That naked wedding guest

Pastor Picard (an excellent preacher) had an interesting take on this week's Gospel lesson, Matthew 22: 1-14.

The traditional exegesis, certainly in Lutheran circles, is that the "wedding garment" which the evicted guest lacked is the righteousness of Christ, bestowed in baptism and apprehended through faith. Pastor Picard disagrees. Despite the King's surprise at unfit guest's lack of a wedding garment, he points out, that surprise is expressed precisely in amazement that others hadn't seen the problem when the guest first tried to gain entrance into the hall. His unfitness isn't something secret, invisible to any eyes but those of the all-seeing King. Moreover, the text, he points out, ends by saying that "many are called, but few are chosen." Yet it is not "many" who are thrown out of the banquet hall. It is only one.

Or One. Everybody else- "good and evil alike-" gets to stay and enjoy the party. And the Greek word translated "chosen" at the end of the pericope, he observes, literally means "called out." Many are "called," but few are "called out."

Out of the wedding feast? Could it be that we've made the same mistake here that the pre-millenialists make when they misidentify those who are "taken" and those who are left (Matthew 24:40-41)? Could it be that the "chosen-" at least in this parable- are those who are rejected?

Pastor Picard thinks that the Person evicted is Somebody Who lacks not only a wedding garment, but any garments at all (Mark 15:24); who was indeed "speechless" (Isaiah 53-7)- and who was cast out so that the others might remain. Perhaps, he says, we don't get to gloat over having wedding garments while others don't.

The point, he suggests, is not that the hypocrites are gonna get it in the end, while we True Believers party on. The point is that One has borne the unfitness of the many.

I"m not entirely sold on this exegesis, but as I said... it's an interesting take. There are universalistic dangers, to be sure. But then, when you start trying to hedge the Gospel about with protections against universalistic tendencies, you end up compromising the Gospel; it's the nature of the Gospel, after all, to be wholly without conditions.

That's pretty much what the "Evangelicals" have done in turning the gift of salvation into something we earn by making the proper "decision." And it's something which I fear that I myself may have done on occasion when confronted with the presumptive universalism of theology in the ELCA.