2011-10-09–Missional Time
Missional Time
As you read the Gospels for the last few weeks, if you get the impression that Jesus is turning up the heat on his friends and enemies alike, you’re right. Some scholars will go so far as to say that Jesus is deliberately orchestrating the events that will culminate in Good Friday.
Today’s parable intensifies the themes already familiar to us. Once again, Jesus appeals to the prophetic tradition of authority as superior to that of religious traditions. The prophets are the slaves sent on multiple missions to declare that the King’s wedding banquet had been made ready. But, like the slaves sent to collect the harvest in last week’s story, they are at best ignored, or worse, mistreated or even murdered.
What is important for us to notice is that those to whom the slaves are sent are not taken surprise by the announcement. They have been invited. In fact, according to first century protocol, not only have they been invited, they have already announced their intention to attend. After a day of preparation for the feast, the invitees are to be in their best dress, waiting at their doors for the messengers to come and say, “It’s time!”
But they are not ready. They are at their farms and businesses. They are about the affairs of everyday life. We don’t live in an honor/shame culture like that of Jesus. But our Pakistani or Ugandan sisters and brothers, for example, could very easily tell us about the gravity of the insult that is taking place here. The King has prepared a wedding banquet; he’s invited people; they have agreed to come. To then refuse to honour the King is utterly unthinkable. If we think his reaction is heavy-handed, brutal, evil even, Jesus’ first hearers would not have. Nor would very many in the southern hemisphere today.
The villagers’ rejection, in the king’s eyes, can only mean that a rebellion is about to erupt; that the legitimacy of his rule is at stake; no measure is too extreme in ending it. But now he’s left with all this food. After all, the banquet is still ready. There are no refrigerators or freezers. The meat is going to be ruined. So the slaves are sent out to those who had not been invited. They find all sorts of people—good and bad—and pack the king’s hall.
When the king himself enters, only to find one guest who was not properly dressed, we might think that he would graciously have found the proper attire so that this guest could be properly clothed. But that is not what happens. Rather, the king addresses him in only what can be called, sarcasm: “Friend,” he says. What’s going on here is, again, the flouting of the king’s invitation, this time by presumption. And the response, again, is judgment. “Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The parable presents us with a very sharply drawn picture of the king, doesn’t it? On the one hand, the king does not tolerate even potential rebellion or presumptuousness whilst on the other, the invitation to his banquet could not be broader; no one is excluded from the invitation. So, what are we to make of this portrayal?
We could move in a number of directions this morning, but I, as I said last week, I want to reflect with you for just a few moments on what this parable has to say about what I would like to call missional time. Last week, you will recall, we talked about missional discernment, about learning to see the ministry opportunities that the Lord is sending our way, about learning to encounter the strange and the new not as threats that cause us to cling ever more tightly to what we have, but as opportunities to give away the life-giving Gospel of Jesus. I invited all of us last week to begin to pray for new eyes—to pray that the Holy Spirit would open our eyes to those opportunities, to transform our perception so that we really would see them as opportunities.
Have you been doing that? What’s happened? Anything?
Let’s leave those questions hanging for now and turn our attention to time and how this parable might be challenging us with respect to time.
This parable does not talk about time directly, but time does figure in its telling. Perhaps the first thing to notice throughout the parable is the palpable sense of urgency. There no longer any time to wait. The food was ready; it was heaped up on platters in the wedding tent; the casked wine was ready to flow. The time was, simply, now.
This profound sense of immediacy runs all the way through the Gospel of Matthew. John and Jesus both come with a sense of the impending inbreaking of God’s kingdom: “Repent! The kingdom has drawn near!” There is no more time for deliberation. “Even now!” John the Bpatist goes on to say. Even now!
This sense of urgency is found throughout the New Testament—Paul spoke “the fullness of time” in his letter to the Galatians as the time for the sending of Jesus to be born of a woman. What does he mean? He means, very simply, that with the coming of Jesus, the old world, the world enslaved to sin, death and the devil, ended. Now was the time to proclaim that Good News! Death has been defeated; Satan’s emissaries have been overturned; Satan himself has been captured, his power destroyed. Right now! Any day now, the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout!
