Dressing down for salvation

The passage from Matthew’s gospel assigned for this coming Sunday (Matt. 22:1-4) has a couple verses in it that can give us fits. It’s the parable of the wedding banquet in which Matthew adds the bit about the guy not wearing a wedding robe being kicked out of the festivities.

It was hardly fair. This guy, after all, had been dragged in from some alley by the king’s wedding guest procurement posse. How was he to know he was supposed to rent a tux for the nuptial shindig? He winds up hog-tied and tossed back in the alley where he has to spend the night forced to listen to the hootin’, hollerin’ and toast-raisin’ to the groom. Poor fella. Condemned because he wasn’t dressed in the right clothes.

In his letters, Paul loves to use the phrase “in Christ.” In Romans 9:1, for instance he says, “I am speaking the truth in Christ.” He sends greetings to fellow believers who are in Christ. To the Philippians he prays that God would keep hearts and minds in Christ. Paul says it most clearly in Galatians 3:27, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Could it be that the ill-attired wedding guest was not in Christ? If so, what would that look like? I think it was that he failed to get gussied up in Jesus’ cross.

As a kid, I spent many glorious days and weeks at my grandparents ranch in western South Dakota. In early Spring, when it was lambing season, my Grandma Luberta would let me help feed the bum lambs, which were her charge. The bum lambs were orphaned or the runt in a set of triplets. We’d take bottles of milk to the shed and the bums would go to town on their rubber nipples. Apart from that, they were pretty much goners.


Every once in a while I’d see the opposite situation. A ewe would give birth to a dead lamb or one that was so sickly that it died quickly. She’d nuzzle her lamb and try to get it to stand. It was a situation ready-made for the bums. A ewe with a dead lamb + a lamb with no mother? Brilliant! Bring a bum over for the ewe to adopt.

But no ewe with a nose at the tip of her shaggy snout would have anything to do with a lamb that wasn’t her own. It didn’t smell right. So my Grandpa Buster would pull out his jackknife and slit the dead lamb’s underside from chin to tail. He’d skin that dead little thing and toss the carcass across the fence line for to become a night-time coyote feast.

Grandpa would tie the dead lamb’s skin on the back of the bum lamb with a length of baling twine and bring it over to the mother of the dead lamb. She’d smell her own lamb righteous odor on that bum and stand still so it could get at her teats and drink up. The bum would live and grow because it was wrapped in the dead lamb’s skin, immersed in its death as the thing that gave it life.

The problem for the guy with the wrong clothes is just that. He was wrapped up in something that gave him no entrée to the festivities. He waltzed in and thought it was going to be a reception right out of Brides magazine: pretty gowns, pretty cakes, pretty much happy all the day long. But this is a zombie party, a can of whoop-de-doo for the living dead, for those who smell like the crucified and risen one who’s wrapped himself around their rotting sinful flesh. The life they have, they no live in Christ.

The excluded wedding guest remained outside of Christ, instead of being baptized into Christ’s death, wrapped up in his cross. God can smell the sin and glory of the self from a mile away and will have none of it. They smell too much like their own life and too little like Jesus’ death.

But you, dear sinners and friends, have been baptized into Christ Jesus. The robe is already yours, tied around your middle with the baling twine of God’s eternal word. The party began on the first day of the week when the women found themselves staring into an empty grave. It’s a real barn-burner and the guest of honor has decided that you simply must sit at the head table.

You see, it’s a surprise party, because you’re about to find out that Christ has made you the bride. As unlikely as it may be, you’ve walked into the arms of the one who promises never to let you go. When you say, “Do you really take a sinner like me as yours,” Jesus answers, “I do. I do. I do. This is my body and blood given and shed for you."