"You are invited." If you aren’t sure how much excitement that one little phrase can cause, imagine that it is printed on the invitation to a child’s birthday party. You know what thoughts immediately fill the head of the child who reads those words: friends, games, presents, cake & ice cream, and lots of fun.
But this is not true only of kids. Most people like to get invitations: to weddings, birthdays, or anniversary celebrations, etc. Usually, invitations are nice looking. They are printed on colorful paper with bold lettering centered perfectly on the page. When we get an invitation in the mail, it makes us feel good inside. That invitation means that someone else thinks we are important to them, important enough that they want us to share in their joy on that special day.
In the parable set before us this morning, God extends an invitation to us through his Word. God loves us so much that he wants each and every one of us to share in the joys of heaven. God calls out to us:
Come to the Feast!
We meet up with Jesus again on Tuesday of Holy Week. He is in a heated debate with the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. Jesus had already told them two parables that day (the gospel lessons for the previous two Sundays), and neither had been very complimentary to the Jewish leaders.
The Pharisees knew that Jesus was talking about them even though he spoke to them in parables. If it weren’t for the huge crowds of people that had come to celebrate the Passover, they would have already arrested him. Jesus saw the evil in their hearts, but he was not about to run away in fear. Instead, he told them yet another parable to get his message across, a message which made their blood boil.
"The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son." The story begins on an upbeat note. The setting is a wedding feast, but this is not just any ordinary wedding reception, with the head table and the buffet line and the dance after dinner. This is a royal banquet hosted by the king himself. According to Jewish custom, a wedding feast could last up to seven days, so this was no small affair.
When everything was ready, the king sent out his servants to gather those who had been invited to the feast. But for some reason, the guests were not willing to come. Maybe they forgot, maybe something came up. Whatever the case, they didn’t plan to attend.
To his credit, the king did not give up. He sent out even more servants to gather the guests. These messengers were sent out with specific orders, "Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the banquet." Normally, one would not expect such a powerful man to be so patient, but this king was no ordinary ruler. He extended his invitation a third time. "Mountains of food have been prepared. Don’t let it all go to waste. Come and enjoy!"
You might think that these guests would react differently to servants with a message from the king himself. You would expect them to come running with lowered heads and humble apologies. But there was going to be no apology. The guests "paid no attention" to the servants. They just didn’t have time. Some were busy with their chores on the farm. Others had to take care of some business. These rejections were bad enough, but the reaction of some other guests was shocking. They didn’t make any excuses. They didn’t even pretend to care what the king thought. They seized the king’s servants and killed them.
When Jesus talked about these ungrateful guests who rejected the king, he was drawing an obvious parallel between this parable and Israel’s history. God sent prophet after prophet to the nation of Israel. These prophets were God’s servants, sent to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins. But the Israelites responded by rejecting God’s message, and even by killing some of God’s messengers. Now, the Pharisees were filled with the same murderous thoughts. Jesus, the Son of God, stood among them preaching and teaching, but their only thought was: "How can we get rid of him?"
The king’s patience finally ran out: "He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city." He not only killed them, he utterly destroyed those who had ruthlessly killed his servants. And "he burned their city." This later would prove to be prophetic. Because the Jews rejected God’s messengers again and again, because the Pharisees hardened their hearts, they would be punished. Only forty years later, Jerusalem, the holy city, the home of the temple of the Lord, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
On the surface, it might be hard for us to relate to this story. An invitation to a party is hardly a good reason to kill someone. But try to relate the parable to a situation that we might understand. Imagine that a close friend invited you to a party. Your friend assures you that all the arrangements have been taken care of: the food, the drinks, music, entertainment. Everything has been planned out to the last detail. And it is absolutely free. As a guest, you don’t have to bring anything. Just come and enjoy.
Do you go? Of course, you go. It’s an honor to be invited. But if you choose to reject your friend’s hospitality, he might wonder what kind of friend you really are. If you don’t have a good reason, if you make up a lame excuse, or worse yet, if you give no reason at all, he has every right to be upset with you. He may never want to speak to you again.
That was the point of the parable. For centuries, God patiently sent his prophets to Israel. God offered his chosen people freedom from all worry and concern. Now Jesus himself stood right before their eyes. He called them to repentance. He came to take away their sins. They had to do absolutely nothing. But "nothing" turned out to be too much for them. They rejected God’s free invitation and were doomed to face God’s punishment.
