The Wedding Banquet
Jesus’s most consistent metaphor and image for this final state of affairs was
some version of a wedding feast or banquet.*1 In all four Gospels, Jesus refers to
himself as the host, or “bridegroom,” for an open and inclusive banquet,
available to “good and bad alike” (Matthew 22:10). He seemed to know that
people would not naturally like that, however. So there is already pushback
included in the text: guests angling for a higher place at the table (Luke 14:7–
11), hosts insisting that all the guests wear wedding garments (Matthew 22:11–
14), or wanting to offer the wonderful event only to those “who could pay them
back” while rejecting “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke
14:12–14). We have always made it hard for God to give away God—for free!
The fragile ego always wants to set a boundary, a price, an entrance
requirement of some sort. Many Christians sadly prefer to read these passages
from a worldview of scarcity instead of the Gospel of divine abundance, and this
constant resistance to Infinite Love is revealed in the biblical text itself. The
problem is tied up with the solution, as it were, the pushback included in the
resolution.*2 There seems to be a necessary villain in every story line, and the
villain is almost always found inside the biblical text. I know no other way to
make sense of the Bible’s many obvious contradictions and inconsistencies about
God.
The ungenerous mind does not like the wedding banquet. It prefers a dualistic
courtroom scene as its metaphor for the end of time, which is why Matthew
25’s sheep and goats are the end-times parable that most people remember, even
though they do not follow its actual message about care for the poor, and
remember only the scary verdict at the end. In other words, Matthew 25:46b is
allowed to trump all of Matthew 25:31–45. Scared people remember threats and
do not hear invitations!
Just as the first creation of something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) seems
impossible to the human mind, so any notion of life after death seems to
demand the same huge leap of faith. Grace’s foundational definition could be
“something coming from nothing,” and the human mind just does not know
how to process that. Just as it does not like grace, it does not like resurrection. It
is the same resistance. Resurrection, like most gifts of goodness, is also a creatio