6. The Wedding Feast

Gathered Fragments

From Christ’s straight-forward yet profound parable of the wedding banquet comes the line: “many are called, but few are chosen”. Not just a story, this potent parable is also a prophecy. Its dual-application points to the end of Israel as God’s chosen nation, and the final judgment of the righteous and the wicked at the close of Earth’s history. It’s a simple story: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son”.

The central character in this story is a man who accepts the king’s invitation to the wedding, but does not arrive wearing the wedding garment the king has supplied. On a surface level, this man—who is simply dressed in his own clothing—appears to have committed no serious crime, yet he is cast out of the banquet into outer darkness, and meets his end with others who have made the same mistake. Christ stresses the gravity of their punishment through the harrowing imagery: “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.

So what does the wedding garment represent? And why did a man’s failure to wear the garment result in eternal loss? Finally, why did this man—who desired to attend the banquet—not comply with the one simple condition that would have served as his irrevocable ticket of admission into the king’s court?
www.gatheredfragments.com
[e-mail]