Even in Hebrews—perhaps the most theologically dense book of the casts its own pleas in the light of the shortness of time—enter into God’s rest, says the preacher of that first century sermon, while it is still “today.” “Today, if you harden not your hearts” he writes. Come while it is still today.
When I start to see the New Testament’s urgency, its emphasis on the end of all things and the importance of today, I wonder at our own way of doing things. And I want to ask a question. How might our life together change were we to take seriously the urgency that drips off our Gospel lesson, that flows through every page of our New Testament?
Let’s leave that question hanging, shall we? Let’s take up a second observation about time—however urgent the time is in this parable, the story also cautions us to come prepared—it requires us, in other words, to draw a careful distinction between urgency and haste.
I’m thinking here of the fellow who came under-dressed to the ball. We must be clear that the king’s sharp, sarcastic, and immediate response to this lapse of etiquette springs from the same sensibility as his destruction of the village: this was an indicator at best of scorn and at worst, as a small, private rebellion.
Now to say such is not to limit the scope of the king’s invitation. It really is broad; it really does go to all kinds of people. But, the quality of the response does, apparently matter. To put it in the language of the parable, when the king calls, you come on the king’s terms. Or, to use the language of the German Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, grace is free but it is not cheap.
We have seen just how decisive Matthew’s understanding of Jesus’ call to discipleship is. In this, Matthew is expressing an understanding very similar to that of James, who wrote in his New Testament letter that belief in Jesus was not enough, for that raised us only to the level of the devils who believed and trembled. No, James called his readers to demonstrate belief in Jesus by the living out of the Gospel. Or as James puts it, “I by my works will show you my faith.”
The point is, a proper response to the invitation—a response that fits the both the generosity and the gravity of the invitation—is what is expected. Well, what does this have to do with time? Just this: Urgency is borne of the realism of the Gospel message—the time really is now. The kingdom really has drawn near. Jesus really is victor. Haste, on the other hand, panics itself into lack of preparation or presumes itself into no preparation at all. Haste, in other words, is what happens when we do not exercise missional discernment. When we do not ask what God is calling us to do and instead, try to implement what God has called another parish to do.
Balancing urgency with deliberation is what Jesus through this parable is calling us to do with respect to time. And we dare not sacrifice one for the sake of the other. Both are required if we are to take seriously the mission into which we have been invited by the Father who unites us to his Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. What “wedding robe” is uniquely ours to wear? How would we go about choosing it? How might our life together change if we deliberately, carefully embraced the urgency of the Gospel? That’s the follow-up question.
Again, let’s leave that question there.
If we combine this parable’s assumption of urgency and caution against haste together, I think we will have a metaphor that is important for us. Here it is: time is the space in which the king’s invitation is to be announced and answered.
We tend to think of time as our commodity. It can be spent, wasted, lost, stolen or sold. It’s ours to dispose of as we please. Isn’t it interesting that this way of thinking about time is implicitly rebuked in this parable? Time in the parable is not time to return to the farm; it is not time to return to the family business; it certainly is not time to mistreat the king’s servants. Time is time to respond; time to change clothes; time to come to the party. Time is not ours. Time is the king’s. And he has things for us to do in the time he gives us.
So, here’s the third question. How might our life together change if we conceived of time as the space which we have been given to respond to, and in turn to announce to others, the invitation of the king?
Three questions: (1) How would our life together look were we to embrace the urgency that suffuses this parable? (2) How would our life together look were we deliberate and discerning in response? And (3) How would our life together look if we thought about time as the space we have been given to announce to respond to the invitation of the Gospel?
I don’t have the answers to any of these. But as we begin our missional discernment in prayer, these are the questions I believe God is calling us as a community to lay before him, and to mull over together.
And that’s my final point. Have you noticed that we are half way through our sermon series on mission and I have said very little about “getting out there” and a whole lot more about praying so that our intentions and God’s are aligned? That’s on purpose. If we are going to be more missionally minded, we need to be transformed by the Gospel. And as we are, the opportunities will present themselves.
Pray. Pray for opportunities to share the Gospel. Pray for your perceptions to clarified by the gracious and purifying fire of the Holy Spirit. Pray that our understanding of time and the times will be transformed. Pray that as we come to the table, we will eat and drink in such a way that the very life of Jesus is infused into our souls not so that we will go to heaven when we die, but so that we might go forth rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.