Dressing for the Wedding Banquet

A little girl asked her mom why women wear white on their wedding day. She looked at her daughter and said “they wear white because it is the happiest day of their lives.” The little girl looked at her mom and asked “well why does the groom wear black?”

The history of why a bride wears white at a wedding is long and complicated. You may have heard about the various historical references to the property transfer of an unblemished young woman – white being the symbol of untainted goods. It modern times, white stands simply as the traditional color of a bride, a symbol of new beginnings and a clean slate for a promising marriage.

And though women have strayed a bit to wear off white, cream or ivory for their dress, to see a woman dressed in black at her wedding would cause alarm in the minds of all the guests.

The gathered guests would see it as a sign of warning, of sadness, a bad omen for the future of the couple. At the very least there would be chatter about whether the dress color was appropriate.

If the bride is madly in love and faithful and happy, pure of heart, does it matter what color dress she wears on her wedding day?

In some respects, this is the big question for today.

A king has a wedding banquet for his son. He sends out the first invitation, the save the date if you will. And then, when it is time for the feast, he tells his servants to go and rally up all the guests so that the meal can begin. But as the servants rally, the invited guests are suddenly too busy for the party. It was a long work week, the kids are misbehaving, the lawn needs to be mowed. Sorry, we won’t be able to make it to the party. And the king is outraged. I completely understand his rage. We spent $40 a plate on our wedding reception and plenty of people who had rsvp’ed yes, simply didn’t show up. Not only were we hurt by the fact that they skipped the big event, but we spent a lot of money that was needlessly wasted.

So the king sent out the servants a second time, instructing them to gather up all of the people they could find… anyone would do – the homeless, the addicts, the prisoners… anyone to attend the banquet so that the party would still go on.

The second round of guests filled the banquet hall, dined on the finest food, and the best drinks. The king took a long look at the newly gathered guests. The group was made of both the best and the worst that society had to offer. Perhaps they weren’t the crème dela crème of society but they were willing and eager and having a great time at the party. Until he took a long glance to the far corner of the room and saw one guest who had not come dressed in a wedding robe. He marched right over to him and asked him where his wedding attire was. The man said nothing. And quickly he was thrown out of the banquet, into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Many folks hear the story and are perplexed that the king would be so angry about the dress of someone who was dragged off the street at the last minute, but the truth is, it was as if the bride was wearing black.

A group of well known clergy were sitting at an Atlanta Braves game not too long ago when out of nowhere, the ushers rushed down the steps to a seat a few rows in front of them and hastily grabbed a man out of his seat and escorted him out of the stadium. In humorous clergy talk, one said to the other “he must not have been wearing the wedding garment.”

The fact of the matter is nobody wants to be that guy. The one who is plucked from the party. The one who suffers humiliation and shame. Certainly no one wants to be the one who is thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The Bible is not simply a book about admirable people or even about a conventionally admirable God. Instead, it is a book about a sovereign God's covenant with a chosen people, as full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders, none of which we may avoid without avoiding part of the truth.

Overall, we don't do so well with the terror parts. They do not fit the image we wish to publish.

What makes a Scripture terrible to me is what it exposes about a sovereign God who is radically different than me, whose mind I cannot read, whose decisions I cannot predict, whose actions I cannot control. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," writes the author of the Hebrews (10:31). But I believe it is not the sort of fear that we cannot overcome.

This week on the Biggest Loser – the TV show where people play a game about losing weight, a woman was working out with her trainer. She had a personal, one on one session with her trainer and time and time again she kept saying “I can’t do it, I’m tired, I can’t do it anymore. I need a break.” And the trainer kept pushing her and pushing her, telling her the only thing that couldn’t do anymore was her brain. The trainer looked right at her and asked her “what is stopping you from being the person you want to be? Is there anyone standing in your way? Here you stand in the middle of a gym with a personal trainer asking to lose weight and you say you can’t do anymore. This life is your choice and you are choosing to live in fear. Fear that you will never be a new person, fear that you will not overcome this obstacle, fear that if you give up control over every little detail and trust this experience that you might just become the person you’ve always wanted to be. But you won’t get there without hard work and sacrifice.

I believe that some of the fear we have of our God is that he might call us out on the things we already know we are doing wrong. The fear of being confronted with our own secrets and our own earthly crutches.

Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth-century U.S. revivalist, was one of the most frightening preachers of all time. In Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, he writes that a person who sees him or herself ready to sink into hell will quickly and easily blame God for not coming to save him and in the midst of trial and tribulation will grab onto every twig in the swamp, even if it will only hold him up for a second. He will hold on to these weak branches rather than admit that he is complete and total need of God. Edwards goes on to suggest that those who watch the drowning have an obligation to pull away each and every twig that he clings to, even if it increases his terror because those small things that he clings to are insufficient to save his life and to pull them away is a necessity to save his life.

This is an alarming image, and yet it is what the biblical tales of terror do. They pry our fingers away from our own ideas about who God should be and how God should act. They leave two things for us to do with our fear: use it to propel us toward the God who is, or let it sink us like a stone.

It does no good to protect ourselves with inflatable bits of comfort and advice. I hope we find the courage to forsake the twigs and swim toward the living God. As fearful as that may be, it is less fearful than the alternative.

Judgment, violence, rejection, death--these are present in our world and our lives. And there is some crazy kind of consolation in the fact that they are present in the Bible as well. They remind us that the Bible is not all lambs and rainbows. If it were, it would not be our book. Our book has everything in it--wonder and terror, worst fears and best hopes--both for ourselves and our relationship with God. The best hope of all is that because the terrors are included as part of the covenant story, they may turn out to redeem us in the end, then we see dimly no more but face to face at last.

In a similar parable, a king throws a party and a beggar wishes to attend. He goes to the king and asks for a new set of clothes so he will be properly dressed. The king gives him the proper attire and tells him to throw away his beggar’s clothes. His new clothes will last forever. At the last second the beggar decides to grab onto his old clothes in case the promise isn’t true. All through the night, he clutches on to the clothes and because of his grip on the old things, he is unable to enjoy the food on his plate or the dancing in the ballroom. As his life goes on, he is not known by the new man with the new robe, instead he is known always as the man who carries around the dirty clothes. As the former beggar lay on his deathbed the king came to him to pay his last respects. He was so sad to see that the man still had his old clothes. His old life. And the beggar realized that clinging to those things which brought him no joy cost him an entire lifetime of true royalty.

I know a lot of people—perhaps you do, too—who look about as happy to be Christ followers as Eeyore. You would never guess, to look at them, that salvation is a good thing. You would never know, to hear them tell it, that Christ has made a difference. They have no wedding garment—no outer sign that this really is a party, that we really are "being-saved," that the gospel is really and truly good news! Or maybe they find it hard to put on a wedding garment that everyone else (taxpayers, sinners, prostitutes) is wearing, too.

And you know what, sometimes I’m like that. Sometimes I have a hard time celebrating because it feels like I’m sinking instead of dancing. Sometimes I deliberately under dress, or choose to sit and pout in my flip flops while everyone else is dancing in their party shoes. Sometimes I don’t put on the wedding garment that Jesus has already laid out for me, freshly laundered, on my bed. Those are the days when I, as a disciple of Christ, wear a black dress to my wedding.

On those days, just send the ushers in after me.