going on here, why does this matter?

To point out the role of hyperbole in Jesus’ parables only gets us so far, however. It still leaves us with the basic sense that this is an unfair world being portrayed; that the man has done little to deserve the fate that befalls him. If this is the way God acts, then it would appear to be fairly arbitrary, and God a frightening and irascible figure, who flips from a radical invitation one minute, to casting us out into darkness the next.

There are commentators that point out that it would have been the practice at the lavish wedding feasts of that time, for the host to provide wedding garments for all the guests to wear. That would have been understood by Jesus’ hearers: they would have understood that the king stops in his tracks upon noticing the man not dressed in a wedding robe, because the man has consciously refused to put on the festal garment – he is refusing to join the king in his rejoicing despite the generosity of the unexpected, undeserved, invite.

That explanation certainly sharpens the sense of what the parable might be getting at – it asks us the hard question of how we are responding to being invited to the banquet laid out before us. In rejoicing; or in indifference? Because we realise that this makes all the difference, or simply for something to do?

I think that explanation is helpful, but I’m not sure it really gets us off the hook of our basic uncomfortableness with the harshness, and starkness, of the world being presented in the parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…’ began Jesus. Is this the kingdom that we want to proclaim, and seek to live out; where those who are insufficiently rejoicing will find themselves cast out?

I’m aware that I’m giving more questions than answers to you in this sermon. And actually, I’m not done yet, because on closer examination, the whole parable begins to feel quite strange. ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king’, says Jesus. But when we read the parable, we discover this is a king who obviously has a strained relationship with his subjects and relations, given that they respond to his invitation to a wedding feast for his son, by offering excuses, and even in some cases killing the slaves who have brought the invitation. A king who then, in his subsequent rage, destroys them in turn and burns down their city. Before, as we have seen, sending his slaves out to invite all whom they find in the streets, both good and bad, into the wedding hall. If we immediately, as we often do, imagine that, in the world of the parable, the king is God, then the sense of God being capricious, violent and slightly unhinged, is only strengthened.

Matthew tells us that the parable is told by Jesus to the chief priests and Pharisees. Maybe that’s a clue that the parable needs to be read in that context; the context in which Matthew is writing his gospel. It is a context of an increasingly strained and violent relationship, and break up, between the emerging early church, and the alternative proponents of synagogue based Judaism. It is an argument over two versions of what being faithful to God means, and as is often the case when siblings, or close political allies fall out, the disagreement gets fierce. As we have explored, the version of this parable in Luke is significantly different, suggesting that whatever the original parable that Jesus told, it then gets bent in particular directions by the context in which it is told and retold. Matthew’s version is shaped in his re-telling by an increasingly violent disagreement and argument with the Judaism that Matthew is writing his gospel within. The pressures of that violent disagreement begin to warp the telling, leave God unrecognisable; harden the edges. That is what disagreement, sharp division, is liable to do, as, I would suggest, we know only too well.

And so finally, I think it is vital to read this parable, and other instances of language and concepts that we find unforgiving and harsh, through the lens of the Gospel as a whole; the good news that Matthew is setting out for us. The good news that in Christ, God comes to us in ways that certainly do reveal our smug self-satisfaction and self-righteousness; in ways that do make sharp demands upon us – even if that sharp demand is to step into a place of rejoicing in community with others. But above all, Christ comes to us as one who is not in the business of condemning others to outer darkness; but instead, on the cross, travels himself into that deep darkness, that place of God-forsakenness. He makes that journey into the darkness of hell, in order to reveal that nowhere is beyond the reach of God’s love and faithfulness; he rises triumphant over the power of darkness to bring us into that place of feasting and light where all are invited. That is the Gospel we place our faith and trust in. That is the Gospel that gives us the confidence to sing, as shortly we will as we approach the banquet of God laid out before us:

Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness,
Come into the daylight’s splendour,
There with joy thy praises render
Unto him whose grace unbounded
Hath this wondrous banquet founded;
High o’er all the heavens he reigneth,
Yet to dwell with thee he deigneth.
Amen.