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1 Jesus again spoke to them in parables, saying, 2 “The Kingdom of God is a like a king giving a wedding feast for his son. 3 He sent out his servants to call the invited guests to the feast, but they refused to come. 4 He sent his servants again, saying, ‘Tell the invited guests, ‘Look, I have prepared the banquet, my oxen and grain-fed cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’’ 5 But the invited guests paid them no attention and went away, some to their lands and some to their businesses. 6 Some even seized, beat, and killed the servants. 7 The king was enraged and sent out his armies to kill those murderers and burn their city. 8 Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 So go to the streets and crossroads and invite whoever you find to the wedding feast.’ 10 The servants went out to the streets and gathered everyone they found, the good and the bad, and the wedding hall filled with guests. 11 As the king entered and looked over the guests, he saw a man not dressed for the wedding. 12 He said to him, ‘Friend, how is that you came here not properly dressed.’ The man was silent. 13 Then the king said to the servers, ‘Bind his hands and feet and throw him into darkness outside where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.’”

Comments

The Parable of the Wedding Feast parallels the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in 21.33-41. In both stories, an authority figure (the landowner / the king) sends his servants to a group (the tenant farmers / the invited wedding guests) to instruct them to perform a certain action (deliver the harvest / come to the feast). Instead, the group mistreats and kills the servants and so is replaced with another group by the authority figure. Both parables are figurative stories about the treatment of God’s prophets, and ultimately of Jesus. Mt has sometimes been accused of having an antisemitic tone. While this is unfair, it is a historical fact that certain passages in Mt have been [mis]read to support anti-Jewish hatred. For example, 21.43 has sometimes been interpreted to mean that God’s Covenant would be taken away from the Jewish People and given to the Christian Church. This gross misinterpretation ignores the context of the passage. Jesus (who is himself a Jew) is not condemning the Jewish nation as a whole, but a select group of leaders in Jerusalem. In this way, he is standing in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, who fearlessly called the leaders of their own day to account (e.g. Is 3.14-15, Jer 7.1-15, Ez 22.1-12). The very notion that God would ever revoke his Covenant to the Jewish People would seem bizarre to the early Church (cf. Rom 11.1, 29).