The Wedding Feast and the Man Without a Garment (4 of 26)

The ending offends people and it is supposed to.

A king throws open his son’s wedding to anyone the servants can find in the streets, good and bad alike. Then he spots a man not dressed for it, has him bound hand and foot, and throws him into the dark.

Where was the man supposed to have got a wedding garment? He was pulled off a road an hour ago.

What Is the Parable Answering?

The refusal that came before it, and it follows straight on from another parable making the same charge.

Matthew places this immediately after the tenants in the vineyard, and everyone in that audience knew what a story about a vineyard meant. This one works the same way. A king throwing a wedding party for his son was a recognisable figure, and the subject is the arrival of the kingdom and of the Messiah.

The invited guests are Israel’s leadership and those who followed them. They were invited long ago. The party is ready. And they will not come.

Notice the escalation in their refusal. The first group simply ignores it, one going to his farm and another to his business, which is insult enough at a royal wedding. The second group seizes the servants, abuses them, and kills them, which is the standard image for what happened to the prophets.

The line about the king burning their city is widely thought to have been added later, possibly by Matthew, so his readers would connect the parable to the events of AD 70.

Who Are the Replacement Guests?

The people Matthew has been naming throughout his Gospel.

The servants go to the roads out of town and bring in everyone they find. Tax collectors, prostitutes, the blind and lame, the nobodies. Wright’s phrase for them is the people who thought they had been forgotten.

That part is heard easily and it is the part everyone wants the parable to be about. The invitation goes to the wrong parts of town and the hall fills up.

Then the ending arrives and spoils the mood, which is exactly its function.

Why Is the Man Thrown Out?

Because the wide-open invitation is not the same claim as everyone is fine as they are.

Wright puts the distinction plainly. When the blind and lame came to Jesus, he did not tell them they were all right as they were. He healed them, and they would not have accepted less. When extortioners and prostitutes came, his love reached them where they were and refused to leave them there.

Love wants the best for the person loved. That is the whole argument, and it is why an open door is compatible with a standard at the table.

The man without a garment represents someone who accepted the invitation and declined the transformation. He came to the party and brought nothing of the party with him.

Is the Ending Arbitrary?

Inside the story it looks arbitrary, and Wright grants that.

The usual answer is that a host of that rank would have provided garments at the door, so refusing to wear one is a deliberate act rather than an oversight. That reading is old and it is plausible and it is not stated in the text.

What can be said without that assumption is that the man is speechless when challenged. He is addressed as friend and asked how he got in, and he has no answer. Someone with a legitimate excuse has one.

What About Many Are Called But Few Are Chosen?

It is the closing line and it is not a statistic.

Read as a percentage it turns the parable into an arithmetic of the saved, which is not what the story has been doing. The invitation in the parable is aggressively wide. Servants are sent to round up everyone they find.

The line is a warning attached to a wide invitation rather than a limit placed on it. Being in the hall is not the same as being at the table, and the difference is whether the invitation changed anything.

Why Does This Parable Bother People?

Because it holds two things most treatments separate.

One is the door thrown open to people who had no claim on it, which is the part modern readers love. The other is that the party has a character, and someone who wants the party without its character is at the wrong event.

Wright notes what is really being resisted when people dislike the parable. It is the idea that actions have consequences and that moral choices matter, that life is not a chess game where the pieces go back in the box.

The mystery of forgiveness is not the claim that nothing matters because it all works out. That is a different claim entirely, and this parable exists partly to refuse it.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the talents.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 22:1-14. Supports the reading of the invited guests as Israel’s leadership, the identification of the replacement guests with those Matthew names throughout, the possible later addition of the burning of the city, and the argument that an open invitation is not the same as leaving people unchanged. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 21:33-46, Matt 22:1-14, Matt 11:20-24, Luke 14:15-24, Isa 25:8, and Rev 21:4.

Where the sourcing stops: the tradition that the host provided wedding garments at the door is old and widely repeated and is not stated in the text, and I have flagged it as an assumption rather than leaning on it. Whether Luke 14:15-24 is a version of the same parable or a different one Jesus told on another occasion is not settled.

Footnotes

1. That verse 7 may be a later addition is worth stating rather than hiding, because it is the verse that ties the parable most directly to AD 70. A reader who discovers the textual question elsewhere, having been given a confident reading here, has reason to wonder what else was smoothed.
2. The speechlessness of the man is the detail that does the most work with the least attention. He is not defiant and he does not explain. Anyone dragged in from the street against expectation would have had something to say, and the silence is the story’s way of indicating that he knew what was being asked.