Sermon preached 18 October 2026
Reading: Matthew 22:1–14
Tr Pastor Lawrence McCatty
Introduction
Have you ever been invited to a party, a wedding, or other special event, but when you arrived you realised you were not properly dressed. Perhaps you hadn’t read the invitation carefully enough and missed the bit that said “black tie only”, or “formal dress only, strictly no jeans, or tee-shirts”.
Royal weddings have specific dress codes to ensure a level of formality and respect for the couple being married. At the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, guests were expected to wear a “Uniform, Morning Dress, or a Lounge Suit” and female guests were advised to wear long sleeves.
In our Gospel text for today, Jesus tells a parable about a king who invited guests to a wedding banquet for his son. Through it He teaches us a wonderful history lesson, the history of God’s kingdom, from the Old Testament Prophets through to the Apostles and disciples of Christ, to today and through to the Last Day.
Who’s who?
First all, Who’s who in this parable? The king is God the Father, his son who he had prepared the wedding banquet for is Jesus.
The Wedding Banquet
So what is the “wedding feast” that God has prepared? The feast that God has been preparing since Adam and Eve defied God and brought the curse of sin into the world. It is the spiritual feast for starving souls, the blessings that Christ Our Saviour won for all by His death and resurrection.
The first call rejected
Jesus tells us that the king:
“sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast”
Listen carefully to what Jesus is teaching here. He says that God sent His servants to “call those who were invited” to those who had already been invited. This first call was to those whom God had already invited into His Kingdom, His chosen people the Israelites, the Jewish people.
The first servants He sent to call them to His wedding feast are those we hear about in the Old Testament – the Prophets, the writers of the Psalms and other books that tell of the kingdom to come, of the Messiah through whom we come to be given a seat at His table.
“but they would not come.”
The Old Testament records how time and again the Jewish people and religious leaders rejected God’s promises and His blessings. “We want a king like other nations!” “We want to worship the gods of other nations.” “We want to follow rules and outward ceremonies and not love God with our heart soul and mind, or our neighbour as ourselves” and finally “Crucify Jesus the blasphemer!”
The second call rejected
Then when the feast is ready, when “everything is ready” as Jesus tells us in verse 4, when God the Father had prepared salvation through the atoning sacrifice of His Son on the cross, and by His resurrection fully sealed their redemption, then God sent another invitation to the Jews.
Out of patient love, and by His grace the king sends another call out to those for whom he had prepared the banquet.
But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”
Romans 10:21
So, in Jerusalem, on the Day of Pentecost, when “everything is ready”, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were gathered in the city, God “sent other servants” to call them to the feast of salvation. These “other servants”, the Apostles and Jesus’ disciples that He had been teaching and preparing for this Day, testified to the Jews who had gathered in Jerusalem that God’s banquet was now ready.
At Pentecost, the Apostle Peter stands up in front of a huge crowd and delivers a beautiful Holy Spirit inspired sermon to those gathered, which ends with him announcing:
“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Acts 2:36
The Holy Spirit prompted hearts to respond, wondrously some received faith in response to Peter’s sermon:
37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Acts 2:37–38, 41
41 So those who received his word were baptised, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
The following chapters of the book of Acts record how the disciples repeatedly called on their fellow Jews to receive the salvation won by Christ.
The Materialists
Despite this miraculous work of the Spirit, Jesus knew that many others “paid no attention and went off”,as He prophesied in His parable. For many their hard stubborn hearts led them to reject the divine call as not being in their best interests. Their earthly pleasures and treasures are everything. So they “went off one to his farm, another to his business”, away from the gospel, from their invite to heaven. They went back to their possessions, their wealth, their idols. We see so many today who reject the divine invitation to share in Christ and His blessings, and prefer the pleasures and satisfactions of this world. They are deaf to the gospel invitation, their earth-bound hearts despising heavenly things.
