BY DAVID MARSHALLJosh, the Accused
Court reporter Zach knew he was not supposed to care about the reputations of accused people. Reporters just report their cases. They just present the facts. That is their job. But Zach’s write-up made it seem that just like the fiend prosecuting the case, he was determined to destroy poor Josh. Why, his readers wondered, would he need to use a word like “filthy” to describe the defendant’s clothing? True, Josh did look more like a hobo dragged from the street than the cleric everybody remembered, deprived as he was of all the dignity of his earlier stature. Only the court’s presiding officer compelled more attention than Josh in his misery. In absolute contrast to Josh’s wretched presence, the judge struck a powerful, almost unapproachable figure. All the while, and in the oddest of paradoxes, he showed extreme determination to accommodate the filthily clad prisoner standing in shame before him.
 
An Outrageous Banquet Story
It was very much like a story Jesus would tell, particularly the stories of God’s final intervention in history. At least two of Jesus’ parables rehearse the idea, maybe because Jesus really liked it Himself. The parables interest us by the ways they are alike as well as by the ways they differ from each other. They feature banquet stories about an unconventional host, oddly disobliging guests, and peculiar invitation outcomes.
 
In Luke’s story (14:18-20) the invitees to the banquet make outrageous excuses. The excuses are so transparently comic that it is difficult to avoid the inference that Jesus is using humor in His uniquely brilliant way. The first excuse amounts to “I’ve just bought a field. Now I must go and find out what sort of field I’ve bought. Please excuse me.” Surely nobody has ever really done business that way. For they could be buying themselves anything from lush pasture to nothing more than a rocky outcrop with a few tufts of grass.
 
The second excuse is, if anything, even less plausible: “I’ve bought five pair of oxen. Now I must go find out what sort of oxen I’ve bought. Please excuse me.” Again, no one does business that way. Before they hand over their money, buyers would certainly confirm whether their oxen are big and beefy, or radiator-ribbed. They go find out, not after handing over the cash, but before they pay the price.
 
Jesus may well have drawn the loudest laughter with the third excuse. This time there was no “Please excuse me” to soften the weird rejection. “I can’t come,” the third man boldly states: “I just got married!” The absurdity here is not alone in the man’s brashness, but in the law he alludes to. Deuteronomy’s excuse for newly married men is hardly designed as a party prohibition. The Mosaic newlywed exemption from serving in the army and other such responsibilities (Deut. 24:5) frees up the couple to revel in all the banqueting a year of partying could allow, the very type of protracted days-on-end celebration and feasting that had attended his own union!

A Second Banquet Story
Jesus’ exposé on transparently absurd excuses highlights the ease with which people place material and family concerns ahead of spiritual ones, a truth that also grounds the banquet parable of Matthew 22:1-14. In this story invitations to the marriage supper of the king’s son have gone out. The invitees’ indifferent rejection runs in awkward parallel with the ongoing marriage celebration. The feast may already have begun in the story. For just like today, guests were informed beforehand, and then solicited when the event was ready. The Greek imperfect tense shows that the king’s invitees do not simply say no; the king does not allow them to brush him off so easily. He keeps trying to get them to his banquet. After all, they are the friends who apparently agreed beforehand to be his wedding guests. So he tries, and they refuse; he sends, and they rebuff; he keeps trying, and they keep refusing—insistently obstructionist in their rejection.
 
Then things get worse. Messenger rejection with repeated excuses eventually gives way to hostility at messengers who will not take no. That anger climaxes in the messengers’ murder! Jesus is not being funny anymore!
 
In both parables, it is what happens next that shocks twenty-first-century readers. At the beginning our conditioning causes us to expect the king to be fashionably inclusive so that somehow everyone ends up at the party. But Jesus wants us to be grown-up enough about it to believe in act and consequence. We have to live with the results of our life choices and priorities. In the end the king does accept refusals. Grace urges, but it does not compel. Instead, the king sends his servants to the wrong side of town and to the forgotten country districts to urge to the uttermost, that the least and the outermost, and whosoever wills besides, should come to his banquet.
 
