Jaxxen,
I’ve therefore deleted your accidental post that was only Cindy’s in followup. Sorry to hear you lost the composed reply! 
But you’re right, topically (in answer to that post from Cindy) it deserves to be in another thread anyway, maybe that other one I started about the relative value of soteriologies and fear of the wrath of god.
HI everyone –
Just a message of peace and love to y’all since I’m embarking on a lent fast from engaging in argumentation (and I thank Matt Jaxxen for this in a way – blessings to you brother 
).
First, Joel – I think when I posted the Girardian interpretation of the Parable of the Wedding Banquet you seemed quite perturbed about the parables of Judgement in Matthew – and it was only because the exegetical big guns were otherwise engaged that I posted here (and you’ll have to remember that I am a historian and literary ‘bod’ rather than a biblical expert). Don’t’ feel downhearted if giving the Girardian interpretation was of comfort and is now contested– I did it again on the other thread you created when the big guns had come back, but at that point their interpretations supplemented and reigned in mine – so look to the other thread of balance.
Cindy my dear old mate – yes I can see a lot of good sense in your argument above and I have found a good contextual exegesis of Matthew’s judgment parables that chime with what you say at
ibr-bbr.org/files/bbr/BBR_19 … enants.pdf
Jason, my good friend – and anyone else who is interested - regarding why people might/do find the Parable of the Wedding Banquet perplexing - and the other Parable’s in this set from Matthew – see
baylor.edu/christianethics/P … leReid.pdf
for an excellent summary.
I still think that the Girardian take on the parable has mileage in it in terms of Raymond Schwager’s Theo Dramatic exegesis which argues that we have to see Jesus ministry in terms of different acts in a drama. SO we have the teachings and parables of the free offer of the kingdom of peace and grace at first, and then when the opposition come from the Jewish authorities we have teachings and parables of judgement, but then there is the next act and as he writes –
*In the Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast the guilty one keeps silent; Jesus himself is silent before his judges. The unmerciful creditor is given over to the torturers, as is Jesus (scourging, crown of thorns). The man without a garment in the royal wedding feast is cast into the outer darkness, as is the worthless servant in the parable of the talents. On the cross Jesus found himself in outer darkness abandoned by God. IN the parable of the sheep and goats, the Son of Man addresses the goats as ‘cursed’. Jesus himself is condemned as a blasphemer and becomes a curse for us.
The many close parallels between the parables of judgement and the passion narrative cannot be accidental. So the parable of judgement also strongly point to the one who is to be judged on the cross with all victims of sin. The first act of separation of the just from the rejected is overturned again as the judge steps in on the side of the rejected.
For as long as people are trapped in sin they can perceive only from the perspective of their own closed worlds and God must necessarily appear to them as an alien and hostile power. Only after genuine conversion does their capacity to see things alter and thus also their picture of God. When we have ears to hear, now he no longer appears as the angry one, but can show himself as he is, the one who is kind above all others.*
Anyway rich blessings for this conversation everyone wherever it leads as long as t leads to God’s universal love.
Love
Dick
great post Dick, i do think that has mileage and should be explored.
thank you Cindy and Jason for clarifying.
Cindy, do you realise you just debunked Calvinism, if your view of that parable is true? if the King is God, and the King can’t get his pre-destined party guests in, and thus judges and kills them, and invites a totally separate group of guests…
well pre-destination doesn’t work very well, does it?!?!?!
Good point, CL. And to take it a little further, it is this election – the chosen nation and in particular the chosen leaders – that Paul often speaks of in his letters. They DIDN’T (as a whole) make it into the feast at that time, and so others were chosen instead. Not that He has rejected them forever, but just for a little time, that we also might be grafted in.
precisely…we have a direct line into what Paul says about them being pruned out so we could be grafted in, but with the promise that they too will also be grafted back in (and a warning that we might get grafted out ourselves for various reasons!)
I am enjoying reading the responses.
Parables for me seem to take on different meanings depending where I am in my life. Some days I am the king who does not get his way and sees that his power/control is not what he thinks it is. Some days I am the invitee who has other things I would rather do so I miss the party. There are times I get pulled off the street and find myself in a place far better than I deserve or can even imagine. Most days I am the guy in the wrong place, wrong time wearing the wrong clothes.
