The Princes and Paupers Who Never Knew the King

Well, good morning. We've just celebrated Easter, as you all know, and during that time we reflected again on the message of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we saw how Jesus in this time ushered in the kingdom of God. This is a new reality for humanity where we not only experience its effect in this life, but we experience it in the life to come as well. The passion of the Christ, His work on the cross, is rightly considered the culmination of all His earthly ministry as He worked towards this moment in His life.

In fact, if you were to go through and read the account of His teaching, you'll be struck with how intensely focused He was on this moment of ushering in the kingdom of God. Jesus talked about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven many times. But the question I want to ask you this morning is, if Jesus was the king of this kingdom, and if through His death and resurrection He ushered in the power and the victory of this kingdom, how do you and I enter that kingdom? How do you and I become a part of that concept? And some of us will say, quite rightly, that this is entered into through faith.

That's an excellent answer. That will get you top marks in your professional faith class or your catechism class. But what if I ask you to explain it further? What does this faith do? What do you put that faith in?

Is this a faith of doctrinal standards, of statements to believe? Is it a person to trust? Well, this morning we're going to look at one of Jesus' last teachings on the kingdom before He would go to the cross. And it's exactly on the question of how do we enter the kingdom that He was going to be talking about. As He so often loved to do, Jesus was teaching in a parable.

A story with a meaning. And in it, He was explaining what it means to come into, to enter into the kingdom of God. And so let's read together this morning from Matthew chapter 22, verse 1 through to 14. Matthew 22:1. And again, Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come.

Again, he sent other servants, saying, 'Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.' But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business. While the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully and killed them.

The king was angry and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burnt their city. Then he said to his servants, 'The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.' And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?' And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'

For many are called, but few are chosen." So far, our reading this morning. So I want to begin this morning by making a few observations on some of the details of this parable as we think about how we enter into the kingdom of God. And the first we observe, the first detail we see, is the breadth of the invitations. It is very wide.

We see a king who is over the moon. He has a son who has just got married. He has a son who is the prince and he has just married his princess. And so the king is going to throw a lavish feast and celebration.

And what we see in the story is the nature of a very generous king. Not only is the feast absolutely sumptuous, we're told in verse 4 that there are fattened calves and oxen. He's had them butchered. The barbecue pits are absolutely lined with steaks and fillets, the best portions of those animals. But the king is not simply generous with what is on offer for dinner. He's generous in his invitation of who can come.

Like the parable of the sower that Jesus tells elsewhere, the extravagance of this open invitation for people to enter into the feast of the kingdom is what is in focus here. What we see is a king who is not stingy in who he invites. He calls people everywhere to hear and attend the wedding feast. But we do notice that there is a particular order in which he invites people. First, he invites those who are near to him.

Probably his close friends and his family members. These are the noblemen and the noblewomen of the country. In the time Jesus is telling this story, those people close to the king, he's probably referring to as the Jews of the time. The Jews were God's special chosen people. But we see in the story that not many respond.

And so, he goes out into the streets and he invites the commoners. The people that aren't so close to the king. He invites them to come and celebrate with him. Here, Jesus is referring to the Gentiles, the pagans of the time, who will be reached with the same invitation to enter into the kingdom. But what we have to see first here is the character and the nature of the king.

There is a generous invitation to a lavish feast thrown open to whoever may come. But then secondly, we notice the depth of the response of the people. And the depth of that response is very shallow. We see the king sending out information and invitations to his closest friends and to his family, the noblemen and women. He sends out an invitation twice, in fact.

In verse 2, he sends out his servants the first time to tell them that the wedding feast has come, that they should attend. But it says that these people refused to come. Then in verse 4, obviously, some time has passed and the food has been prepared. The dinner is nearly served. The chops and the steaks and the food is ready, and he sends his servants out again and says, "Dinner time. Come on over."

But again, these invitations are ignored. In fact, some of his friends and family are so annoyed by his second round of invites that they beat up and some kill the messengers that have been sent. Of course, the irony is that the people who are meant to be so noble, as they are so close to the king, not only reject the king's invitation but show just how ignoble they are. They become murderers and thugs, beating and killing his messengers.

The king is so enraged at the injustice that he sends soldiers to bring his judgment down on these murderers and he destroys their city. Now this little detail highlights the fact that the king takes away those very things which had become the excuses for why those people didn't come. Verse 5 says the people send their excuses to the king. They don't attend because they go and farm their fields or they go to run their businesses. Meanwhile, the king in his judgment, who rightly owns everything, now takes it all away.

