Who I Am/Not in the Wedding Feast

One of the first things I find I have to teach my college students is how to look at plays and other texts as more than just a mirror that reflects them as readers and watchers. I get the impression that much of high school literature coursework strains to spark interest in teenagers by encouraging students to imagine themselves as, say, Lady Macbeth, Bigger Thomas, or the speaker in Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for death."

I approve of just about anything that gets people engaged in literature and art, but as a theatre history teacher, my job is to get my students engaged with texts in which they do not necessarily appear. Reading a Japanese Noh play, for example, challenges millennial twenty-somethings to take in an art form utterly uninterested in stretching to reflect the college junior of 2009. It's the student who has to put into new perspective her assumptions about what theatre is, what art does, and how life should be represented.

The encounter between now and then, familiar and strange, can be difficult to navigate. But--so I assure my incredulous pupils--the rewards of such a struggle will benefit them as artists: a broader horizon of possibility for art, a humility about the scope of their own experience, and, yes, even a better idea of who they themselves are.

With this in mind, I turn to the pickle of a scripture passage that I as an inclusivity-minded Christian consider problematic: Matthew 22: 1-14. Christ relates a parable: A King has a wedding feast for his Son. He invites all the best people, and all the best people ignored his invitation and murdered his messengers. The King retaliates by 1) destroying the murderers, and 2) sending out (more) servants to invite anyone and everyone, good and bad, to the feast. He then approaches one of these wedding guests and asks why the guest isn't dressed in the proper wedding attire. When the guest does not answer, the King responds by having him bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. "For many are invited," concludes Jesus, "but few are chosen."

I confess: I hate that last message. It's right up there, for me, with Jesus's comment in Mark 7:27 to the Gentile woman asking for help that it isn't right to take the children's food and feed it to the dogs. At least the woman quips right back to Christ, correcting him (a correction Jesus accepts).

Nevertheless, such is the parable as it is presented. The standard evangelical interpretation, available widely online (and which I know from my childhood) is for believers to identify with the invited guests, specifically the second round of guests (i.e., Gentiles). The warning to believers is that it isn't enough simply to accept the invitation; they also have to wear the right clothes, treating the invitation seriously and reverently, paying proper respect to the King and his Son. Thus the passage becomes fuel for the certainty-anxiety dialectic that defines much of conservative evangelicalism in my experience: are you going to heaven? Are you absolutely sure? Because--as this passage shows--you can think you're saved and act like you're saved, but that's no guarantee that you are saved. So you'd better get right with the Lord and don you now his Pray Apparel (sorry, sorry).

And perhaps this is the right interpretation. Worry about what you're wearing and how you're behaving as you enjoy God's party. Or else.

But--in the interests of exploring other possible lessons in this parable--let me look beyond the "where am I" question. Indeed, I wonder whether it might not be more appropriate to look at where I'm not.

Who am I not in this parable? I am not, first of all, the King. Nor am I his Son. I don't issue the invitations to the Kingdom of God, and I don't get to decide who does and does not belong. I wonder, in fact, if we aren't the servants in the Kingdom rather than the guests. If so, then the standing order (bracketing the "kill those who rejected my invitation order") seems to be "invite everyone." If there's winnowing to be done, God will do it.

Sure, it seems obvious that a wedding guest not wearing wedding clothes (which several online commentaries assure me were provided by wedding hosts in first-century Palestine) does not belong. But Jesus in other places has a knack for upending his disciples' expectations about who's in and who's out. "Let the little children come to me," Jesus says. "Let her wipe my feet." "Let me see who in this crowd touched me." "Let me talk to the Samaritan woman at the well." And later, in Acts, to Peter: "Do not call unclean what I have declared clean."

If my least favorite stories in the gospels concern Jesus's kicking people out of the Kingdom, my favorite ones involve him letting the very last people you'd possibly expect in through the back door--the hated Samaritan, the tax collector, the leper, the Roman soldier, the Pharisee, even the betrayer. My faith in Christ's atoning love balances, struggles against, my doubts regarding my own spiritual fashion sense. If there's a right outfit to wear in the Kingdom, like as not I will miss the mark. Try as I might to resist easy, egocentric identification with characters in the parable, I see myself most as that poor chap who's kicked out.

I sometimes wonder if--I hope that--Christ is not merely there in the feast (note that we do not see the Son at the feast) but also there in the outer darkness, waiting to catch us as we're bound hand and foot, weeping and teeth-gnashing. He is, after all, the one who sets at liberty those who are bound, turning our weeping into rejoicing. He is the one who goes with us into dark Gethsemane, into the dark Roman dungeon, into the dark tomb.

More tomorrow,

JF