Stinger

The Unwanted Guest, by Tamsyn Muir

Lections: The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 28), AD 2026 A

You may find the accompanying children's sermon here.

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.

Matthew has lived through an apocalypse.

He has witnessed the end of the world as he knew it. And so he preaches to the survivors a Gospel of vindication, the Good News of Jesus Christ enduring the worst that evil can throw at it. That’s what gives to his Gospel its edge. It is written for people who have been through hell.

The Church has four canonical Gospel accounts, penned in the decades following Christ’s Resurrection. Scholars like to say that the Gospels were written for grandchildren; by which they mean that the first generation of believers had the living witness of the Apostles. And despite their many challenges, despite opposition both political and praeternatural, those early witnesses reaped great success in the Holy Spirit, spreading the Word throughout Judea, Samaria, Syria, Anatolia, to the heart of the Empire at Rome, and beyond.

But as we neared the 40-year mark—a single biblical generation since the Cross and empty Tomb—a number of tragedies struck in rapid succession. James, Peter, and Paul, the undisputed leaders of the Christian community, suffered violent martyrdom. And to top it all off, Jerusalem’s long-simmering messianic expectation rose up in open rebellion against Rome, led by Endtimes Zealots—only to result in the utter annihilation of that Holy City, and of the one true Temple of the One True God.

Fire and steel, chaos and blood. “Traumatic” doesn’t begin to describe it. The loss of any city is a horrific devastation: but this was Jerusalem, the very heart and soul of the Jewish people; politically, religiously, historically. And that of course includes the Jewish Christians. For centuries the faithful had hoped for God’s deliverance, for the establishment of His Kingdom and the liberation of Israel, only to watch it all go up in smoke. This was nothing less than the apocalypse. This was the end of the world. This was the time of monsters.

Believers tried to make sense of it in spiritual terms. Christians wrote the Revelation of St John, and Jews wrote the Second Book of Esdras, in response to the loss of Jerusalem. And Matthew, in his own turn, wrote this Gospel from which we read this morning.

Traditionally the Church credits the Apostle Matthew—also known as Levi, the tax collector—with authorship of the Gospel which bears his name. And the core of it, more likely than not, indeed originates from within the Matthean community. But in those early decades, Matthew’s preaching had been compiled by his students, written down, translated from Aramaic into Greek, combined with other accounts of Jesus’ ministry, and finally edited into more-or-less the form in which we have it today.

Matthew addresses his Gospel to the Hebrews, to people who have survived the conflagration. Meanwhile, his fellow evangelist, St Luke, aims his Gospel at the Hellenists, an audience who would identify more with the conquerors than with the conquered. This can explain the different ways in which they tell their stories. Take today’s parable, for example.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the tale of a man who hosted a great banquet, and sent messengers to his guests when all was prepared. But each guest gave excuses, much to the host’s chagrin. Rather than let such a feast go to waste, the man sent out his servants again, this time to gather in the poor, the blind, the crippled, and the lame.  And still he had more room! So he sent out his servants a third time, far down the highways, to compel more strangers to come, to ensure that his feast would be filled. And that, Jesus concludes, is what the Kingdom of God is like. Alleluia.

It’s a beautiful story, of unmerited grace and limitless inclusion, of honoring the very people whom society would rather sweep under the rug, of a God who will go to any lengths to gather His children, for there is more than enough room for all of us within the Father’s house.

Matthew doesn’t tell it that way, does he? He recalls a different iteration of Jesus’ parable. And in fairness, I suspect that this is how Christ taught. He repeated the same core stories, the same basic lessons, in different venues, tailored for the audience at hand. Yet Luke chose one version and Matthew chose another. The way that Matthew frames the story is political: the man is now a king, and the banquet a wedding feast. When his guests refuse his invitations, he sends for them again—only for them to kill his messengers!

Violence has entered into the Matthean context, and not just murder but treason. The guests are now rebelling against their rightful king, and he destroys them for it. If Luke is a relaxing cup of tea, Matthew’s a shot of espresso. Now the king gathers in everyone whom he can find, from highways and byways, explicitly both the good and the bad, to fill up the wedding feast for his son. And that would be a happy ending, wouldn’t it? —except that unlike Luke, Matthew adds a stinger.

The king now finds among his guests a man who will not wear a wedding robe. And so the king commands his servants to seize the improperly clad, to bind him hand and foot, and to throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. “For many are called, but few are chosen.” Yeesh. Way to end on a downer.

Matthew picks a version of the parable which speaks to his audience, to his people. They would see, in Matthew’s framing, their own anguished situation. God had sent salvation to Jerusalem; Jerusalem had refused, indeed rebelled; and this led to their destruction. Yet now God had gathered in the many, the Jew and the Gentile alike, from every walk of life, from every time and clime, and welcomed them into His banquet, into the wedding feast of His Son. This is pretty much the plot of the entire Book of Revelation.

But what to make of that last bit, the fellow without the robe? Lutherans are very sensitive about what we call Law-Gospel-Law preaching. See, we interpret the Word of God as both the Law, which convicts us, and the Gospel, which sets us free. The Law lays bare our great need for salvation, and then the Gospel reveals the great Savior for our need. The Law kills us, and the Gospel makes us alive.

But Law-Gospel-Law is when a preacher says, “You can’t earn salvation. But don’t worry, because you don’t have to. We’re saved by grace through faith! Now here’s what all you have to do in order to keep in God’s good graces.” That’s no good; it defeats the purpose. All that is, is preaching Law with extra steps: you’re a sinner and you’d better straighten up. No comfort to be found there, I’m afraid. And so we cannot take the robe to be our works.

Matthew isn’t telling us we have to earn salvation. Remember, the servants brought in everyone, both the good and the bad. Rather, he warns us against self-righteousness, against the sort of faith that eschews acts of love in favor of proclaiming all things pure for the pure. We have plenty of examples of so-called Christians who think it perfectly acceptable to abuse immigrants, denounce minorities, instigate wars, round up people in camps, and justify all manner of violence and injustice as their God-given right.

That’s not faith. That’s tribal identity. And that’s exactly what got Jerusalem destroyed. The Church must be on guard against such blasphemy in our midst, lest we too refuse the grace of God by keeping it from others. That’s what casts us bound into the darkness. Yet even here, Matthew offers hope. In 2 Esdras, a Jewish apocalypse written about this same time and for this same reason, the angel Uriel states that God “created many, but only a few shall be saved.” Matthew seems to mirror that verse when he writes: “For many are called but few are chosen.” Yet he softens it, doesn’t he? He changes it.

In the New Testament, those cast into the outer darkness are rejected from the Church so that they will return, so that they will repent. It isn’t the end of the story, but another chance at redemption. “Some shall be saved as through fire.” For as hard-bitten as Matthew often sounds—which is understandable, considering what he’s seen—he nevertheless preaches to us a God of grace, of unmerited forgiveness; who demands that we love one another, not in order to earn our own salvation, but simply because love is what salvation is.

Come now, my brothers and my sisters. Let us gather into the feast, for all has been prepared.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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