What To Do After A Week Like This?
The past week has been for many, grueling and simply unbearable. Images of the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists have been unimaginable. The responding air strikes inside Gaza have been equally upsetting. We want to believe that we, that people, that human beings, can be better than all of this. We want to believe we have seen this all before: the poison gassings of World War I; images of concentration camps, gas chambers, and pits filled with corpses in World War II; the ravages of nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; defoliation and destruction of lives with Agent Orange in Viet Nam; the Killing Fields of Pol Pot; the butchery in Rawanda.
This is not even to go into the long list of how many of our European Ancestors, often in the name of Christ, treated the native first-world peoples of this land, imported Africans slaves, and other immigrant groups with terror, beatings, slaughter and all manner of human brutality.
And now this. On the nightly news. And the immediate reaction of so many of us is equally repugnant. And we want to assign immediate blame. As if pinning it down on one person or one group of persons will somehow make it easier to manage. As if tragic moments like that unfolding before our very eyes is a call to judgment of others – any others. All others.
One result of quick judgment has been a meteoric rise in anti-Semitism. We fail to remind ourselves that Jews and Arabs/Muslims are all Semitic peoples. We rush to choose sides. Rather than look at ourselves to question just what we may have done or said that feeds into the kind of hatred being force-fed into our homes on TV and Radio day after day, night after night.
We hear a Jewish mother whose daughter was dancing and singing at a music festival one minute, and the next has either been captured or slaughtered, plead for peace, crying we are all of the same genetic material. When will we ever stop and see that, she says? It is hard to watch. It is even harder not to watch.
We come to church on Sunday looking for a word of hope, of peace, of justice, of love. Instead, we are confronted with a story of a king who orders people be invited to a wedding feast. The servants sent to deliver the invitations are beaten and killed. The king in turn marshals his troops and destroys the city and everyone therein. Then he orders his servants back into the main streets to find more guests, and they do – some good, some bad, - all are admitted into the feast. But that is not good enough. The king spies a man with the wrong clothes. He is not wearing a wedding robe. “How did you get in here without the proper wedding robe?” The man is speechless. He was just hustled in off of the streets with no time to stop and think, let alone go home and change. The king orders him bound hand and foot and tossed into the “outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.”
This episode from Matthew 22:1-14 is unbearable to read aloud, let alone listen to it against the backdrop of the events of this past week. In one sense, this parable seems to have arrived right on time, bearing such eerie resemblances to the ongoing events of horror and destruction.
First, we need to stop and remember that the biblical texts do not ever offer the last word on any subject other than the graciousness, mercy and abounding love of God for humankind. These texts, most especially parables, are meant to simply be the first word, discussion starters, meant to provoke us to somehow do better than we are doing. And remind us, as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and South African leader, Nelson Mandela, spent life-times urging us to see that doing nothing in the face of such evil is the same as allowing it to happen. There is no such thing as remaining neutral.
Second, we must see and acknowledge what damage such texts as this Parable of the Wedding Banquet can cause. The standard interpretation says it is about Jews rejecting Jesus, and Gentiles, properly dressed of course, are the good Christians. It could stand as a condemnation of irrational and unacceptable violence. Yet, the Church, has allowed the standard interpretation to persist. So doing, the Church allows anti-Semitism to persist day after day. After day after day, after day.
There ought to be no world in which the destructive behavior of this king is to be emulated, condoned or allowed. Matthew, writing after the holocaust that was the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, most likely portrays this king as the Empire of Caesar’s Rome who destroyed any and all opposition to its insatiable appetite for money, power and land.
Then there is the wedding robe: just what might that represent? Most likely it is the Robe of the Gospel, of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God, who calls one and all to reach out to the others, rather than reject, demean, accuse and destroy the other. A gospel that calls us to love others the way we are meant to love God, which means to love others as God loves us and them.
Finally, with such challenging texts, we might try to imagine just how Jesus presents this story. Matthew does not indicate if he is angry or sad as he tells this tale of a king and a wedding banquet. What is his tone of voice? Can we imagine his facial expression? His body language? Does he look serious, or is there a slight smile on his face? Is he encouraging violence against others? Or, is he asking the Church to look at itself and its behavior toward others? [i]
Does the text encourage us to stop pointing our fingers at someone or some group to blame? Or, are we to look deep within ourselves and the Christian community to see if we have been living our lives as if we are following Jesus? As a nation that some like to claim is adherent to Judeo-Christian values, do we walk the walk? Or, just talk the talk?
When we listen, really listens, to this story, we must conclude that such a response to people turning down an invitation to a party is unacceptable. Such a response to someone showing up in the wrong clothes to the party is unacceptable. And yet, throughout centuries and down to this very day, there have been Christians who have slaughtered those who refuse to be baptized, and turn away people who are not “dressed” just like us. And yet, we still find the time, as a Church and as a Nation, to have the hubris to say the problems of this world are with everyone else but us.
[Coda: As I finished writing this, I walked outside into a
misting rain around sunset in New Hampshire, to see a rainbow, full end to end
and then doubled across the sky as a reminder of God’s promise and hope that
one day we will become the people God creates us to be.]
[i] For
this suggestion on how to reflect on such parables I am indebted to my friend
and teacher Amy Jill Levine and her book: The Difficult Words of Jesus
(Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2021) p.151-155.
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