Their farms, their businesses are all destroyed. And the tragedy of the story is, now that they have no excuse not to come to the wedding, they are no longer invited. Because the king says in verse 8, they are not worthy. And so he sends out a third wave of invites. But this time, his messengers are to go into the streets and collect the commoners.

And here's a hint of the type of people that are being invited. They're not just your ordinary commuters on the road, on their way to work. The people being invited here are probably dodgy people as well. Perhaps people with a bit of a history. The NIV translation brings it out a little bit more by translating the Greek word as "the street corner."

Well-to-do people don't hang out on street corners. I know where I live in Southport, people who hang out on street corners, especially at night time, around dinner time, they're not those people that are too well off. This is further emphasised when Jesus says in verse 10 that those servants did go out into the roads and they gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. And so the banquet hall is filled with people. The banquet hall is full of people who have gladly come at the invitation of the king.

But then we find another example of how someone responds to this invitation. Initially, they've responded positively. They have turned up to the feast. But he's attending a wedding feast without a tuxedo. The king meets and greets all of his guests and he comes to a man not wearing the type of clothing that would be expected for a wedding celebration.

The king asks in verse 12, "Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?" Jesus says the man is speechless. He doesn't have a reason. He's without an excuse. Now, we've all seen those YouTube clips, haven't we?

Of little boys painting peanut butter all over the rooms, drawing all over their little brothers, little girls caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It's hilarious, that moment where mum or dad catches them on film and they have that look of an animal caught in headlights. And when dad says, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" they open their mouth but there's nothing coming out.

They don't know what to say. They don't have any excuse, any reason for doing what they've been doing. That's how this man is. He has no excuse. And so the king has him thrown out of the party.

Now, the main issue here isn't so much that the man needed to look a certain way to gain access into the feast. Rather, what is being highlighted here is his motive. Why would you come to a wedding feast without dressing in a way that honours your host? That honours the occasion. What it reveals is how the man felt about the host.

He doesn't really care about the king. He doesn't really care about the prince. The man is here for the feast, but has no inclination to celebrate with the king. This part where Jesus talks about the man being thrown out from the party symbolises that moment when God will investigate the heart of every person. This is called the judgment day in the Bible.

And after the king lays bare the motives of this man's heart, Jesus says that he is taken away into the outer darkness. And Jesus' description of it being a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth is actually used several times by Him when He refers to a place called hell. But notice the description of this place. Jesus says it is outside. It is the outer darkness, He calls it.

In other words, it is away from the feast. It's a place that is not inside that warm, jovial banquet hall of the king. Here I think we find the most helpful explanation of what hell is according to the Bible. The terrifying reality of hell is not so much its location, that it exists as a physical place here or there, somewhere perhaps deep down in the ground with lots of lava and little red devils. A lot of those images have been made up over many years of superstition.

Hell is certainly explained by Jesus to be a real place, a real destination that He earnestly wants people to stay out of. But the significant emphasis of hell is that it is an outer darkness. It's the despair of being outside of the presence of God. Where the wedding feast has joy, has security, has warmth, an endless celebration of satisfaction and delight, hell is everything that is not that. But did you notice this?

Both groups of people, the nobles first invited and the man who is invited on the third round of invitations, they are both excluded from the wedding feast in the same way. They remain on the outside. Why? Because they don't love the king.

They don't know the king. Although the invitation to the feast has gone out widely, every ear has heard. The responses of these two groups, these two examples, have been shallow. But then we get to the main point of this story and our third point, our final point this morning. The invitation of the parable.

The meaning of the parable is, enter my joy. Enter my joy. This is the point of what Jesus is saying. The kingdom of God is open to anyone who sees it for the joy and security that it offers. Another way to put it is that the kingdom of God will be given to those who seek the joy of knowing the king.

The noblemen and women were first invited, but they didn't think it important enough to attend. They lived under the illusion that they had enough for themselves. Their peace with the king was self-determined. They had somehow earned a name for themselves with a vague affiliation with the king and discover that they are locked out of the kingdom. Here we find a warning for those of us who think that our pretty healthy-looking lives gain us the ear of God.

That God looks favourably on us. If you have this understanding, you will do exactly what these people did. They could so hate the messengers that the king had sent them enough to beat them or kill them. Why? Because their message said to them, "Your self-determined morality, your vague affiliation with the king does not mean you know or you love the king.

