“Parable of the Great Banquet” (between 1525 and 1545) – Brunswick Monogrammist
After his death and resurrection, Jesus returns to the shore of the Sea of Galilee at dawn one morning, sees the disciples, who have gone back to fishing but have caught nothing, provides a catch for them, and then prepares breakfast for this unworthy bunch, invites them to bring some of the fish they have just caught and to come and have breakfast. Jesus is still choosing them, this time to gather around another meal with their Lord and Savior.
And this part—Peter, when he realizes that it is the Lord on the shore calling to them, he throws on some clothes, for he is naked. Now fully clothed, he jumps into the sea, and swims to shore, to join Jesus for breakfast.
When Peter hurries to put on clothes to swim to Jesus, he is putting on the new life that he suddenly realizes is waiting for him. He is putting on his wedding garment to wear to the banquet.
And so Jesus still invites us today to put on new life and to come to his table. He invites all of us.
As the invitation to the Eucharist says in the Celtic Eucharistic prayer that we will pray again on All Saint’s Day,
“For this is the table where God intends us to be nourished; this is the time when Christ can make us new. So come, you who hunger and thirst for a deeper faith, for a better life, for a fairer world. Jesus Christ, who has sat at our tables, now invites us to be guests at his.”
Imagine the times in your life when you’ve felt like you’ve been fishing all night and you haven’t caught a thing. Remember how Jesus has filled up your boat over and over with blessings, too many to count.
And now, at his invitation, bring what he has so graciously blessed you with, and even if you feel like you don’t have much to bring, even if all you can bring is weariness, bring what you’ve got.
Put on your wedding garment of new life, and come to the table, rejoicing in the Lord.
Sermon, Proper 23, Year A 2023
Isaiah 25:1-9, Psalm 23, Matthew 22:1-14
Once, a friend told me about a dream she had.
In the dream, my friend was dressed up. She was wearing a fancy hat. She found herself walking up the sidewalk to a brick building. She climbed some stairs, reached the door, and uncertain about what to do next, rang the doorbell.
A person came to the door and ushered her into a banquet room with a large table, set for an elegant dinner. Why was she here, my friend wondered? She hadn’t received an invitation to dinner, and yet, here she was.
Was she supposed to be here?
She hesitated, but the person who had brought her to the room took her to the table, pulled out a chair for her, and asked her to have a seat.
And then my friend woke up, and wondered what on earth that dream had meant.
A few months later, she unexpectedly died.
I’ve always been convinced that in her dream, Jesus was seating my friend at the heavenly banquet table that had been prepared for her from the foundation of the world.
Throughout the Bible, the banquet is a symbol for God’s love, generosity, and welcome. In today’s Old Testament reading, Isaiah describes a banquet that God will prepare for all people, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines. And along with this feast comes the end of death. While the people feast, God swallows up death itself.
One of the most famous tables in the Bible is the one that God provides in the 23rd Psalm—“You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me.” Even in the midst of trouble, God provides for us.
At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was at a wedding banquet. When the wine ran out, Jesus changed water into wine so that the joyful festivities could continue. That wine, even though the people didn’t know it at the time, was a symbol of God’s direct sacrificial love, generosity and welcome for all of those who had gathered at the wedding banquet.
No wonder Jesus told parables in which people are invited to banquets. Today’s gospel is one of the banquet parables.
But this parable makes me, and maybe you, highly uncomfortable because it’s so violent, and ends up being so exclusive.
The context of this parable is important. Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem and the Pharisees continue to question his authority. What did Jesus want the Pharisees to understand as they listened to this parable?
But in the end, what does this parable have to say to me? To us, today?
I find myself asking, “Is God really like the violent king?” I don’t think that God is like this at all, but….am I limiting God to my own comfortable version of God, dismissing any view that doesn’t fit with mine? Then, I come to the most uncomfortable question of all.