The Violent Persecutors
While the earth-bound wander off back to their things, back to their idols, others mistreat and persecute the king’s servants who are delivering His call, His invitation:
“while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.” We hear.
We are reminded of the Jews in the book of Acts who persecuted the early Christians. Chief amongst them was a Jew called Saul.
Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. 3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.
Acts 8:2–3
We are only too well aware that this harassing and persecution of Christians, and the taking of their lives, persists to this day, and will continue until Christ comes again.
But God will not see His love that reaches out to sinners rejected and insulted forever. The time of grace will end.
In verse 7 of Jesus’ parable we hear of the fate that awaited the Jews who rejected the gospel. Several times during His ministry Jesus prophesied about the future destruction of the temple and Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. And in this parable, He does so again:
“The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.”
So what should the king do now?
“The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy”
“those invited were not worthy”.By nature, all are unworthy.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
Romans 3:23
No-one has any merit whatsoever before God. But by their rejection of the king’s generous invitation, and his servants who brought it, the Jews had proved themselves unworthy of being at the king’s banquet.
The king therefore sends his servants to the main roads to invite ‘as many as you find’
Jesus here is telling of the future turning point in the development of God’s kingdom when the invite goes out to the Gentiles. There is no better illustration of this than when Paul and Barnabas bring the invitation to the Jews in Antioch as recorded by Luke in Acts 13:
And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. 47 For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, “ ‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”
Acts 13:46–47
Paul and Barnabas “Go to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as they find.” They and many other followers of Christ, then and now, obey Jesus’ Great Commission to:
“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation”
Mark 16:15
We only need look at the history of the church to see how Jesus’ promise in this parable has been fulfilled. How, despite persecution and indifference, that many millions have accepted the invite:
“So the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
The One Without Wedding Robes
But Jesus’ parable comes with a warning: Does this mean that all who appear to follow the gospel will be saved? We find the answer in the one man at the feast who had no wedding garment.
In Jesus’ time it was the custom for royal and wealthy hosts to provide garments for their guests at wedding feasts and banquets. These events typically went on for several days so they would supply several robes and changes of clothing for their guests. Furthermore, the guests in Jesus’ parable had been brought in from the main roads, so had not had the opportunity to return home to change.
But there is one man who despised the robes the king had provided. Instead, he believed that his own shabby clothes were good enough, that they were worthy for such a fine banquet.
Not being in the wedding garment that the king had provided was disrespectful to both the king and his son, and when the king confronted the man with his lack of respect, the man was struck dumb.
12 And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless.
Sinful from conception, hostile to God, we sinners are totally unable to supply anything that can make us acceptable to a holy God.
Good works or self-righteous living are not a passport to heaven. They do not give us a seat at His table.
But in His love for us, God has provided a wedding garment that makes us worthy to be at His Son’s wedding feast. It is the robe of righteousness that God in grace made ready when:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21
But those who trust in their own works, their own grubby clothing instead of the robe of righteousness washed whiter than snow by Christ’s own blood, will be exposed on the Last Day.
God, the righteous judge will ask: “Where is your wedding garment, the righteousness of Christ which I freely gave and in which I wanted to clothe you?”
Then, like the man, they will be speechless. They will realise that they arrogantly declined the glorious robe of Christ’s righteousness and dared to present themselves in the filthy rags of their own imagined righteousness.
Anyone who appears before God in the Last Judgement and does not bring with him Christ and His righteousness will be consigned to the endless torments of hell.
700 years before Christ told His parable, Isaiah told of the promise of the robe of righteousness the Saviour will put around our shoulders in readiness for the wedding feast:
I will greatly rejoice in the LORD;
Isaiah 61:10
my soul shall exult in my God,
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
And we will see the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, and Jesus’ promise in His parable. Hear John’s prophecy of the wedding feast to come in Revelation 19:6-8:
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
7 Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
8 it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”
So come to the Lord’s Table, come to His heavenly feast, everything is ready:
Come, everyone who thirsts,
Isaiah 55:1
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Amen