I’ve been asked a couple of times recently about Matthew’s rather startling and perplexing version of the parable of wedding feast (Matt. 22:1-14). Don Lambirth, for example, sent me this question:

In your opinion who are the people who are invited but don’t come? Who are those who are invited later and do come? And this is the one that always puzzles me… who is the guy who shows up not dressed properly? And why is he kicked out? What if he was poor and couldn’t afford a wedding garment? Would Jesus and Paul have presented this story differently? And what I mean is did Jesus speak of the outsiders as the dregs in Jewish society whereas Paul may have flipped it into a story of the outsiders being Gentiles?

Matthew has this as one of three parables told to the chief priests and elders of the people in the temple: they are like the son who said he would work but did not; they are like the tenants in the vineyard who produce no fruit but kill the servants sent to them and even the owner’s son; they are like guests invited to the wedding of the king’s son who can’t be bothered to attend. Luke has Jesus tell the story in the house of Pharisee, over dinner, in response to the man who exclaimed, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” (Lk. 14:15-24). The note of judgment is muted in Luke’s version.

With all the current excitement/dismay in the US surrounding the release of yet another Left Behind film, starring Nicholas Cage, I thought I would offer a quick overview of arguments that I have presented in The Coming of the Son of Man and elsewhere regarding the offending passages. I was chatting with my friend Mike in Seattle about this yesterday (he’s in Seattle, not me, just to be clear). How does this sort of doctrine work in relation to a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament? What has it got to do with the gospel? My concern here is less to discredit the modern dispensationalist notion—it looks like the film is doing a perfectly good job of that itself, with a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—than to relocate the New Testament language in a field of realistic historical expectation.

The question of whether God heals miraculously today—or, for that matter, ever has—is obviously a difficult and contentious one for the church in a rationalist secular context. A comment by James Mercer, however, in connection with my post on the narratives of mission highlights a different and neglected aspect of the issue. Not: Do miracles happen? But: What do miracles mean?

I have just re-read Re:mission and continue to find your narrative of the task of ‘post-biblical’ mission fascinating and encouraging. You identify Jesus’ healing ministry as being intrinsically linked with the forgiveness of Israel’s sins. What place might prayer for healing have within post-biblical mission? I ask as this is a conversation we are having within and between churches in Harrow.

The two questions cannot be treated in isolation from each other. But the biblical narrative suggests that we may be missing the point if we only address the issue of healing as a matter of apologetics, as part of a competition with modernity over whose view of reality is right.

I suggested in passing in a recent post on mission and blessing that in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative C.J.H. Wright (not to be confused with N.T. Wright) ‘has misconstrued the “grand narrative” of the Bible as oriented towards salvation rather than “kingdom”’. JR Rozko, who is writing what sounds like an intriguing dissertation aiming to “develop a soteriological vision in light of the relationship between the missio Dei and the Kingdom of God”, asked in a comment what I meant by this statement.

Can you unfurl that a bit more? Qualitatively, how do you understand the difference here in Wright? How would you, briefly, reframe this…?

I’ll give it a go….

For the background to this see Ian Paul’s very interesting post “What do we do when the Bible is ‘wrong’?” Ian starts by discussing Peter LaRuffa’s (on the face of it) ludicrous statement:

If, somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2+2=5, I would believe it, accept it as true and then do my best to work it out and understand it.

He ends with a recent online spat over a particular instance of supposed biblical inaccuracy—Jesus’ asssertion that David entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread “in the days of Abiathar the high priest” (Mk. 2:26). The problem is that the high priest in question was Ahimelech not Abiathar (1 Samuel 21:1-6). The discrepancy was mentioned in a contribution made by John Byron to Peter Enns’ series of scholarly “aha” moments.

I suggested recently that in their book What is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert highlight some legitimate concerns regarding current “missional” thinking. There will be differences of opinion, but I think they are right to complain that, both in theory and in practice, the pendulum of mission has swung too far away from gospel proclamation in the direction of social transformation. The authors argue that it needs to swing back again: mission is fundamentally about making individual disciples of Jesus Christ, as defined by the so-called Great Commission texts. But here I disagree. I think that the narrative-historical approach offers us a way to get beyond the tired and unbiblical dichotomy of proclamation and praxis, though I’m not going to try to explain what I mean by that here.

This is a further—and final—response to some productive comments made by Paul K. regarding my argument about the narrative-historical method and its implications for our understanding of the kingdom of God. He argues that the gospel deals with spiritual powers as well as “socio-political forces”—he has in mind the serpent in the garden “who usurped Mankind’s rule, and the kingdom of God through his people, becoming the god of this age and enslaving humanity and keeping them in bondage”. So whereas I am proposing that it is the story of Israel and the nations that dominates scripture, he thinks that a much bigger story about God and humanity provides the interpretive framework.

I question, in the first place, whether we can make such a firm distinction between the “spiritual” and the “socio-political” in scripture. It seems to me that once we get to Babel and the call of Abraham out of empire and as an alternative to empire, the whole story through to Revelation 20:10 is worked out in political-religious terms. The focus may oscillate between the “spiritual” and the “socio-political” aspects of this two-sided construct, but at no point does the narrative break away from the political context, like a bird breaking out of its cage, to fly free in the open skies of an a-historical spirituality. This point was made in an earlier post, but it can be further illustrated by looking at the particular question of the role of Satan in the story.