Sharing in the Wedding Banquet

Sermon 11 October 2026, The Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity

Readings: Isaiah 25.1-9; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14

Theme: Sharing in the Wedding Banquet

The first miracle of Jesus, recorded in John’s gospel, was at a wedding feast in Cana. This Sunday in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus uses the scene of a wedding banquet to convey an important aspect of the meaning of the kingdom of God.

The choice of a wedding for these purposes is not by chance. The relationship between God and the people of Israel was often spoken of in nuptial terms in the Old Testament. God considers Israel to be his bride and this special relationship is expressed in notions of the covenants made between Noah, Abraham and Moses and in the divine emotions expressed over the many infidelities of Israel.

Yet, the faithfulness of God knows no limits. And though God is ‘broken hearted’ over the infidelities of Israel, the hope of a renewed people will never completely die out. This hope is clearly expressed in the first reading. Isaiah tells us that even though the Lord has destroyed the city, God will restore the people of Israel and defeat all their enemies.

The language used by Isaiah in this passage is what we call ‘apocalyptic.’ This is a literary genre which emerges at the end of the Old Testament times, following the dissolution of the united monarchy and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. It conveys both despair at the powers of human society to deliver solutions but also hope that the divine promises will be fulfilled by a saviour. Surrounded by powerful and heavily militarized enemies it is not hard to understand why a very un-Jesus-like Messiah was the one expected to deliver Israel from the many foes of Israel.

So, when the long-awaited Messiah actually arrives one can almost hear the Jewish authorities sigh with deep disappointment and say, “was this really the one whom we were to await?” And it was the failure of these religious authorities to acknowledge the promised ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah in their midst that is the backdrop to the gospel of the wedding banquet.

Yet, the failure of the authorities to acknowledge Jesus will be the opportunity for Israel to realize that its role in the history of salvation is to be a curator of the treasures of the kingdom for the entire world and not only to keep them for themselves. This is why in the parable of the wedding banquet the servants of the Lord are ordered to go out into the streets and to invite everyone into the feast.

Paul is the first one in the early church to really get this message of the kingdom. He takes it to the Gentiles in Philippi, in Eastern Macedonia, as we hear in the second reading. However, he does not do this alone. It is with the local female church leaders, Euodia and Syntyche, and with Clement that this work is conducted. A work that came up against much resistance and even internal arguments, but which was nevertheless the eventual sharing of the wedding banquet with the Gentiles as well.

This spirit of sharing beyond ethnic boundaries is the origin of what we today call ‘universalism’: The belief that all peoples are to be included regardless of sex, gender, national identity and so on in a common project of mutual belonging. The champion of this view is Saint Paul because he grasps the meaning of the opening out of the message of the faith born in the history of Judaism and now called to include the whole world.

The advent of Christ is truly a pivotal moment for the history of humanity; it inaugurates a movement away from faith being seen as exclusive to it becoming a truly universal and inclusive reality in the church.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this shift from the particular to a universal faith. The very fact of such a universal inclusion opens the way for the later development of things like human rights, the universal respect of cultures, and important aspects of cosmopolitanism that had not previously found institutional forms as they would in the later development of the Christian faith.

Looking at these things from the standpoint of today it is easy to take them for granted. And despite recent retrenchments, we still live in a world which is deeply soaked in this spirit of universalism. However, at the time of the New Testament none of this was self-evident. This was because the Jewish faith had a self-understanding of exclusivism and singularity at its heart, born out of the necessity of survival amongst foreign powers.  

Exclusivism here is understood in the sense that Judaism was different from the other belief systems that surrounded them. Yahweh was not only one of the gods, Yahweh was the only God, not a local deity responsible for fertility or prosperity, but rather the God of the whole universe. This universal understanding of God conferred on the people a sense of their own election through a series of covenants to be the unique people of God. There were no other ‘peoples of God.’ Such exclusivity provided a strong sense of tribal and later national identity, but it struggled to cross the threshold into the universalism of one humanity under God.

Paul is the one who makes this journey, first in his own mind and heart, and later, through his missionary journeys around the Mediterranean, by means of the communities that he set up and encouraged. It would be these seeds of universalism that would sprout into the growth of a truly universal community that had been intimated at by the Stoics such as Zeno and Seneca, and also later by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but it would be through the medium of Christianity that such ideas would really take root and embed themselves in society.

So, as we celebrate today the sharing of the wedding banquet with the Gentiles it is good for us to remember just what an achievement this cosmopolitan reality is. It patterns the one universal God of the Jewish tradition in the societies and cultures of a world which can so easily slide into nationalisms, particularisms and exclusivism. In the birth of Christian universalism, the God of Jesus Christ is revealed as the God of all peoples, cultures and nations. All are invited to this banquet; the wedding feast of the kingdom of God.