God meets me where I am.
Considering that my exposition was basically the same as Cindy’s (although she had written hers up independently with some different ways of putting it), including with explicit overt criticisms against Calv interpretation attempts of the parable, it shouldn’t be surprising that Cindy’s version also ends up counter-Calvinistic for basically the same reasons. 
I’m certainly a big fan of various theories of Theo Drama; but speaking as someone who actually composes dramatic narrative (and who studies how they’re designed to function), I don’t think the solution here is to read Christ into the parables over-against the context and details of the parable–which is what the Girardean theory seem to be advocating.
If Raymond Schwager, on the other hand, is actually arguing for Christ suffering along with the guilty, and calling us to notice the parallels in that regard, I’m almost fully on board with that (minus some technicalities about Jesus being abandoned by God). That adds meaning to the parables as they stand, without having to ignore or discount relevant dramatic details.
In other words, the account that was given of the Girardean theory seems to me to involve outright substituting Christ into the parables, so that in effect the king of the wedding feast becomes an anti-God tyrant and Christ becomes the wedding guest thrown out (and maybe also those invited to the wedding who are zorched by the king when they refuse to come) – but this interpretation requires ignoring or dismissing major details of the parable, as Jaxxen (and I) complained.
But if the parables are accepted according to their details and contextual construction (and presentation) as describing the punishment of the guilty by rightful authority, it adds meaning to the parables for the son of the king of the wedding feast to volunteer (with the overt blessing and support of his father) to suffer with the one punished by the king and the son. The Son goes into the outer darkness, too, where wailing is and the gnashing of the teeth. The king who gives the unforgiving and worthless slave over to the torturers, voluntarily joins the unforgiving servant there in torment. The king whom the lazy servant tried to flatter as a ruthless brigand, in order to excuse his refusal to cooperate in the work of the king (which was absolutely the reverse of ruthless brigandry – saving the flock instead of sacrificing and killing them for his own sake), goes with the lazy servant, which a ruthless brigand chief would never do. The Good Shepherd suffers the curse of eonian kolasis with the baby goats of His flock, rather than abandoning them to hopelessness as the baby goats had done to others, for which abandonment they are now being punished but not abandoned! – so the eonian kolasis and the curse from the Shepherd King cannot be hopeless.
If that’s what Raymond was after (I can’t tell from the limited quotation), I agree in principle and in most of the details. But that is very different from interpreting the punished ones in those parables as sinless victims (indeed as the Sinless Victim) of injustice; and extremely different from interpreting the kings of those parables as tyrannical evildoers.
Using context as the key assumes Luke himself correctly understand the parable. Why must we assume this?
Christ is the man rejected for resisting a tyrant… I find that both compelling and obvious, once pointed out. The parable now makes perfectly good sense in itself, but not in its context.
That’s a good question. Both Luke and Matthew provide narrative context attached to fairly definite historical circumstances, although moreso with Matthew who attaches the parable to multiple other data reported of the same scene by both Luke and Mark, including data which contextually shapes the meaning of the parable in question. Luke’s setting for the parable, on the other hand, comes in material unique to his account.
In the case of Luke’s report, Jesus gives this parable during one of His dinner meetings with Pharisees, specifically the dinner meeting where a man suffering from dropsy was present. (Luke 14:1-6) Then Jesus introduces the parable of the wedding guests by advising that when they are invited to a wedding they should not recline at the place of honor but should promote those in the least places forward–in fact, they would do better not to invite people for lunch or dinner from whom they might expect repayment, but should invite those who cannot repay, the poor, crippled lame and blind. (vv. 7-15) Then in response to someone’s benediction, “Blessed is everyone who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!”, Jesus gives the parable of the wedding feast. (vv. 16-24) In Luke’s account, the only negative result for the insulting invited guests is that they won’t eat of the dinner (which they were refusing anyway); but they were only being insulting in their refusals, not rebelliously (and murderously) insulting to someone in rightful authority over them.
