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[markramm]

The Wedding Is Ready

The Second Sermon returns, with this Sunday's gospel. Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue); the Greek is from the SBL Greek New Testament.

Turn to Matthew, chapter twenty-two.

It is the same day, in the Temple courts in Jerusalem. The chief priests and the elders have asked Jesus, "By what authority are you doing these things?" (Matthew 21:23), and he has answered them with stories. In the last one, tenants killed the vineyard owner's son and threw him out of the vineyard, and the chief priests and the Pharisees "realized that he was speaking about them" (21:45). They want to arrest him. They are afraid of the crowd.

He isn't finished.

"Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying:" (22:1)

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, 'Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.' But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.' Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

"But 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." (22:2-14)

Luke tells a version of this story (Luke 14:16-24). In Luke, "someone gave a great dinner and invited many." The invited make excuses: a piece of land, five yoke of oxen, a new marriage. The host is angry and sends his slave into the streets for "the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame." Nobody is killed. Nothing burns. Nobody is thrown out.

In Matthew the host is a king, the refusal ends in murder, the anger sends an army, and the full hall ends in an inspection.

The king's feast

The oxen are slaughtered in verse 4. "The wedding is ready," says the king in verse 8. Between them, an army marches out and a city burns, and the dinner is still waiting.

The word for troops is strateumata, armies.

The biblical scholar David Sim says the date of Matthew's Gospel "is far from certain," and that the burned city is one of three reasons usually given for a date after the Roman war. He finds it "hardly decisive." But he also writes that "most scholars date Matthew to the 80s or 90s." If they are right, the first people to hear this parable read aloud in Matthew's church had lived through the year a Roman army burned Jerusalem.

The historian Josephus was with that army. He records the end of the siege in one sentence: "the Romans set fire to the extreme parts of the city, and burnt them down, and entirely demolished its walls." (Jewish War 6.9.4, Whiston's translation)

Then he records what the victor did. Titus, the general and the emperor's son, called up the soldiers who had done great exploits, by name, put crowns of gold on their heads, and handed out "silver, and gold, and garments." Then he "sacrificed a vast number of oxen, that stood ready at the altars, and distributed them among the army to feast on," and stayed "three days among the principal commanders, and so long feasted with them." (7.1.3)

Later, in Rome, came the triumph. Josephus describes the parade of the Temple's treasures: the golden lampstand, the Law. At the end of the procession the Jewish commander Simon son of Gioras was dragged into the forum with a rope on him and put to death there, as Roman law required, while the procession stood waiting for the news. When the news came that he was dead, the people shouted, the sacrifices were offered, "and as for some of the spectators, the emperors entertained them at their own feast." (7.5.6)

A king and his son. Armies. A burned city. Oxen standing ready. Garments handed out from the victor's hand. A man with a rope on him, dragged out while the guests wait to eat.

The ordinary Roman dinner worked by the same rules, at smaller scale. Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator writing around the turn of the second century, describes eating at a host's house where the best dishes went to the host "and a few more of us," cheap dishes and scraps to everyone else, and three wines were poured: one "for himself, and for us," "another sort for his lesser friends (for it seems he has degrees of friends), and the third for his own freedmen and ours." (Letters 2.6, Melmoth's translation)

A Roman table told every guest where he stood.

They were not willing

Jesus is speaking "to them": the men who run the Temple.

"They made light of it." The Greek is amelēsantes, not caring. They went "one to his farm, another to his business." The word for business is emporia, trade. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The rest "seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them," as the tenants did in the story before this one (21:35).

And in verse 3, before any of that: "they would not come." In Greek, ouk ēthelon elthein: they were not willing to come.

Hold on to that verb. In the next chapter, still in the Temple, Jesus will use it again. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate." (23:37-38)

There is an easy way to read this parable. The invited are the Jews, the burned city is their punishment, and the church files in to take the empty seats. Read that way, the story ends at verse 10, with the hall full and the right people in it.

Matthew does not end it at verse 10.

Bad and good

The slaves go "into the main streets." The Greek is tas diexodous tōn hodōn, the places where the roads run out of the city. They invite everyone they find. The NRSVue says they gathered "both good and bad." Matthew's Greek has it the other way around: ponērous te kai agathous. Bad and good. Bad first.

