Tucked inside most wedding invitations is a small reply card with its own stamped envelope. It asks one question: will you attend? A lot of those cards spend weeks on the refrigerator. Almost nobody who has one is against the wedding. The week fills up, the card slides behind the electric bill, and one morning the date is three days out and the answer still hasn't gone in the mail.
This past Sunday, Proper 23 in Year A, Jesus told a story about a king whose invitations went exactly the same way. And Isaiah told us what was on the menu. All of this week's readings, Isaiah 25:1-9, Psalm 23, Philippians 4:1-9, and Matthew 22:1-14, are gathered around a table.
Psalm 23: when the shepherd becomes the host
"You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies." Most of us could recite Psalm 23 before we knew what it meant. For most of the psalm God is the shepherd, out in the fields with the sheep. In verse five the picture changes, and God becomes the host.
In that world, if you took someone in and fed them under your roof, you were responsible for their safety while they were there. So the enemies are still in the room, but they can't touch you, because you are the host's guest. He pours oil on your head, which is how a guest was honored, and he keeps filling your cup.
The feast on the mountain in Isaiah 25
"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear."
Isaiah lingers on the menu. He says "rich food" twice and "well-aged wines" twice, like somebody describing a meal they can still taste. He repeats the guest list too: all peoples, all nations, all faces. This is a table set for everybody, which in the prophets is a startling thing to say.
Then he tells you what God is going to do at this dinner, and it is more than serve the food. "He will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces."
Word Study — Bala'
The Hebrew verb is bala' (bah-LAH). It means to swallow, to gulp something down whole. Isaiah uses it twice in a row. In verse 7, where most Bibles say God will "destroy" the shroud, the Hebrew says he will swallow it. In verse 8, he swallows death. Same verb, two verses apart, and most English translations give it two different words, so you would never know.
In the Old Testament, death is the one who swallows
To see why that matters, look at who usually does the swallowing in the Old Testament. In Numbers 16 the ground opens and swallows Korah and his household. After the sea closes over Pharaoh's army, Moses sings in Exodus 15 that "the earth swallowed them." The violent men in Proverbs 1 say, "like Sheol let us swallow them alive." Sheol is the grave. In the Hebrew imagination, death is a mouth. It is always hungry, and it never fills up.
Isaiah takes that picture and turns it inside out. At this feast, the swallower gets swallowed. The shroud that has been draped over every face at every funeral gets eaten like the last piece of bread on the table.
Then comes a small detail. God goes to each guest, one face at a time, and wipes away the tears, the way a parent wipes a child's face after a long cry. They are the tears from the same funerals the shroud was covering. Revelation 21 borrows the line: "he will wipe every tear from their eyes." And Paul quotes Isaiah almost word for word in 1 Corinthians 15: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." One of the oldest Christian things anybody ever said about Easter started as a dinner menu in Isaiah.
The wedding banquet in Matthew 22: "they made light of it"
Now listen to how Jesus tells the story of the people invited to that meal. A king throws a wedding banquet for his son and sends his servants to call the guests, and they won't come. He sends more servants with a message that is almost pleading: "Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet."
"But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business." That sounds like a mild sentence. "Made light of it" is one Greek word, ameleō (ah-meh-LEH-oh). It means not to care, to let something slide. It is the word for neglect. Hebrews uses it to ask, "How can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" Paul uses it to tell Timothy, "Do not neglect the gift that is in you."
Most of these first guests had no quarrel with the king. They had a farm, and the farm needed them. They had a business, and the business was busy. The banquet just didn't rise to the top of the week. That is the reply card behind the electric bill. Sometimes the card sits there for a different reason: we are holding the date open in case something better comes along. That is its own way of letting it slide. Either way, the host is left with an empty chair and no answer.
Some of the guests in Matthew's version do turn violent. They seize the servants and kill them, and the king's response is severe. Matthew tells it far more harshly than Luke, and that edge should not be sanded off. But the violence is the exception. The rule, the thing most of the invited people do, is shrug and go back to work.
Both good and bad, and the man without a wedding robe
Then the king sends his servants into the main streets to invite everyone they find, "both good and bad," and the hall fills up. Isaiah's "all peoples" has just walked into Jesus's parable. The feast was always meant for everybody. The only people who miss it are the ones who decided they had something more pressing to do.
The last scene is the hard one. The king sees a man without a wedding robe and asks, "Friend, how did you get in here?" The man has nothing to say. People have argued about that robe for two thousand years. The plainest reading is that he treated the wedding like any other Tuesday. He made it into the room and still didn't care. It is the same ameleō as the guests who stayed home, only this time it shows up inside the hall.
Answer one invitation before the week swallows it
Very few of us are going to stand up and openly reject God. For most of us the temptation looks like the farm and the business: being so faithfully, reasonably busy that the invitation never quite rises to the top. Isaiah says the end of death is being served at that table, and the most common human response, according to Jesus, is "I'll get to it."
It shows up in ordinary weeks. The meal you meant to bring to a friend who lost her father, and now it has been a month. The standing invitation to worship, or prayer, or ten minutes with scripture, that keeps losing to the inbox. The apology you owe someone, still unanswered. None of it is rebellion. It is letting it slide.
The hopeful part is that the king keeps sending people. Twice to the invited guests, then out into the streets. The invitation doesn't expire because you were late answering it.
So pick one invitation you have been letting slide and answer it this week. You don't have to answer all of them. Just one, before the week swallows it. You can hear the full episode of Monday to Sunday above, and on Thursday we stay at this same table with Philippians 4.