Variety: Matthew 22:1–14

In the New Testament, and particularly for Jesus, the most common image for what God is offering us is a banquet. It’s not a trophy, not a prize, not a reward reserved for later, but a participative and joyous party now. A banquet has everything to do with invitation and acceptance; it is never a command performance.  

Matthew’s Gospel contains the parable of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22:1–14). A king sends out his servants to let the guests know that the banquet has been prepared. “But they were not interested: one went off to his farm, another to his business” (22:5). These are not bad things, but just “busyness with many things” that keep them from “the one important thing” (Luke 10:41–42), which is the banquet of conscious divine union. At the end of the parable, the king instructs the servants, “Go out and invite everyone you can find to the wedding feast.” The servants returned with “the good and the bad alike” (22:9–10). That phrase has been shocking to most Christians, because we have been taught to believe that Jesus’ message is primarily a moral matter in which “bad” people would clearly not belong. Once we know it is primarily a mystical matter, a realization of union, it reframes the entire journey. Almost by accident, we find ourselves becoming “moral,” but morality did not earn us a ticket to the banquet.  

In Luke 14, we find three different banquet parables. People are either avoiding them, trying to create hierarchies at them, or simply refusing to come. Just as in Matthew 22, the host almost has to force people to come, and Jesus even offers a bit of nonsensical advice: “When you give a lunch or a dinner, don’t ask your friends, brothers, relations, or rich neighbors” (Luke 14:12). He lists the people that we’d logically invite and says, “Don’t invite them … for fear they might repay you in return.” (Remember, all rewards for Jesus are inherent, not about expecting something later.) But his message is also a warning against ego systems of reciprocity, and an invitation to pure gratuity.  

Jesus is always undercutting what we think is common sense. This passage calls us to nondual thinking and to change our entire form of consciousness. “When you have a party, invite those who are poor, crippled, maimed, or blind, because the fact that they cannot pay you back will mean you are fortunate” (14:13)—because now you are inside of a different mind that will allow you to read all your life from a worldview of abundance instead of a worldview of scarcity. God is clearly into abundance and excess, and God’s genuine followers share in that largesse: first in receiving it and resting in it, then in allowing it to flow through them toward the world.