The Party You Can’t Control

Grace invites everyone and changes everything. The feast is free, but it will not leave you the same.

When Jesus tells a story about a party, we immediately know it’s going to get strange because Jesus never has boring party stories. Remember the wedding at Cana? If the party in today’s text were normal, people would show up, eat too much, stay too long and leave with leftovers. Instead, the invitations go out to the guest list. The king has done all the work. The feast is ready … but nobody shows up.

The guests fail to show up, not because they have other plans, but because they refuse.

One guest goes back to his farm, and another to his business. A few decide it would be easier to kill the messengers than deal with the invitation. That sounds extreme, but it is not that far off from how we respond when God interrupts our plans. We may not kill the messenger (much to the preacher’s delight), but we ignore, delay, excuse and move on.

That is why this parable hits a little too close to home. The problem in Matthew 22 is not that the king failed to invite...