In this parable, which group of the invited do I belong to? Am I someone who turns down the invitation to the banquet immediately? Am I someone who thinks about going to the banquet but then I decide that other things in my life are more important so I just can’t make it? Or maybe I’m in that group that got rounded up and brought into the banquet hall, wondering what I am doing there.
And then, the most troubling question of all. Now that I’m at the banquet, am I the one that the king notices? Will the king ask me how I even got here without a wedding robe, and then, when I don’t have an answer, will I get tied up and tossed into the outer darkness?
Am I one of the called, but not one of the chosen?
Now it’s important to remember another banquet, the most important meal in the whole Bible, the Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion. Think about who was gathered around this table—the ones Jesus himself had chosen as his disciples. The disciples were, like us, imperfect people. One of his disciples even betrayed him. After eating together, the disciples went with Jesus to the Mount of Olives and couldn’t even stay awake to keep watch with him as he prayed. And then they all deserted him. Peter actually denied even knowing Jesus, not once but three times.
Called, but was this bunch worthy of being chosen?
Just as we are all called, but are we worthy of being chosen?
After his death and resurrection, Jesus returns to the shore of the Sea of Galilee at dawn one morning, sees the disciples, who have gone back to fishing but have caught nothing, provides a catch for them, and then prepares breakfast for this unworthy bunch, invites them to bring some of the fish they have just caught and to come and have breakfast. Jesus is still choosing them, this time to gather around another meal with their Lord and Savior.
And this part—Peter, when he realizes that it is the Lord on the shore calling to them, he throws on some clothes, for he is naked. Now fully clothed, he jumps into the sea, and swims to shore, to join Jesus for breakfast.
When Peter hurries to put on clothes to swim to Jesus, he is putting on the new life that he suddenly realizes is waiting for him. He is putting on his wedding garment to wear to the banquet.
And so Jesus still invites us today to put on new life and to come to his table. He invites all of us.
As the invitation to the Eucharist says in the Celtic Eucharistic prayer that we will pray again on All Saint’s Day,
“For this is the table where God intends us to be nourished; this is the time when Christ can make us new. So come, you who hunger and thirst for a deeper faith, for a better life, for a fairer world. Jesus Christ, who has sat at our tables, now invites us to be guests at his.”
Imagine the times in your life when you’ve felt like you’ve been fishing all night and you haven’t caught a thing. Remember how Jesus has filled up your boat over and over with blessings, too many to count.
And now, at his invitation, bring what he has so graciously blessed you with, and even if you feel like you don’t have much to bring, even if all you can bring is weariness, bring what you’ve got.
Put on your wedding garment of new life, and come to the table, rejoicing in the Lord.
The heavenly banquet table could be anywhere—in the brick building at the end of a sidewalk where my friend found herself in a dream, at a charcoal fire beside the sea where the disciples found Jesus waiting, at a wedding feast where the wine ran out but got replenished, anywhere there is love and joy, where two or three are gathered, right here around this simple table in this little church—we are all invited.
The words of today’s sequence hymn and communion hymn, written by Horatius Bonar, were originally in one long ten verse hymn, which got split up into two hymns. I chose these two hymns for today because for me they sum up these lessons about the heavenly banquet to which Jesus invites us all, even though we are all unworthy.
“Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face.” Here we bring our weariness. Here we are forgiven, and “here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace; thy blood, thy righteousness, O Lord, my God.”
It is here at the Lord’s table that, as we take Jesus in, we put on Jesus, our wedding garment. We put on our new lives.
For “This is the hour of banquet and of song, this is the heavenly table spread for me. Here let me feast and feasting, still prolong the brief bright hour of fellowship with thee….feast after feast thus comes and passes by, yet, passing, points to the glad feast above, giving us foretaste of the festal joy, the Lamb’s great marriage feast of bliss and love.”
We are all invited to the table. We are all invited to put on new life.
And when we choose to put on that new life in Jesus, we are all chosen to be welcome guests at God’s banquet table, both now and forever.