In Matthew's Gospel, "many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples" (9:10). He was called "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (11:19). That same morning he had told the chief priests, "the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you" (21:31).

"So the wedding hall was filled with guests."

Then the king comes in "to see the guests." The verb is theasasthai, to look them over. And the story turns on the people in the hall.

Friend

"Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?"

The word is hetaire. As a form of address it appears in the New Testament only in Matthew, three times. The owner of a vineyard says it to a laborer who complains that the latecomers were paid the same as he was: "Friend, I am doing you no wrong" (20:13). The king says it here. And Jesus says it in the garden of Gethsemane, to Judas, who has come with the crowd from the chief priests: "Friend, do what you are here to do." (26:50)

Each time, it is said to someone already inside.

"And he was speechless." The Greek is ephimōthē, he was muzzled. A few verses later Matthew uses the same verb when Jesus "silenced" the Sadducees (22:34).

What was he supposed to be wearing? He was pulled in off the street like everyone else. The text gives the king's question and the man's silence, and no answer.

Matthew's word for the robe is endyma, a garment, and he has used it before. John the Baptist's clothing of camel's hair (3:4). "Why do you worry about clothing?" (6:28). And the false prophets, "who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits." (7:15-16)

Fruits. The day before, in the vineyard story, the kingdom was to be "given to a people that produces its fruits" (21:43). Three chapters on, the king on his throne will say to the ones he welcomes, "I was naked and you gave me clothing" (25:36).

The prophet Zephaniah had already imagined a feast where God looks at what the guests are wearing. "The Lord has prepared a sacrifice; he has consecrated his guests. And on the day of the Lord's sacrifice I will punish the officials and the king's sons and all who dress themselves in foreign attire." (Zephaniah 1:7-8)

Bound and thrown out

"Bind him hand and foot."

The word is dēsantes, having bound. Five chapters later, after the chief priests and the elders confer, Matthew writes: "They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate the governor." (27:2) Same word. Before the high priest, "Jesus was silent" (26:63). Before Pilate, "he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge" (27:14).

"Throw him into the outer darkness." The verb is ekballō. In the story before this one, the tenants took the son, "threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him" (21:39). Same verb.

The wedding is for the king's son. Read the parable again and look for him. He never appears. He never speaks. In the story Jesus told just before it, the son was thrown out and killed.

Jesus is telling these stories to the men who will bind him.

The Greek of verse 2 says the empire of heaven "has been made like" a king who gave a wedding. Matthew's church knew what kings did with armies and cities and feasts. Is the empire of heaven like that king? Or like the whole scene: the invitation sent twice, the refusal, the streets, the crowded hall, and one man standing in it without a word to say?

Sit in the hall a while before you decide which guest you are.

Many are called

"For many are called, but few are chosen."

Klētoi and eklektoi. The word for call has run through the whole parable. In verse 3 the slaves are sent, literally, "to call the called." In verse 9 the king tells them to "call" everyone they find. Everyone in the hall was called. Being in the hall settles nothing.

A parish parking lot

On June 20, 2025, in Highland, California, several men who had been working in the neighborhood were chased by immigration agents into the parking lot of St. Adelaide Church and detained. The same day, at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Montclair, agents arrested a man doing landscaping work on the parish grounds. The diocese's spokesman said he and his family were longtime parishioners, and that he was sent to a detention facility in Texas.

That January, the Department of Homeland Security had removed places of worship from its list of sensitive locations. An ICE spokesperson put it this way: "While ICE is not subject to previous restrictions on immigration operations at sensitive locations, to include schools, churches and courthouses, ICE does not indiscriminately take enforcement actions at these locations."

The Diocese of San Bernardino's communications director said attendance at its Spanish-language Masses was "down about 50%." On July 8, Bishop Alberto Rojas released everyone in the diocese with "genuine fear" of arrest from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. He told the Catholic News Agency: "I know that they would be in church if not for this threat to their safety and their family unity."

They would not come.

They would be in church.

The feast on the mountain

One of the first readings appointed for this Sunday, alongside Matthew, is Isaiah 25. It opens on a ruined city: "For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin" (25:2). Then: "you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat" (25:4). And then a feast.

"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces." (Isaiah 25:6-8)

A feast for all peoples. No degrees of friends.

"The wedding is ready."

"Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find."

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