Is there a part of us that resents the arrival of the riffraff and the hoi polloi at the king’s table? Is there not also a part of us that wants God to love us so much, just as we are, that He doesn’t want us to change?
 
The End of the Story
It is clear that all those who arrive at the king’s table have been invited because of the king’s grace: they don’t deserve their invitations. It is because of his grace that the king does not force anyone to attend. Grace garners them into the banquet, and provides it absolutely free. Grace reaches the blind, the lame, and the prostitutes, who hold neither stocks nor dignity, and the bankers who thrive on status and give themselves huge bonuses. But God’s grace is so gracious that it does not leave us as it found us. Love wants the best for the beloved.
 
In Matthew’s Gospel the banquet parable features a final act of divine grace. In it God provides party attire absolutely free, wedding garments, most expensively purchased, for all guests to wear. That way the poor do not have to be ashamed of their rags, and the rich cannot boast of their finery. For it is, after all, “by grace you have been saved, through faith” (Eph. 2:8), and that not of your own making, so that no one can enter the banquet singing, “I did it my way.”
 
Except that somebody does. Which brings us to the radical and concluding point of Matthew’s banquet story: “When the king came in to see the guests [the ones who had accepted his invitation and had come to the banquet], he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes” (Matt. 22:11). Remember him? Doubtless he was offered the wedding garments accepted by the other guests, but perhaps he said, “Don’t want them! Don’t need them! Got plenty of my own! My best is good enough for me! It will have to be good enough for the king!”
 
Only it wasn’t. It never is. His 100 percent homemade outfit, all his own best work, in the eyes of the king was no better than “filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6). Those who would enter the king’s banquet must be arrayed “with garments of salvation” (Isa. 61:10). This self-confident fashion designer was not. His fashion statement was his own best efforts.
 
Exit stage left, into outer darkness. He had accepted the invitation, but he had not accepted the basis of the invitation: grace.
 
Josh’s Acquittal
Josh, whom we left standing at the bar of the court, was, as Zach reported, quite filthily dressed. The outcome of his trial was determined by the intervention of the Defense Attorney (1 John 2:1), the Judge Himself (John 5:26, 27), who could not have been more scathing about the case put forward by the fiend for the prosecution (Zech. 3:2). Attorney Satan’s case for the prosecution was not, in this instance, the case for the crown. He and the Judge were on opposing sides, and his case got thrown out of court, all charges dismissed. Josh’s filthy garments were taken from him and they dressed him up in a robe not his own. Similarly, when the prodigal returned home from the far country, the father’s first words were: “Bring the best robe and put it on him” (Luke 15:22).
 
God is in the business of “best robes” for the sheer grace of it, rather than for the economic profit of it. Sadly enough, when the risen Christ offers rich clothes to Laodicea, Laodicea’s answer sounds very much like Matthew’s fashion designer: “Don’t want them! Don’t need them! Got plenty of my own! My best is good enough for me! It will have to be good enough for the king!” And Laodicea adds even more: “I’m rich!” To which the risen Christ must respond, “You only think you’re rich. In fact, you’re wretched” (see Rev. 3:14-22).
 
The wedding garments Christ offers are “woven in the loom of heaven” and have in them “not one thread of human devising.”* The guests who get to come to the banquet are garnered by a work of grace. The banquet is the provision ?of grace. And the robe of Christ’s righteousness they are all privileged to wear is a gift of grace. Once they accept it, ?the feast can go forward in forever celebration.
 
Josh’s case is no different. Zach is not exaggerating or unprofessional in describing Josh as “filthy.” Josh does not object. He admits his miserable, needy condition. His very acceptance of the Judge’s terms of grace means victory for his defending attorney. And with no doubt remaining as to the successful outcome of his efforts, the defense rests.
 
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* Ellen G. White, Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 311.
 
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Before he retired, David Marshall was editor of Stanborough Press in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. This article was published November 10, 2011.