You are filled with pride and self-assurance that you have earned the kingdom, but you have never loved the king." In their complacency, they actually show themselves to not love the king at all. And they are so enraged by the second round of invites, suggesting to them that they didn't get it the first time, that they respond in violent revolt and show exactly what their hearts are like. American writer Randy Alcorn puts it this way: "Those who know their unworthiness seize grace as a hungry man seizes bread, while the self-righteous resent grace."

But do you know what? You don't even have to be very religious to think of yourself as very moral like these people did. In fact, all humans are moral creatures and many focus greatly on morality. This week, I was fascinated to watch a conversation between Russell Brand, who is a British comedian, an actor, a bit of a rock and roll sort of celebrity, and a recovering drug addict. He's been slowly growing to understand God and has been moving closer towards a sense of spirituality in a broad sense. And he interviewed and had a discussion with a man called Ricky Gervais, who's also a famous UK celebrity, the producer, the writer of The Office, that great TV show, both in the UK and then the one in the US.

And in this interview, Ricky Gervais, who is famously an atheist to this day, makes a big case for atheism, is asked by Russell Brand, who is inquisitive and wanting to grow in this area. Brand asked Gervais to explain what he thinks the meaning and purpose of life is coming from an atheistic worldview. And Gervais begins by saying, "There is no purpose to this life." And then he says, "What a relief that is, because it sets us free from the archaic chains of some sort of god and his old-timey rules." But if you listen closely to that interview, a few sentences later, and it may only be two or three sentences later, he says, "So let's go out there and be good to others.

Let us live humble, good lives. Don't be narcissistic and self-obsessed." The whole time, I'm listening to this thinking, "Don't you realise what you're saying? Those are all moral judgments. And you have said, 'There are no reasons for life.

There is no purpose to life and how we live.' And yet somewhere you believe that there are irrefutable, absolute laws that govern how we live and what we live for. Why do you hold to those views, Ricky?" Keep asking those questions and you'll eventually end up with God. Even if you are not religious, let me tell you, you are very moral.

And here is Jesus saying to you that as a moral person working very hard to keep to some sort of universal metaphysical law which you inherently want to live up to, here is Jesus saying to you, "You are in fact more sinful and incapable of living up to that than you think. You are more needy of forgiveness than you want to believe." If you don't love the king, you won't respond to the invitation. You'll do whatever you can to get away from that invitation, killing His messengers. You'll conclude, "Nah.

I don't need it. I don't need forgiveness. I've got it worked out. Thank you very much." Don't you see, you are doing exactly the same thing as those noblemen and women did in this story?

And Jesus says, "You have locked yourself out of the kingdom." Alternatively, the man who gets invited is presumably one of the people in that third wave of invitations, a down-and-outer who comes into the banquet through this amazing third round of invites. But he also finds himself locked out for a surprisingly similar reason. Even though he's found on the other side of the social spectrum, he's also locked out because he doesn't appreciate the invite for what it was. Here was a man who assumed that entrance into the feast was worthless because it was so free.

The man enters the banquet with contempt in his heart towards the king because he misses the whole point. There is only a feast to enjoy in the first place because there is a king to enjoy it with. The banquet hall is full of people celebrating the most lavish, incredible feast because there is a king who can offer it in the first place. The many people who fill that banquet hall are all honoured, are all deeply thankful for their invitations. They love the king because of his generosity towards them.

They love the king because of his grace towards them. But this man slinks in unprepared and ungrateful because he's not there for the king. He's there for himself. The man has no excuse for why he's not wearing wedding clothes. He just simply doesn't care about the wedding or the king.

And so if you think about it, in a surprising way, the nobles and the guy from the street corner are both in the same boat. They were all too happy to have the fields to farm, the businesses to run, the fattened calves to eat, but they never moved towards the giver of all of these things. They wanted the kingdom. They never wanted the king. The point of the story is that the kingdom of God is open, very open, to all who see it for what it is.

The peace, the security, and the joy of knowing God as their king. It is the simplest invite you will ever receive. Come and enter the kingdom of peace by being willing to love the king who has invited you. And yet for some of us, it's this simplicity which makes it so outrageous and makes it the reason we reject it. This is why Jesus finishes that story by saying in verse 14, "For many are called, but few are chosen."

Friend, I want you to receive this invite today. Today, you are being called, and I want to ask you, will you accept this invitation? You have heard a thousand messengers bring a thousand messages. But today, today, will you finally receive it? Who knows?

Perhaps it may be the last time you have the opportunity. Hear the words of Jesus. Hear the words of scripture. Come and enter the kingdom and be with the king. And so to those who have come in from the street corners, those with pasts and histories that hurt, that are painful.

