This is a work in progress, but I want to put together some thoughts on our place of response to the Gospel and invite some dialogue…
Hearing the great invitation into the Gospel Story that God has been telling since before time began, with all its extravagant beauty, its breathtaking adventure, its bold intimacy, is not enough. It requires a response. Jesus will arouse our desire for that life with God, and He will invite us in, and then He asks for our initiation, our acceptance of the invitation. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” he says, and he very well means us to open wide the door. This is Romans 10. Paul says that the whole point in anyone being sent to preach is not just that others would hear the Really Incredible News, but so that they would “call on the name of the Lord and be saved.” Saved from death. Saved into Life. That’s the deal.
This reality bears an incredible weight. Although the provision has been made for our place in the kingdom, Jesus has left the response up to us. Oh, he’ll run after us, he’ll haunt us with desire and thwart our efforts to garner life elsewhere, and he’ll pursue and romance and woo us – boy, will he – but he will not force us in the end. We are asked to believe, and to just show up.
Here’s how Jesus describes it. He tells about the kingdom in the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22. He says,
The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.
Then he sent some more servants and said, "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 wedding banquet."
Ultimately, no one who was invited in would come, and they eventually killed the servants the king sent to invite them in. Enraged, he sends his army against them and kills the murderers. In a stunning turn, the king turns to the remainder of his servants and says, "Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find."
Picture it. Vagrants. Street sweepers. Prostitutes. Drunks. Normal folks just on their way to and from market. Street people. These are the ones the king chose to attend a wedding banquet fit for a prince.
Now, this is no ordinary wedding banquet. We are talking an all out, no holds barred celebration. Nothing is held back in the months of preparation for this event. There are decorations and ornaments, entertainers from afar, music and space for dancing, and a table laid out with food fit for a king - fruits from distant lands in all their exotic flavors and aromas, oxen and cattle (notice the plural) butchered and prepared for the occasion, wine, no doubt, prepared and cultured and fermented in stone casks for weeks just for this one event. This is going to be a real celebration to remember.
And those that come must remember to come
ready. After all, this is no ordinary dinner. This is a feast, a banquet, and all of the most famous and well-known and important in the land will be there – the king himself, the prince, his bride, together with all the nobles and the land’s most notorious rulers.
And now, all is ready, all is waiting, and in walk the guests…
Now, they would have no doubt been doted over and prepared in advance. They would have someone to clean them up and prepare them to be in the presence of such important folk. They would have been bathed and dressed in the finest linens, ready to celebrate with the prince and his bride.
Here they stand, here they sit, mouths open in astonishment at the extravagance of the place. Never have they seen such beautiful and expensive and ornate decorations. Never have they seen such exotic food and dancers and musicians.
Just when they thought they had surely seen it all, in walks the king himself to meet them. Jesus picks up the story from here, “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 'Friend,' he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?'”
“The man,” Jesus said, “was speechless.” Yeah, that’s an understatement. The king himself walks up to this man, who just yesterday was out on the street corner scouring through the waste of fallen human indignity for some scrap of food and money, selling himself or someone else for a bowl of soup, and today he walks among royalty. But what’s more shocking to him than that reality is that he failed to get ready. His once-in-a-lifetime shot at being in the presence of the king, something so very few ordinary folk get to do, is blown. The king commands his guards to tie his hands and feet and throw him back out into the street “where,” according to the Storyteller, “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Why? Good Lord, what crime did this man commit in the presence of the king that the punishment would be this severe? Simply because he wasn’t wearing the right
clothes?!
No. It was not that he wasn’t wearing the right clothes. It was that he hadn’t prepared, he hadn't believed, and his pride was the dishonor of many. Upon him had been lavished the most extravagant and unlikely of gifts, an evening of festivity in the presence of the king and his son. He had been given every opportunity to get ready for the event, and he had not. Why?
Because he didn’t believe it. Not until he stumbled into the room and met the others who were wearing their attire, and not until he smelled the food and choice wine and witnessed the months of preparation the king had undergone for this event, and not until the king himself appeared before him did he believe any of it. He wasn’t going to be duped. He wasn’t going to be shoved back onto the streets and hear the mock and scorn of his friends saying that he was a fool to believe that he would ever be invited in. Who was he that he could be in the presence of the
king? No, he wouldn’t be foolish. He would be ready for the hammer to fall and the punch line to be delivered. He would be the butt of no joke. He was expecting to go back out onto the streets once this hoax was revealed for the sham it was.
And that is exactly what happened. He got what he expected – shoved back out into the streets where he came from.
Jesus finishes this strange parable by stating, in reference to the Kingdom and the Story he is telling, “many are invited, but few are chosen.”
This man was chosen. He came into the banquet hall not because he belonged there by birthright or heritage or accomplishment, but because he was invited in by the king himself. But that, apparently, wasn’t enough. The invitation itself wasn’t enough. He had to believe it, accept it, in hope against hope and beyond the cynicism and pride he had built up over the years. He had to enter in, fully, ready, dressed, as it were, for the occasion. Not because he deserved it, not because he earned it, but because it was his for the taking. If he had been honest enough with himself, he would have realized that there was no other place on the planet he would have rather have been but in on the festivities. But he couldn’t bring himself to participate.
In the end, he got what he wanted, or at least what he feared. He couldn’t bring himself to admit his desire to be a part. He played it safe, he didn't take the risk to desire, and what he dreaded overtook him (Proverbs 10:24).
Always, always, Jesus will invite us into something really fantastic by stirring our desire for life. Whatever else you think you want, and by whatever other name you know it – recognition, money, rest, peace, love (and your idea of it), sex, booze – what we are really after, all of us, is life. That is set within us, burned into our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He will so often ask us, as he did to many of his disciples and friends and street people of his day, “What is it you want?” Believe it or not, Jesus says, this is us. We are the men and women of the street invited in to join the celebration of the wedding. And we are
so much more…
Who, exactly, do you think it is that the prince is marrying?
I think the most difficult part of the Christian faith is also the most important: hearing, and believe, exactly what is said about us and our role in the Story with God. That’s really all that’s asked of us. “
Come with me,” is the offer, “
and I will show you life” is the promise. Do we want that, and do we believe that it is really available, really? Would he really do that, is his heart really that good? Could it really happen for
me? All the rest of the work of the Spirit of Christ in us is to bring us into that reality and, ultimately, into that Reality that we are being prepared for.
I want to open this up to conversation. What are your thoughts, your stories, your hopes, your fears? What are some things that God has spoken to you regarding the invitation, and the acceptance of it. Has he spoken to you about it? How has he pursued you and invited you in? In what ways is he preparing you to take your place in this Great Coming Banquet?
