Intrigued by the “Parable of the Wedding Feast” (Matthew 22:1-14), which depicts a ruthless king determined to throw a major party for his son. When the original list of prominent invitees declines to appear (and indeed, murders the mailman who delivered the invitation), he dispatches his army to annihilate them. His next move is to invite everyone in the neighborhood, “both good and bad…so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” (The text specifically says “invite,” but I suspect the people on the new guest list had heard about the fate of those who had declined to respond positively to the first request.) The most puzzling aspect of the parable is the fate of one hapless guest who shows up “not wearing a wedding robe”. When the king spots him, he first insults him by calling him “friend” (a la the Richard Boone character in Hombre, my all-time favorite western… when a king or a gunman calls you “friend”, it’s time to get out of Dodge), then has him tied up and thrown “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Seems like an overreaction for a dress-code violation, especially in the context of a parable about the kingdom of heaven.
For the most part the commentators see this as a reflection of Matthew’s concern for maintaining high ethical and spiritual standards in the Christian community. Just because the new community was more inclusive and generous than the old didn’t mean it had no expectations of its members. On the contrary, its expectations far exceeded those of established Judaism, just as did its prodigality when it came to mercy and forgiveness.
OK, but I am still uneasy. For one thing, my reading of the biblical scholar Ched Myers’ works has sensitized me to the nuances of phrases like “outer darkness,” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Our first response to such words is to assume they refer to some kind of “hell” where people are separated from God and the kingdom of heaven. But Ched Myers and others have observed that “outer darkness” is precisely where Christ goes to establish his new kingdom. “Outer darkness” is the habitation of the poor, the outcast, and the rejected. To the primeval imagination, “outer darkness” is the abode of demons, monsters, and predators, human and otherwise. Ched Myers points out that the street person Lazarus (Luke 16) dies “at the rich man’s gate,” on the edge of the circle of light emanating from the house where the rich man “feasted sumptuously every day.” On the day of crucifixion, “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon” (Matthew 27:45), and the passion narratives draw heavily upon imagery from psalms like Psalm 22, where, in verse 16, “they open wide their jaws at me, * like a ravening and roaring lion,” and where (v. 16) “packs of dogs close me in.” It would seem that “gnashing of teeth” is not only a symbol of misery and extreme discomfort, but a reliable indicator of the presence of the Messiah.
I can’t help but sympathize with the wedding- guest-sans-tuxedo. The commentators notwithstanding, he seems more “Christ like” and more like “kingdom of heaven material” than does a bossy king with a penchant for violence. Remember, this is Jesus, who defied hallowed tradition to allow his disciples to “eat with unwashed hands.” And now he makes a villain out an underdressed man at a party? A party he was forced to attend at gun point? Give me a break…
Perhaps there is a paradoxical truth here. My own experience confirms what the Gospel of Matthew proclaims: Christianity does have drastically high expectations of adherents, coupled with its lavish inclusiveness; as Desmond Tutu has eloquently observed, grace is more demanding than law. However, just because I have been invited to the wedding party along with the other riff-raff doesn’t mean I have carte-blanche to drink all the fancy wine and barf on the bride. What it does mean is that even when I do presume upon God’s generosity , even when I do barf on the bride and exile myself to the outer darkness of teeth-grinding alienation, even then the king’s oddball son will come looking for me, come without an army and without any slaves, come gently into the place of exile, into the domain of dogs and lions, come wounded and divorced, to calm the lions and feed the dogs who came to lick my sores and his.
It is with that son that we are called to party. To that wedding even the old mad king is called, his troops demobilized, his slaves emancipated, his rage dispelled.
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