God’s kingdom is one where love and justice and holiness reign unhindered.
The trouble with politicians today, my friend said to me the other evening, ‘is that they always tell us that if we vote for them things will get better. If only they’d tell us the truth that the world is a dangerous place, that there are lots of wicked people trying to exploit each other, and that they will do their best to steer us through – then we might believe them.’ ‘Yes,’ another friend chipped in, ‘and that’s what happens in the church as well. We are so eager to tell people that God loves them, that everything’s going to be all right, that God welcomes wicked people as well as good ones -and then ordinary Christians have to live in the real world where people lie and cheat and grab what they want. Somehow it doesn’t fit.’
…But now for the good news – though it wasn’t good news for the people who were originally invited. God was sending out new messengers, to the wrong parts of town, to tell everyone and anyone to come to the party. And they came in droves. We don’t have to look far in Matthew’s gospel to see who they were. The tax-collectors, the prostitutes, the riff-raff, the nobodies, the blind and lame, the people who thought they’d been forgotten. They were thrilled that God’s message was for them after all.
But there was a difference between this wide-open invitation and the message so many want to hear today. We want to hear that everyone is all right exactly as they are; that God loves us as we are and doesn’t want us to change. People often say this when they want to justify particular types of behavior, but the argument doesn’t work. When the blind and lame came to Jesus, he didn’t say, ‘You’re all right as you are’. He healed them. They wouldn’t have been satisfied with anything less. When the prostitutes and extortioners came to Jesus (or, for that matter-, to John the Baptist), he didn’t say, ‘You’re all right as you are. His love reached them where they were, but his love refused to let them stay as they were. Love wants the best for the beloved. Their lives were transformed, healed, changed.
Actually, nobody really believes that God wants everyone, to stay exactly as they are. God loves serial killers and child molesters; God loves ruthless and arrogant businessmen; God loves manipulative mothers who damage their children’s emotions for life. But the point of God’s love is that he wants them to change. He hates what they’re doing and the effect it has on everyone else – and on themselves, too. Ultimately, if he’s a good God, he cannot allow that sort of behaviour, and that sort of person, if they don’t change, to remain forever in the party he’s throwing for his Son.
That is the point of the end of the story, which is otherwise very puzzling. Of course, within the story itself it sounds quite arbitrary. Where did all these other guests get their wedding costumes from? If the servants just herded them in, how did they have time to change their clothes? Why should this one man be thrown out because he didn’t have the right thing to wear? Isn’t that just the sort of social exclusion that the gospel rejects?
Well yes of course, at that level. But that’s not how parables work. The point of the story is that Jesus is telling the truth, the truth that political and religious leaders often like to hide: the truth that God’s kingdom is a kingdom on which love and justice and truth and mercy and holiness reign unhindered. They are the clothes you need to wear for the wedding. And if you refuse to put them on, you are saying you don’t want to stay at the party. That is the reality. If we don’t have the courage to say so, we are deceiving ourselves, and everyone who listens to us.
