Outer Darkness

Propers: The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 28), AD 2020A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“He who has a why to live for,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “can bear almost any how.”

What he meant by this is that we as human beings can endure all manner of hardship, frustration, boredom, pain, deprivation, and stress so long as we know why we must go through it—so long as we can find meaning and purpose and value in it. If I don’t know why I’m suffering, it can be quite hard to bear. But if I have a reason for it—if I’m suffering for a greater purpose, or to achieve an important goal, or just for the benefit of someone whom I love—then I can carry on and even thrive.

Meaning and purpose and value, more so even than food or shelter, are the sine qua non of human life. There has to be a reason we get out of bed in the morning. There has to be a purpose that gives dignity to the stresses and strains of everyday life. If we know the why, then indeed we can handle most any how that may come our way.

Yet Christianity can take us beyond this, beyond not only the how but also the why. Faith in Christ can give us something deeper and stronger and truer than purpose. Faith in Christ can give us love—love Himself, love in the flesh. And if you know true love, even the why doesn’t matter. You trust the one in whose hands you place your heart and soul. You trust that no matter what, He is with you, He loves you, He gives His very life for you. And that love cannot fail.

Thus we have a peace beyond purpose, a liberation beyond meaning. We know the Who, and so the why and the how flow naturally from the character of the unspeakably sublime God made known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We don’t always know why God allows for certain things to occur, things that go against His will. We don’t know why bad things happen to good people. We don’t quite know why the world must be so broken, even if it’s only just for now.

But we trust that God will keep His promises. We trust that God will make it right. We trust in Him because we have seen the ridiculous lengths to which He is willing to go to bring every wayward sinner home in Him—even unto death on a cross. And we have seen Him harrow hell and hallow heaven, shattering the grave, filling up Hades to bursting with the infinite life and light and love of God, until the tombs of the world overflow with the redeemed and resurrected dead.

We have seen the love that overcomes sin and death and hell. We have seen the life that outlives all the wiles of demons and of men. And we have seen the white-hot mercy before which all our wickedness, our evils, our betrayals, curl up like scraps of paper in the fire, and blow away as ashes on the wind. We know in whose hands our salvation stands secure.

In the face of that—in the face of God—the whys and the hows are as nothing. They evaporate like shadows before the sun. And we are left only with love.

Our reading from Isaiah assures us of this. It presents the fulfilment of God’s promises as a rich feast, free to all; a wedding feast, of choice wines, of marrow and fatness—this in a culture that rarely knew full bellies, and to which money was as yet new. And on this festal mountain, Isaiah proclaims, all nations shall be gathered, and God shall wipe away every tear, erasing every disgrace, that death may be swallowed up in eternity, and joy everlasting shall enrapture the children of our Lord forever.

It is a glorious, defiant, and scandalous hope; a cri de coeur in the face of all that would bow us and break us; the utter defeat of scarcity, division, disease, war, and death. This, Isaiah roars, is the promise of our God—and God does not break promises! If this is what God is like, you see, if this is who He truly is, then there is nothing that can stop us, nothing that can hold us, nothing that can kill us. We will live and die and rise again as God’s own sons and daughters, fearless and dauntless and true.

To hell with the why and to hell with the how, for we know the One in whom we all live and move and have our being, and He can never fail. Even His crushing defeats He transforms into triumphs such as mortal eyes have never yet beheld. And all this we must keep in mind when we read our Gospel parable this morning. We must remember who God is and what He does. We must remember what He has promised us, what He has given for us, what He has sacrificed in order to bring us all home in Him.

The parable is not an easy one. If we think it so, we’re probably in trouble. Jesus tells the story of a king who prepares a lavish wedding feast for his son—yet the invited guests refuse to come. In fact, they show such contempt for the king that they abuse, mistreat, and murder the very messengers sent to invite them. The king responds, first of all, by hunting down and wiping out the men who killed his people; after which, he sends out new messengers to call in everyone to the banquet, people from off the streets, both good and bad, filling the feasting hall. Rich and poor, old and young, all alike rejoice together.

But one fellow at the table appears to be unprepared. He has not worn a garment fit for a royal wedding. And so the king binds him hand and foot and tosses him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth—“for many are called,” Jesus ominously concludes, “yet few are chosen.”

I ask you, what are we to make of this? The king, I’m afraid, comes across as a rather terrifying figure, burning cities, binding guests. The traditional interpretation goes something like this: Jesus came to His own, and His own rejected Him. Scribes, priests, Pharisees, all alike refused to see Him as the Messiah, let alone the Son of God. And so God took vengeance upon them, replacing them with new leaders, indeed new people: prostitutes, tax collectors, poor fishermen, even Gentiles.

Yet amongst these new guests, many are called and few are chosen. We must wear the garment of righteousness, of good and lawful deeds, lest we too be rejected, tossed from the feast into the outer darkness, there to weep and gnash our teeth. That is indeed a rather simple and straightforward interpretation of Jesus’ story. And so I think it likely to be wrong.

“Bad people go, good people stay, therefore be good,” is a terrible sermon, especially to the ears of a Lutheran, who very well ought to know that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; therefore all are saved by grace alone. This, I said, is why we must remember the character of God, His infinite love for us, His sacrifice upon the Cross. God is not wicked or fickle or cruel. God is not arbitrary in His actions or His punishments. God does all things for our good.

God is always for us. Even when He must be against us, He is for us. And so the judgment that we read in this parable must be for us, and for our good.

It is a reminder that the feast prepared for us is a feast of grace, of superabundance, offered without money and without price. It is not provided for us because we deserve it or because we’ve earned it—certainly not because we are better than other people. The feast is ours simply by mercy, by the promise of God. And this cannot be an excuse to act callously, judgmentally, or wickedly towards others. Our election is not license to be cruel. Rather, our job, as guests at God’s table, is to make room to welcome others. This feast is for all nations, all peoples. We cannot take this honor lightly. The garment required of us is humility and grace.

And even the binding and casting into the darkness—I cannot read this as rejection. I cannot read this as God abandoning us forever to perdition. For indeed, I was raised to know God, to know His love lavished upon us in Word and Sacrament. If Jesus binds us hand and foot it can only be for our own good. It can only be for our correction. It can only be for our healing and for our ultimate salvation. That’s who He is; that’s what He does; He is the Savior and He saves.

So yes, we should beware of God when we act contemptuously, haughtily, cruelly toward our fellow man. He sees and He sets right. If we need to be corrected, God Himself will correct us, as would any loving father, as would any loving parent. There are consequences for sin, even for sin forgiven in the Blood of Jesus Christ. But come what may, come hell or high water, come angels or demons, God is with us, God is for us, and God will never let us go. His punishments may be hypberbolic, but His mercies never are.

It doesn’t matter how. It barely matters why. We are saved by God in Jesus Christ because that’s who He is. That’s who we trust. His love and His mercy and His promises are unbreakable. And once you know Him, anything in this life or the next is bearable—because Christ is our deep joy.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.