20th Sunday after Pentecost Oct. 11,2026

Gospel of Matthew 22:1-14

My eyes keep getting worse. I got a new glasses prescription back in November, and already I can tell, I need to go back. And when I do go back, and the doctor asks her series of binary questions “which is better–1 or 2? Now, which is better, 2, or 3?” I get analysis paralysis, fussing over the idea of a perfect solution for my imperfect vision.

With a text as layered as this parable, and so many interpretations on the books, I get analysis paralysis  too. We can try to read it allegorically. We can try to read it socio-historically, asking questions about what, really, would have been the dress code at Jewish weddings or at royal weddings. We can see where textual critics have called for an ambulance–verse 6 in particular, where in our translation the king says “my dinner is prepared” but the Greek has, clearly, “breakfast”: what’s going on there?

“Which is better, allegory or text analysis? How about, text analysis or sociology? Sociology, or Judaic studies?” To which most of us might reply, “can I see allegory again?”

But there’s no prescription that can suddenly bring everything into focus here–at least, I don’t think so. Our parable is not some stereogram where everything leaps out at you if you squint just the right way. Martin Luther himself called it a “terrible gospel” that he hated to preach, while Saint Origen, referring to the vengeful king, asked “Is this angry God really the father of Jesus Christ?”

And Origen puts his finger on what, for me, is a very scary question. I don’t mean to say the whole parable is scary or incomprehensible, not at all. Here, come with me again into the optometrist’s chair. Maybe we can see the first guests are the religious establishment, like the Pharisees, and the second guests are the sinners, drunkards and tax collectors Jesus so scandalously loves? Or, maybe the guests who kill all the king’s men are a symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness, and the second-round invitees are the Gentiles who accept the Messiah.

Maybe, again,  the violent guests are the arrogant rich and the ones who finally come to the feast are the joyful and teachable poor, the kind of folks who are called

blessed in the Sermon on the Mount. I’m not even asking you to pick! We could try on any of these interpretations and say, yeah, that fits pretty well. But then there’s the vengeful king. As I hope you can tell, I am in awe of the brilliance of interpretations, literally millions of learned pages, that have been written on this parable. But most of the interpretations, when they come to the figure of the king, soft-pedal. “It’s hyperbole,” they say. No king would ever actually do that”, they say.  Oh really? 2026 would like a word. The people of Minneapolis, MN would like a word.

Here’s where I throw on my hazard lights and say that, owing to some good counsel, I have toned it down quite a bit. Because although in 2026 I can think of a national leader who gets very irascible when people don’t come to his events, and although in 2026 I can think of a national leader who does send his armies into cities that oppose him, and  although in 2026 I can think of a national leader who banishes people from his sight when he doesn’t like the way that they look, nevertheless, the moment we read the Gospel thinking we know who the good guys are and the bad guys are, the moment we’re sure any parable can be mapped one-to-one onto reality, well, that’s the moment when the Gospel comes for us too, because all of us, no matter what we believe or how we may vote, are convicted by the challenging and fundamental moral precepts particularly in the Gospel of Matthew. So rather than dwelling on any allegorical reading at all, I just want to say that the connection that I just teased is proof that the Gospel really can speak to us throughout human history. There is something to find every day, every Sunday between what is claimed in our Holy Scripture and the life we have to live together, our common life, here in America and on Planet Earth.

The parable of the wedding banquet is also disturbing to anyone with a sense of

graciousness surrounding being invited to a wedding, where etiquette is at a premium. Ignoring the Save-the-date, or leaving it on one’s fridge,  might be one thing, but ghosting the bride and groom when they ask for a head count? Horrifying. We Episcopalians would never, any more than we would throw a punch at the wedding planner. Being invited into fellowship and hospitality–or, on the allegorical level, God’s fellowship and God’s hospitality, is such a holy thing that some of us consider it our very reason for being.  But they say a sermon should be nourishing, like giving an apple to a hungry child, and I just gave you that acerbic brief modern allegory. I believe we are doing ourselves a moral injury when we ignore evil, because as part of our Baptismal vows I believe we are called upon to resist and rebuke evil. But I want to be crystal clear–clarissimo–this is not by matching violence with violence as the parable invitees did, but this is by looking at any situation and asking, “how can we open the doors farther, draw the circle wider and choose peace instead of retaliation?”

My heart goes out to the fellow who came into the big celebration, the big dance floor, thinking that he had a golden ticket, but was singled out by the king for not coming correct. It’s interesting that when the king asks his question about the garment, and our translation, the one that Father Miles read this morning,  has “he was speechless” (where we are to infer, it was a gotcha moment), the Greek actually says, ever so vividly, is “he was muzzled”, from the Greek word φῑμός, the word for a muzzle on a dog or a bridle on a horse. It’s hard here not to think of how people, particularly women, are muzzled by men in power.

Yet for all that, even though I shudder to inhabit a theology that would accept and even celebrate the vengefulness of the king in the parable, I have to admit that this story, like its neighboring stories in the Gospel of Matthew, convicts me of my own arrogant and uncaring responses to invitations from Fellow Christians. “Do you have a moment to talk about Our Lord and Savior?” the invitation goes, and I breeze on by, smugly assuming that the evangelical or the Jehovah’s Witness knows far less about the kingdom that I do. I, after all, am on the ordination track, and I can climb the heights of the Greek

language. Or so I would tell myself.

Friends, I have deliberately postponed one integrative reading of the parable, maybe out of some cowardice, because it’s the one that is most challenging to me and my arrogance and my smugness. On this reading, the man without the proper garment is any of us who think we can join the heavenly conga line without actually doing the good works of feeding the hungry and clothing the poor. A shepherd, as Pope Francis said, should smell of the sheep, not the Day Spa. This parable may be a very scary warning to any of us who hope to rest on the laurels of our good intentions, our education, our

niceness. A self-congratulatory church is not the Kingdom of Heaven. Times may be dark. That is not a hyperbole. But if we refuse to interrogate our own lives, refuse to see that we are all complicit in the darkness in some way or other, there’s no prescription for that. Thank goodness we worship a God whose property is always to be merciful. Therefore, when you get the call, please: remember to RSVP.