What is your reaction to this morning’s Scripture reading? A friend of mine is a Lutheran pastor, who traditionally ends every Gospel reading with the words, “The Gospel of the Lord,” to which the congregation responds, “Thanks to you, O Christ.” But, she says, this Sunday she’s tempted to end their customary litany with the word, “Really?”

Really, this is the gospel of Jesus Christ? Really, this parable tells us what God is like: A king so despised that nobody even wants to come to his wedding feast? A king who responds to violence with troops that bring even greater violence? A king whose feast seems to be more about boasting a full dining hall than either honoring his son or welcoming his guests? A king who spots someone ill-dressed and casts him into the outer darkness? This is God? This is the “good news of the gospel” that Jesus embodied in word and deed? This is the one who brings us here, in whose name we gather, whose kingdom we pray over and over to come? Really?

I simply find that hard to accept.

Oh, I know that there are sermons that are being preached today filled with all kinds of reasons why this is – despite all of my objections – indeed a story about the God whose steadfast love is declared over and over in the Scriptures and who is made known to us most expressly in Jesus Christ. Perhaps we’ll hear again how God’s grace is what sets the table, but God’s justice is what demands that God punish rejection with fury. That is how our popularized “civil religion” understands God. Even folks who don’t know jack about the Scriptures are convinced that the God of the Bible is always ‘this close’ to going postal on us. Or, perhaps we’ll hear again how this is a story of the Jews and their final rejection of God. Those darned Jews – here it is again – they never listen to God’s messengers and never seem to understand that God just wants to love and feed them. Only, we might be a little curious as to why the story doesn’t include the Jews showing up long enough to kill the king’s son. But, oh well, they killed the messenger, so that means this is a story about the Jews. Or, perhaps we’ll hear how this is indeed a difficult story, but – remember friends – we don’t get to just pick and choose which Bible stories we like and which ones we don’t. We’ll hear that – when it comes to the Bible – ours is not to question why but to accept with simple faith; and – if we can’t accept it – well, that says more about us than it does about the story. The offense of this story becomes a gauntlet that is thrown down, to see who really believes that the Bible is the Word of God or not. So, like it or not, you have to accept this story as true. I’m guessing that there will be sermons of this sort happening today, with various degrees of weak protest before grudging acceptance of this story as a story about God’s kingdom.

Nonetheless, I have to say it again: I simply find that hard to accept.

And so, like many of you, I find myself being torn over how to understand this story that depicts God in a way that seems contrary to everything that I believe and love about God. The difficulty is not that the story is too demanding – nothing is more demanding than the invitation to take up our cross and to follow Christ. The difficulty is not that the story rubs against our popular ways of thinking – I believe that one reason we are all here is that we expect to be transformed from our popular ways of thinking by the teachings of Christ. The difficulty lies in how the way God is depicted in this text seems contrary to the way that God is made known in the Scriptures. And, I am not referring to a slim and selective view of God that we have derived from a slim and selective set of biblical texts. I am referring to the view of God that is stated over and over in the most often-repeated words of the Scriptures: “God’s steadfast love endures forever.” I’m talking about the way God’s love grounds God’s demands, even in the harshest language of the prophets. I’m especially talking about the way that God is made known to us in Christ – not as one who overcomes sin by fury, but one who overcomes sin by enduring the cross and its shame and answering that rejection with resurrection. That is the God that is utterly incompatible with the king in this parable. And that is the reason why all people of faith should struggle when we read it.

It is also the reason why we should read this parable a little closer. In the end, I do not believe that this is, in fact, a parable about the kingdom of God and that the king of this parable is not an expression of who God is. And I want to make the case for you this morning that this is not a parable about the kingdom of God, so that we can experience the daunting power of this parable.

The first difficulty with saying that this is not a parable about the kingdom of God is that right off the bat, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” It certainly sounds like this king and the kind of kingdom that he has is precisely supposed to describe the kingdom of God. But, if you would allow me to get technical for a moment, this verse is not translated very precisely. It does not say that the kingdom of God “may be compared” to a king. It says that the kingdom of God “has been compared to” a king (aorist passive verb). Elsewhere, Jesus has used the active voice in comparing the kingdom of heaven to something else, but not here. By using the passive voice, it is left unclear as to who it is, exactly, who compared the kingdom of heaven to this king. My sense is that Jesus is describing how the chief priests and the Pharisees typically describe the kingdom of heaven – as though God is every bit as vicious and vengeful as the king they all knew and feared named Herod.

You may recall that this parable is part of a long conversation where Jesus’ authority has been called into question by the chief priests and elders. You may recall that these are the folks who wanted to say out loud what they really believed, that John the Baptist was just not a prophet, but they were afraid to say so because John was so revered by the crowd. We recall that Herod also rejected John, and was originally afraid to put him to death because of his fear of the crowd. But, in the end, Herod had John the Baptist killed, at a feast. So, the people who acted in concert with Herod in questioning John’s authority are now questioning Jesus’ authority. That’s the conversation of which this parable is a part.

We also recall that Jesus had just told another parable, of a landowner who leased out his vineyard to those who killed his messengers and tried to take the vineyard for themselves. At the end of that parable, Jesus asked the chief priests and Pharisees what the owner of the vineyard – who seems to be God in this story – ought to do. They answered, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenant who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Most people act as though the chief priests and Pharisees got this answer correct. But, Jesus doesn’t seem to think so. In response, he asks, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?” In other words, Jesus depicts God’s response to rejection as being quite different than what we might expect from a tyrant like … Herod. God’s response to rejection is not murder and mayhem; it is resurrection, where the one who is rejected is now elevated as Lord and Savior. Just before our parable, Matthew notes that the chief priests and Pharisees perceive that Jesus is speaking about them, and they want to arrest him but – like Herod – they fear the crowd. You see, the whole flow of this conversation assumes that the chief priests and Pharisees have a wrong understanding of God, and it is wrong precisely because they assume that God is the kind of tyrant the Herod is. They think like Herod. That is why Jesus begins this parable with the passive voice, “The kingdom of heaven has been compared” to Herod. And it is the religious leaders themselves who have been doing the comparison.

One more note: In the stories that follow our parable today, the religious leaders try to entrap Jesus with questions. It is no small thing that the first question is posed in collusion with Herod’s supporters, asking about the relationship between the law and taxes. In the end, Jesus will denounce these very religious leaders as hypocrites who make converts only to convert them into children of hell. In other words, this parable is laid down not as a nice illustrative story about what God is like, but as part of a serious and contentious struggle for who has the authority to name the kingdom of heaven rightly. And these religious leaders – with their Herod-like tendencies – do not have that authority granted from God.

In the end, we have to agree that the kingdom of God had indeed been compared to a vicious Herod-like king. And, it was the religious leadership who had been making that comparison. A ferocious God was a God that they could use to their advantage. In some ways it validated the tyranny of Herod, and the religious leadership’s collusion with Herod. It validated their opposition to John, even if they were too scared to admit it. And now it validates their attempt to arrest Jesus, by using the fear of Herod in the stories that follow. It is an awful and demonic thing when God’s people cultivate a tyrannical view of God in order to establish their own validity.

If Jesus were to give a parable today about the mis-naming of God in our popular imagination, I suspect it would begin something like this: “The reign of God is often compared to the plot of an action movie, where the good guy is beaten and seems thoroughly defeated, only to rise out of the dust and to overcome the bad guys with a greater burst of good guy violence.” That, too, would be an apt description of a wrong-headed way of understanding God’s reign.