Sermon for Trinity 20 2008 - Matthew 22:1-14
Immanuel Lutheran Church of Frankentrost
Saginaw, Michigan
Trinity 20 (October 5, 2008)
Text: Matthew 22:1-14
LET’S say you have some friends who invite you to their wedding. In fact they want you to be in the wedding party. They have fine tuxedos all ready for the groomsmen, and tastefully elegant dresses for the bridesmaids. But on the wedding day, you decide to mow your lawn before the ceremony. By the time you’ve finished, you don’t have time to change into the fancy clothes provided for the wedding, so you show up at the last minute in your old jeans and sweaty T-shirt. You look pretty out of place in the beautiful sanctuary with the marble altar and hand-carved furnishings, especially with everyone else dressed so beautifully. So how would you respond if the bride and groom asked you why you weren’t wearing the clothes they’d provided for you? I’ll bet you’d be speechless, and I doubt they’d let you appear in the wedding. Your friendship with the newlyweds would probably be strained, if not broken altogether.
Our heavenly Father has invited you to the wedding of His Son, and He’s provided beautiful clothing for the occasion.
GOD CLOTHES US IN THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF HIS SON.
I. These wedding clothes are provided for us completely free of charge, and
II. We dare not approach Jesus’ wedding feast wearing our own clothes instead.
I.
So how do I get this idea of the righteousness of Christ, freely provided to all people, from today’s Gospel lesson? It comes from the interpretation of the parable that Jesus tells. You’re familiar with the story. The king sends his servants to invite the guests to his son’s wedding feast, and they’re met with rejection, insult, and even violence. So the king destroys the wedding guests and their city, and he proclaims an invitation to the whole world, and people from all walks of life show up. The interpretation of this part of the parable is pretty straightforward. Jesus has just spent the last chapter in Matthew talking about how Israel through the years has sinfully rejected God’s invitation, issued through the Prophets. If you look through the last books of your Old Testament, from Isaiah through Malachi, you’ll find the names of some fifteen prophets. Most of them died violent deaths, and they were killed by their own people, by Israel. And then finally Jesus comes, the fulfillment of the entire prophetic ministry, and He invites Israel to share in the salvation prepared for them by God, and how do they respond? Crucify Him! They treat Him worse than they did the Prophets before Him.
God is patient, but His patience lasts for only so long. In A.D. 70, God sent the armies of the Roman Empire to destroy Jerusalem. They burnt the city to the ground, and they leveled the Temple completely. That was the end of Israel as a state. The Temple has never been rebuilt, and with no Temple, there are no sacrifices, and with no sacrifices, Judaism as it was established by God has come to an end. It’s been replaced with Christianity, with the Gentiles whom God has invited to share in the salvation that Israel rejected. That’s us! We’re the ones that the servants in the parable went out to invite to the wedding feast. We’re the replacements for the guests that the king destroyed.
So far so good. But what about that wedding garment that we read about in our Gospel lesson? The king has sent out his invitation to everyone, and people have shown up from the highways and byways, rich and poor, good and bad. So the king comes into the wedding hall to look over his new guests, and he sees one who’s not wearing a wedding garment. His reaction is kind of harsh, don’t you think? Just because the man isn’t wearing the right clothes, he gets bound hand and foot and thrown out. What if he’s really poor? What if he can’t afford wedding clothes? Isn’t that unfair of the king? It sounds like he must not have meant his invitation very seriously. And if the guest in the parable can be thrown out for not having a wedding garment, what does that say about us? Are we supposed to be dressed in a certain way to get to heaven? What good does it do us to be invited to share in God’s salvation if we still have to supply ourselves with the right clothes? It seems like we started with the sweetest Gospel, a free and unconditional invitation to salvation, but now it’s been snatched out of our grasp, and we find that we’re not invited after all. Or even if we are invited, what guarantee do we have that we won’t be kicked out for not wearing a wedding garment?
Thankfully, Holy Scripture gives us more to go on than just this parable. The Bible is full of images of clothing, especially in the Prophets. Isaiah talks about clothing in chapter 64 when he says, “all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.” This dirty clothing shows up again in Zechariah chapter 3, when angels remove someone’s “filthy garments,” which is interpreted as taking away iniquity. So the Old Testament recognizes our works, our attempts at good deeds, as being nothing but filthy rags. But to turn again to Zechariah 3, the angels now clothe the man with “pure vestments,” the righteousness provided by God. So the biblical image has God providing clean garments to replace filthy ones, divine righteousness to replace human sin.
This is the image that Jesus is building on in our parable. This is about God’s righteousness replacing our sin. The poor people invited to the wedding feast aren’t expected to provide their own wedding garments, especially on such short notice. Just as God provides His own righteousness to replace our works, so also the king in this parable provides beautiful clothing, suited to the occasion, to replace the rags worn by the beggars invited to the wedding.
