I don’t know if you have noticed but, not unlike the days in the Fall season, Jesus’s parables grow darker every week…

You may remember from last Sunday the parable of the wicked tenants in the vineyard, the tenants who kill the landowner’s son who comes to claim the fruit of the harvest – it was dark enough, wasn’t it? The parable we have today, known as the parable of the wedding banquet, may be the darkest of all though…

So what’s up with that? Was Jesus trying to terrorize the people? And why would he do that?

Well, I had these words in mind when I read the story – words from Stendhal, a famous writer. Criticized by some of his readers for telling bleak stories, he answered that a good novel was “a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”

And so to me, as the writer who describes an ugly reality not because he has bad intentions, but because the days are ugly, Jesus didn’t tell terrifying stories because he enjoyed terrorizing people, Jesus told terrifying stories because the days were terrifying. His parables, also are a mirror, a mirror of the days getting darker and darker – Jesus, experiencing more and more rejection, knowing he is going to be put to death and bring great mourning on his disciples. To us, today, the parable still work because it is also a mirror of certain aspects of our world, and even deeper, a mirror of our souls.

Actually, I am wondering if this is not the most important to Jesus: To show people some aspects of their souls, of their hearts that they refuse to look at. We see that in the end, as in last week’s parable, Jesus isn’t that preoccupied with the Son’s lot, about his own lot, Jesus is worried about the landowner / the King (God’s figure) – or more precisely about people rejecting God. And as I was scrolling through our Scriptures for today, I think it’s also the question our Old Testament lesson deals with – and this theme is a constant preoccupation in the Bible: people rejecting God (and the consequences for them)

But first to our Gospel. In the parable today, we see people rejecting God / The King for different reasons: first group who is invited represents not the Jewish people in general (as we may believe) but more precisely the leaders, the religious ones. We know that they rejected Jesus for some deep reasons – Jesus turned upside down their theology of election and privilege, a religion that made them feel important and better than others – but they also rejected Jesus for superficial reasons: Jesus said “They made light of it”, they went to their business, they had other things to do! Certainly, it was not a little rabbi from Galilee who was going to teach them!

Then there is the second group who is invited. They often have been identified as the Christians, but when Jesus told the story he really meant the rest of the Jewish people, the crowd, the little ones. And those guys, they accept the invitation the other ones refuse, happy at the idea of a good meal and celebration, and they go to the banquet and you know…they have a good time! Luke’s Gospel, who reports a similar parable stops the story here and that’s great but maybe a bit shallow! Yet Matthew goes on and as he does so I think he gives more depth to the story and warms us of another danger: In the end, even the little ones, or some of them, don’t put in the effort – symbolized by the putting on of the wedding robe. The little ones can also reject God too, in their own way. Not because, like the religious leaders, they are in active rebellion, or have other things to do – these people care about God’s gifts, they need the healing and food (here symbolized by the banquet) but they don’t truly care about God, about having a proper relationship with God – and so in the end these people may end up condemned as well, like the powerful leaders.

Although it’s a difficult one, I like this version of the story because I think it describes quite accurately what Jesus was feeling during his ministry. We know that Jesus welcomed everybody, healed and gave out food generously, yet several times he complains that this is all what people are after, when healing and feeding are a sign of God’s presence to whom he wanted to drive attention to.

In the story of the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus says: Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves (John 6:26)

In the story of the ten lepers, Jesus asks: Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? (Luke 17:17-18)

This ingratitude reminds us of course of our first reading – in Exodus, the famous passage of the worship of the golden calf. Again and again in our OT lessons these past weeks, we have read how the people in the wilderness kept on rejecting God when God did not “deliver”, at least not according to their standards and their time frame: Food, meat, water. Today they just get mad because God keeps them waiting, so they go out to worship another God! As a side note, to me, it’s very shocking to see Aaron participating in this, he is a leader, a priest – but we see that he just wants to please people by letting them worship what they want, whatever make them feel better. “Whatever works” could be the motto of these people. They don’t want a God, they want a magician.

Well, I don’t know what you think but it seems to me that things haven’t changed a lot since the wilderness and since Jesus sat in the Temple in Jerusalem to deliver disturbing parables to the people.

We want the honor and the privileges or maybe we want the healing, we want the food (and God knows we need them), but in the end we are not that interested in a relationship. We care for the gifts and not so much for the giver (That’s actually what idolatry is all about) Jesus’s parable is a mirror of what’s going on in the world and in our souls: Humankind at war with God, directly or indirectly. I don’t think so many hate God literally, reject God actively but as you may be aware of, worse than hate is indifference. And at some level, we are all guilty of indifference, we have better things to do than to wait on a God who does not deliver in the way we expect God to deliver.

We’re not interested in a relationship and we don’t want to change.

And it’s not only with God I think. How often are we more interested in what people can do for us, rather than interested in people themselves? And isn’t it the same with nature? We want the resources the earth provide for us but we don’t care for the earth itself.

The parable we’ve heard today is a dark parable, but I think it reflects not only the state of our world and of our souls but also the grief in Jesus’s heart. Jesus came to convert people and in the end, he realizes that people really don’t want to change. God gives them the best that God has to offer, a relationship with God through his Son, and the people are not interested. They rather run their businesses or fill their plates at the buffet. They don’t want to change their hearts as the man in the story does not want to change his clothes.

And so in the end, there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. An expression Jesus uses 6 times in Matthew’s Gospel, and it’s always “in the end” that there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. So is God going to punish the world, and to punish people the way the King does? Well, I think that the story tells us that God would have very good reasons to be angry. I think Jesus asks us this question: Wouldn’t you be mad if you were the king? How much more offended should be God? Yet we know that God does not punish people, rather people punish themselves and to me this is the sense of the expression. We weep and gnash teeth in the end when we have remorse and regrets and it’s too late to do anything about it.

So maybe what Jesus asks us today with this story is this: How do you live today, so you know that you have answered the invitation and do what’s most important? How do you live today so in the end, you have no regrets?

How do you live today so in the end, you have no regrets?

Most people would answer to this question by saying: “Just enjoy the most of it”, and, right, Paul tells us today to rejoice as well. But he says more precisely: “Rejoice in the Lord, always”. We are invited to rejoice at God’s table, not because it is well supplied but because true joy is to love God and love one another. We are invited to open our hearts to be able to enjoy deep and meaningful relationships because in the end it is all that’s going to matter. No one dies thinking they should have worked more, made more money or spent more time shopping. In the end, all that matters is that we have loved and been loved in return. But as wide and deep God’s grace and God’s generosity, God cannot make this choice for us. We are all invited but we’re the only ones who can accept the invitation.