Poor decisions that have been made. Implications of those decisions that hurt even to this day. Believe and know that you may enter into the kingdom of peace. The kingdom of healing. The kingdom of forgiveness. There you will find the ethics and the morality, the forgiveness that you've always longed for.

And then for those of us in the noble houses of proud Christian tradition, tirelessly working in the church, a life that is not too destructive, bound by safe Christian morality. Or perhaps those of us not very religious, but considering ourselves pretty good people nonetheless. Hear this. You are invited to find the deep and the satisfying gladness of not simply the blessings of the king, but the joy of being with the king Himself. Why?

Because in your own morality, in your own attempts to earn God's love, your attempts to buy your way into the kingdom have fallen dreadfully short. In trying to secure your own salvation, you don't realise that you are more lost now than you might have realised. You've missed the forest for the trees. It's like the time a wife found her husband standing over their baby's crib early one morning. As she watched him look down at their very first baby, she saw on his face a mixture of emotion: disbelief, delight, amazement, enchantment.

Touched by this unusual display of deep emotion, with eyes glistening, she slipped her arm around her husband. "A penny for your thoughts?" she said. "It's amazing," he replied. "I just can't see how anybody could make a crib like this for $49."

Amazing. In your pursuit for godliness, you may forget the God who pursued you first. And instead of cherishing the king, you're focusing on the gifts surrounding Him. You see, neither the good nobleman or the lousy street corner kid had enough love for the king to warrant their entrance into the kingdom. That's the great problem of the story.

But similarly for us, none of us were actually ever motivated enough to enter the joy of the king. In fact, the Bible says that our hearts are so cold and so numb naturally to Him that we can't scrape enough willpower together to desire Him in the first place. The Bible says the heart is deceptive above all things. That is a shocking statement in our time when we are constantly being told, "Listen to your heart. It will lead you down the right path."

The Bible instead likens the heart to a cold, dead stone, and that is why we needed Jesus. The apostle Paul explains in Romans 5:5 that God somehow needed to pour His love into our hearts in order to wake us up towards Him. Paul says in the very next verse, Romans 5:6, that this is how it was accomplished. "You see," he says, "at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die."

"But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Christ died. For who? For the ungodly.

Who are the ungodly? Those who hate God the king. Who are the ones who hate the king? Both the noble and the street kids. Both the prince and the pauper.

It's only because Christ would die for the ungodly that the ungodly have a chance of God's love being poured into their hearts. And so the invitation for you this morning, as it goes out again, this message that goes out again to the country, to the furthest reaches of this land, across the highways and the byways, is that this is available to all of you. To the highest-ranked politician in the country, to the person sitting beside a Salvation Army truck this morning. The invitation is the kingdom belongs to anyone who sees it for all its joy and the security that it offers, who yearns to experience the presence of the king. Yes.

This invitation is free, but it's not worthless. This grace is free, but it wasn't cheap. It comes at the cost of His son. And so this wonderful, beautiful, blessed invitation is going out again, far and wide. And the question you and I are faced with again this morning is, how will you respond?

How will you respond? May you be found in that great wedding feast. If you have questions that you still need answers for, ask them today. Ask them to anyone that you trust. Ask them to anyone that you believe might have an answer.

Don't leave it for another day. Don't leave it for another moment. Today is that day. Right now is that moment. And then when you have no more questions to ask and you find yourself speechless before the king, what else do you have left but to bow your knee while there is still time and receive Him as your king?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before You to thank You for these words. First and foremost, because You have a kingdom. You have a kingdom that is not necessary for us to believe in, not necessary for us to build, to establish. We may hope for it.

We may long for it. But Lord, this kingdom is Your kingdom. Thank You that by Your grace, You have invited us into that kingdom. Thank You that by Your grace, You have extended far and wide this invitation. Lord, our hearts break for the shallowness of the responses.

Our hearts break for our own responses that were so long in the making, that delayed for so long, that waited and waited for so long, that had to make many mistakes before we finally accepted Jesus as king. And then, Lord, we pray for those who are still not ready, that are still waiting. And Lord, we ask that their eyes may be opened to see Your kingdom and kingship. That they will respond in positive ways, that they may come with the right motives, that Your love will be poured into their hearts so that they will see the eternal value of Jesus Christ their king. And so, Lord, will You move our hearts to see just how precious the kingdom of peace is and how easy it is to attain and how wonderful it is to dwell with the king of that kingdom?

We ask this in Jesus' precious name. Amen.