Now go beyond the king, the servants, the guests, and the banquet. Strip the parable down to get to the bare meaning. What is the point? What is Jesus saying to us? The fundamental question is: Is God the top priority in your life, or are you sometimes too busy? We might not be as blatant about it, but we are not always so eager to answer when God calls us. We may not go out and kill God’s representatives, but that does not make us innocent either.
In a world full of sin, even God’s people are tempted to respond to God’s invitation with indifference. Day in and day out, God offers us a feast in his Word. Week in and week out, God invites us to enjoy a banquet with fellow Christians. But isn’t it easy to make excuses? "No thanks, not today, Lord. I’m kind of busy."
Outer darkness awaited those unworthy guests who rejected the king. Satan himself is destined for an eternity of pain and suffering in hell. But you know what they say. Misery loves company. Satan already has the unbelievers, but he is not satisfied. The Devil wants more. He is always looking for ways to separate us from God.
Based on our track record, it might look like Satan is doing a pretty good job. Because of our sins, we deserve to be weeping and gnashing our teeth right along with him. But our King has the last word. Our loving Father remains patient with us. He protects us and preserves us. Even though we do not deserve God’s mercy, his gracious invitation still stands.
After the wedding banquet fiasco, things began to settle down. The king, however, still had a problem. He had spared no expense to prepare a wedding feast for his son, but now there were no guests to enjoy it. The people he had invited were not worthy, and the feast sat uneaten. The king didn’t want everything to go to waste, so he decided to send out another invitation. He gathered his servants together again and told them, "Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find."
So the servants went out again, but not to call people the king thought were his friends. Instead, they invited everyone they met. They combed the busy streets and even went out to the highways and byways. And they did not discriminate. They met all kinds of people: merchants, beggars, foreigners, the sick and the healthy, the good and the bad. It did not matter. The servants invited anyone that crossed their path. They must have done a good job because we are told that "the wedding hall was filled with guests." So there was going to be a feast after all.
Imagine what these people in the parable must have felt like. One minute they are walking down the street, some of them probably wondering where their next meal was coming from. The next minute they are at the king’s palace enjoying a magnificent banquet hosted by the king himself. They had done nothing to deserve the invitation, but they were treated like royalty. The hospitality of the king was amazing, almost too good to be true.
As amazing as the hospitality of the king was, the love that God has shown to us is even more amazing. As the prophet Isaiah put it this morning, "The Sovereign Lord will wipe away every tear from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth" (Is 25:8). Jesus came to fulfill that prophecy. Where we are going there will be no weeping, no gnashing of teeth. Why? Jesus has rescued us from the darkness of sin. Jesus has set us free from all sorrow and guilt and shame. He wipes every tear from our eyes. He turns our disgrace into joy.
And now he sends us out to the highways and byways. Our mission is clear, but God does not tell us specifically how to carry it out. He leaves some of the details up to us. So what do we do? How can we as a congregation and as individual Christians fulfill God’s great commission?
Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending the School of Outreach at Garden Homes with some of our members. The School of Outreach is an intense weekend of evangelism planning and training for individual congregations. One of the presenters asked the group if we knew how the majority of people come into contact with the church (besides being born and raised in a Christian home).
Did some traumatic event in their life cause them to start asking those deep spiritual questions? Is it because they were visited by a friendly church member during a neighborhood canvass? Did they come to the church because they believed that their children were in need of some religious training? People do come to church for all of these reasons, but together these examples make up only a small percentage. Statistically speaking, over seventy-five percent of people came to church simply because someone they knew invited them.
Do you know what that means? The best evangelists are YOU. As God’s servants, each one of us is a missionary where we live and work and play. And what could be more exciting? We have the world’s greatest message to share. We know that Jesus died for our sins. We know that we are forgiven. We want our friends and neighbors and relatives to share in our joy. We want to see their faces in heaven. Therefore, we invite them to come and hear what God has done for them.
God has given us a wonderful invitation, laid out for us in his precious Word. He tells us, "Come, eat and drink of my life-giving Word. Come and be renewed and refreshed at no cost. Come and be filled and never be hungry or thirsty ever again." The feast is ready. Come to the feast!