God's Invitation

I have recently been very blessed and been to a wonderful wedding in the South of France. One of my old team at World Vision was marrying a Frenchman so it was done in style.

The wedding began with a parade of the wedding party through the centre of Marseille to the Mairie.

The happy couple were married by the Mayor of Marseille and we then all repaired to the Provencal countryside for a party that lasted over the weekend. It was an extraordinary celebration of love and life and it was such a privilege to be invited. So when I received the invitation with the standard French request Répondez s’il vous plait (R.S.V.P), I responded in the affirmative with enormous gratitude that my friend wanted me to share in her celebration.

On my return I found myself preaching in our church about another wedding feast – the metaphorical feast described by Jesus in Matthew 22:1-4 – a feast being hosted by a King on the occasion of his son’s wedding and I began to reflect on the whole nature of invitations.

The Parable of the Wedding Feast
At the time when Jesus told this parable, the custom was to send two invitations to a celebration or feast of any kind: the first was to tell everyone that the event was being planned and the second was to tell the guests that preparations were complete and the feast was about to begin.

In this parable, the King had already sent out the first invitation, and the feast being ready, he sent out his messengers with the second invitation. But when the second invitation was extended, the intended guests refused to attend.

How rude. Can you imagine how hurt you would be if you issued an invitation to join you for an important moment in your family life – a christening, a wedding, an anniversary - and you were treated like this. And this was a king. I am hardly an ardent monarchist but to respond to a royal invite in this manner seems unthinkable.

But this King was remarkably patient and decided to send out even a third invitation. But once again the invited guests made light of it, one went to his farm another to his business, while others actually seized his messengers and killed them. And at this the final insult the king’s patience, not surprisingly, reached its limits, and he sent his army to destroy those that had rebelled against him.

The feast was ready, however, and in order to supply it with guests, the king ordered his messengers to go out again and find anyone who would come and invite them to the feast.

Taking him at his word, his servants invited everyone without regard to social status, race, nationality, or gender and each guest was supplied with a wedding garment by the king, and wearing this was allowed to enter in to the feast.

Later, the king arrived on the scene, and when he entered the feast, he found a man that had refused to wear the wedding garments that he had so generously had been provided. When questioned about why he had refused to wear them, the man stood speechless. The king had the man removed from the celebration.

When Jesus told this parable he was teaching in the temple and had been cornered by the religious leaders, who demanded to know by whose authority he was teaching. But he exposed the hypocrisy of the leaders saying.

‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.’

So the King in this parable represents God the father and the son is Jesus himself. The messengers who were sent forth were the Old Testament prophets and John the Baptist; the people who rejected the invitation were the religious leaders, and the others that were allowed to enter the feast were society’s outcasts – the tax collectors, prostitutes, gentiles and other sinners.

Our Invitation
But what does this parable mean for us today? Well this invitation still stands. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, everyone is invited into a relationship with God.

But the relationship is on God’s terms not ours. We can’t earn an invitation, it is given freely but in order to be admitted we have to put on the wedding garment – the salvation through Christ that has been provided by God.
The Bible gives us a vivid glimpse of this banquet. In Isaiah we are told

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.

None of us can really envisage his Kingdom but Isaiah uses the imagery of rich and choicest foods and refined wines to give us an idea of how wonderful it will be. And In Isaiah we are told that at this banquet we will see God’s true glory and he will destroy death giving us eternal life.
What a wonderful invitation – all we have to do is RSVP.

Why would anyone turn down that invitation? It doesn’t seem to make any sense but they do.
The Guardian recently published a British Social Attitudes survey which shows for the first time more than half the UK population say that they have no religion and the generation gap on religious affiliation is rising; almost three quarters of 18-24 year now olds say they have no religion.

And there is a wide scale decline in church attendance in this increasingly secular country. Looking at the established church in England. The number of adults saying that they are Anglican has declined from almost 1 in 3 at the turn of the century just to 15% and only 3% of young people under the age of 24 describe themselves as Anglican

Lost in the post
Some - such as Richard Dawkins and other humanists - in the country have rejected God’s offer outright. Others seem to think it isn’t relevant. Undoubtedly the church today does have a challenge and we need to do some deep soul searching about how we can be more relevant to society. But as CL Lewis famously said: ‘Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.’

But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that for many his invitation seems to have got lost in the post. During a recent TV game show, a contestant was unable to say what the crown of thorns and Pontius Pilate were associated with and another thought the Sermon on the Mount had been delivered by Joan of Arc.

We have a whole generation growing up today who do not even know that they have been issued this wonderful invitation and given what is at stake that is something that should bother us all.

The banquet is ready and God still wants to invite his people but today we are his messengers; he is relying on us to deliver his invitation.
It doesn’t mean you have got to turn into Billy Graham. It might be as simple as inviting someone to come along to a service at your local church, or a social gathering of Christian friends, or perhaps even just to have a conversation that begins to touch on some of the deeper questions of life that we all struggle with.

We just need to deliver the invitation, to take that first step and God will do the rest.

Kate Nicholas’s best-selling book Sea Changed – recently shortlisted as CRT Biography of the Year – is available in Christian bookshops and Waterstones throughout the UK and online at eden.co.uk and Amazon Worldwide .