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I have written about the parable of the wedding banquet before. More than once, as it turns out.
It is one of those stories that seems to keep giving me something new to wrestle with. A king prepares an enormous wedding feast for his son, and the invited guests refuse to come. Some simply carry on with their lives, while others attack and kill the king’s servants. The king responds with violence; the invitation is extended to people from the streets; and then, just as the banquet finally seems full, another guest is thrown out because he is not wearing the right clothes.
To be fair, there is quite a lot going on.
When I went back recently to something I had written here about the story before, however, it was not the violence or the wedding garment that stopped me this time. It was one word of my own.
I had written:
“A king, clearly God, is throwing a banquet.”
I stared at the word clearly for a while. Because these days, I am not sure it is as simple as I made it sound.
