So too the guest may be simply returning to the untenable marginal socioeconomic position he normally occupies, a position created and perpetuated by the systemic injustice he has just protested.īal, Mieke. They are now relegated to the sorrow of suffering and sickness and the gnashing teeth of starvation. Certainly, this might allegorically depict the final judgment, but on a literal level it also expresses the slaves’ destitution as they are cut off from what sustenance their former position afforded them.

24:51 and 25:30 use the phrase in parables to describe the expulsion of a slave from a household. However, the formulaic phrase may serve as to illustrate the worst of bad conditions, applicable both to the final judgment and to untenable conditions in this world. This saying about calling, along with the standard Matthean reference to “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (22:13), are two linguistic factors that are often taken as reinforcing the transparency of this parable as an allegory of salvation, with the calling referring to a call to salvation and the outer darkness referring to ultimate damnation. Viljoen, “Matthew, the Church and Anti-Semitism,” in The Gospel of Matthew at the Crossroads of Early Christianity, ed. Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (London: SPCK, 2010), 30–54. For an overview of scholarly positions on the question of whether Matthew as a whole is anti-Judaic, see Terence L. So for instance Warren Carter counters John Drury, Herman Hendrickx, and Jan Lambrecht, who see the parable pronouncing doom on the entirety of Judaism (Warren Carter, “The Parables in Matthew 21:28-22:14,” in Warren Carter and John Paul Heil, Matthew’s Parables: Audience-Oriented Perspectives, 174 John Drury, Parables in the Gospels: History and Allegory, 98 Herman Hendrickx, The Parables of Jesus , 121 Jan Lambrecht, Out of the Treasure: The Parables of the Gospel of Matthew , 119, 123, 133, and 137) so also Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 321.

Read in this way, rather than sanctioning violence, the parable offers a model of nonviolent opposition to oppressive power structures. In this context, we can understand the guests’ failure to participate in the king’s celebration of his power as a form of passive protest.

I argue that the parable’s original audiences would not have been sympathetic toward the “king’s” set up over them by Rome, and would have been more likely to side with the guest than with the king. This chapter offers a new interpretation of the parable, reading it in the context of Roman imperialism. Seen this way, this difficult parable runs the risk of depicting God as condoning-indeed, demanding-violence. This parable has commonly been interpreted in ways that identify God with the king and the ungrateful invitees with the Jewish people. However, one guest does not wear wedding robes, and the king casts him out of the feast. When they refuse to come and kill his slaves, the king orders the destruction of their city and instead invites both the bad and the good. In Jesus’s parable in Matthew 22, a king invites his subjects to his son’s wedding feast.

Subversive kingdom parables