The appropriate question isn’t whether Luke understood the parable and its contexts, but whether he was accurately reporting an incident that historically happened. By the standard conventions of grading ancient authors (do they say they are trying to report real history and include genre markers indicating they’re serious about this and not just saying so for dramatic fiction flavoring; are they reasonably accurate where we have some ability to check them; etc.) Luke either earns a basic trust that he’s reporting accurately (or at least what he thinks is accurately), or he doesn’t in which case we have much worse problems than whether we should be trying to understand the meaning of this parable!
If Luke earns a general trust that he’s reporting accurately, however, then the question becomes whether we have definite and sufficient reasons to think he isn’t reporting a historical incident here in some way. (Perhaps adding details of one or another kind to an otherwise historical incident.) If we don’t have such reasons, and I for one don’t, then the reasonable provisional inference is that we should proceed with the data as he has reported it and evaluate the meaning in regard to the contextual details Luke provides.
(Which is all very bothersome, but that’s one reason why there’s forty hundred million scholars working on this collection of texts. )
So what does Luke report as the contextual coloring from Jesus for this parable? An emphasis on the intention of God to heal on the sabbath, including those things of God which have fallen into a pit (an emphasis He expects His servants to share, but which they notably don’t, for which they’re being rebuked); and a related emphasis on promoting up and honoring those in dishonor. After this comes the warning, although Jesus puts it very softly in this incident, that those who insultingly hold to their own high honor will be dishonored, while the man who represents God goes about honoring the dishonored. But the man who represents God (by prior context of what came before this parable) did seriously invite those other people, too!
Thus the parable functions like a typical Synoptic riddle: considering the circumstances, what should we expect God to do, sooner or later (but especially on God’s Great Sabbath to come), in regard to those people He seriously invited but who have stumbled into the pit? Should we expect God to mean that they will miss all future dinners and never be invited (or compelled to come in), or only that they are missing a particular dinner? A wedding feast dinner is no doubt important (although Jesus doesn’t include this detail yet, thus not in Luke’s report), thus especially insulting to refuse attendance for such blatantly insulting reasons, but someone who is married does have more than one dinner; Christ certainly assumes the Pharisees will have dinners after the one He’s currently attending! Otherwise there would be less than no point for Him to advise them to do better in regard to future dinners!–don’t keep behaving in ways which insult God and get you excluded from dinner with Him!
Do we have reasons to believe Matthew is generally incompetent at reporting history, and/or has no intention to do so? If so, we have much bigger problems than interpreting his version of the wedding feast parable (at GosMatt 22). Since I have no such reasons, the next question is whether we have reason to believe Matthew has created an unhistorical context here? If he has, then we should be asking whether he has understood the context (and whether he has the right to create interpretative context). If not, then it doesn’t matter much whether Matthew understands the context, because he and we are all dealing with the same historical data.
Matthew, much like Luke (despite one way of reading Luke’s prologue) has a definite tendency to move material around topically. Has he (or Luke) done so here?–has Matthew picked up a saying from Jesus, historical in itself, from one incident (such as Luke’s) and ported it over to this Temple scene because he thinks it fits thematically here?
Matthew is certainly including it in strong double-or-triple Synoptic material. The parable has thematic connections to what follows and came before, and so do the details of the parable unique to GosMatt compared to GosLuke’s version. That might mean Matthew (or his source or his tradition) thought it should go here and added details to spice up its contextual relevancy even further; but it might also mean Jesus thought He should tell the parable again in these circumstances with extra details to ramp up its contextual relevancy even further.
I don’t know that we have any way to be sure from historical analysis which is the case; but if it fits in such a way that Jesus might have said it here, and if Matthew has proven sufficiently fair and critical in presenting historical data (even if he likes to thematically shuffle things around), then I think we ought to operate in good historical faith (so to speak) and treat the material as though Christ chose the context not Matthew. Moreso depending on whether we think the arrangement of material (and thus its contextual connections) was inspired by God for details we can be sure had to have happened one or the other way but not both! (Such as the different order of the desert temptations reported by Matthew and Luke.)