That’s what it’s like at the feast to which we’re invited. Our clothes are waiting for us. They’re expensive, all right. They’re more than we could ever hope to pay for, even with a lifetime of hard work. But God has taken care of the cost. He’s suffered and died to win this beautiful clothing for us. And now He gives it to us free of charge. So how do we get this complimentary wedding garment? God gives it to us through Baptism. Jesus says in John 3 that Baptism is the way to enter the kingdom of heaven: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit,” He says, unless one is baptized, “one cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Well, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” as St. Paul says in Galatians 3. It was in your baptism, at the entrance to the kingdom of heaven, at the entrance to the wedding feast, that God clothed you with His Son and the righteousness that He won for you. So you needn’t worry-God has already given you the wedding garment. He’s given you all you need to remain in His wedding feast.
II.
But what about the rest of the parable? The part that ends, “Many are called, but few are chosen”? Many are called: the Gospel is to be preached to the entire creation. Jesus paid for the sin of the entire world, with absolutely no exceptions. Everyone’s sins have been paid for, and God calls everyone, without exception, to enjoy the forgiveness of sins for Jesus’ sake. But few are chosen. As generous as God’s promise is, most people reject it. That’s what Jesus is showing us through the guest with no wedding garment. He was given the right clothes, but he wasn’t wearing them. He’s content to enjoy the wedding feast in his own filthy beggars’ clothes. If they’re good enough for me, he thinks, then they’re good enough for the king and his son, no matter how wealthy and generous they may be. The king can keep his fancy clothes! I do just fine with my own, thank you very much.
What nerve. What ingratitude. What an obnoxious sense of self-satisfied arrogance. How dare a wretched sinner expect God to be satisfied with his works! Jesus spent a lifetime living under the burden of the Law so that sinners could be freed from the Law, and now the sinner wants to fulfill the Law himself? Jesus suffered the full fury of the divine wrath against sin so that sinners could escape eternal damnation, and now the sinner wants to pay God for his own sins? How dare you presume to provide for yourself what God has already so richly won for you! How dare you bring anything to God as a basis for Him to receive you into His kingdom, when He has already given up all that He had to win you a place in His house!
Such effrontery is common, though, and it arises within the visible fellowship of the saints, in congregations just like ours. The guest we’re talking about in our parable isn’t someone who’s “out there.” It’s not the immoral celebrity we see on the magazines at the checkout counter, it’s not the politician who openly supports gay rights or abortion on demand, it’s not the atheist neighbor with the anti-God bumper stickers on his car. They’ve already been excluded. They’re like the ones in our parable who ignored the invitation or even persecuted the messengers, and the king has already taken care of them. No, the guest we’re talking about is the upstanding church member, the one who attends faithfully and makes diligent use of the means of grace, the one who generously supports his church and boldly fights for the truth, the one who’s always faithful to his wife and raises good, god-fearing kids. He’s the one who does everything that Christians are supposed to do… and then trusts in his doing to save him. He’s the one who trusts that God will receive him into heaven because he’s such a good person, such a good Christian.
The wedding guest in our parable was actually in the feast. He was eating the meal, he was in there among the other guests. This is someone who’s responded to the invitation and is here to get his free meal, to enjoy the wedding feast of the Lamb, and yet he’s not willing to let the king be as generous as he wants to be. He spurns the clothing offered by the king, and so he’s bound hand and foot and thrown out. That’s the fate of everyone who professes himself to be a Christian and yet expects to get into heaven on the basis of his own works.
Those works can take many forms. They can be the money I give, the prayers I pray. They can be sinful opportunities that I don’t take, the temptations that I successfully resist. They can be the choice that I make, the decision that I make for Christ. No, not one of these is acceptable to God as a way to win His favor. All of them are attempts to replace the good works that His Son has already performed, to replace the righteousness that Jesus offered up on the cross and that God has credited to us. Jesus has given God all the good works He requires. God doesn’t need your good works.
But aren’t we supposed to be good? Yes, of course, but not as a way to get into the wedding feast. There’s a great need for your good works out there in the world, where God calls you to serve your neighbor. Your good deeds are desperately needed in the home, at school, on the farm and in the workplace. The world would cease to function without them. But here, at the wedding feast of the Lamb, there’s no need for good works. Here there is only one Worker, and that is Jesus. Here Jesus serves you, here God richly provides you with all that you need for the life to come. Here you receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. There’s no work to be done. Your works can be checked at the door. They don’t apply when God is working to save you.
So when you’ve been invited to a wedding, why wear your grimy, everyday work clothes when there’s a fresh tuxedo waiting for you? Why show up wearing your old sweats when you’ve been provided with a beautiful new dress? Why come to Jesus’ wedding feast dragging along your own works when He’s prepared His own glorious works just for you? What a blessing it is to rest from our labors and simply receive from our Lord, to receive His body, sacrificed for us on the cross, to receive His blood, shed in complete payment for all of our sins. What a blessing it is to receive these gifts from the hands of that same Lord, who though He died for our trespasses, has now risen from the dead, and who lives to celebrate His wedding feast with us. The dinner is prepared, the wedding feast is ready, God is here to clothe you in His Son’s righteousness, and you are invited! Amen.
