Professor Jack Alverson, co-chair of the humanities department and professor of theology here at Carlow for 25 years, gave a guest lecture in my parables course. He spoke on the great banquet parables in Matthew 22 and Luke 14, and my students and I were very fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience a class session by a master teacher like Dr. Alverson.
He introduced the class to hermeneutical philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a threefold process of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. With regard to parables, the initial setting of a parable is familiar and orients the reader to the short story which is to unfold. In the case of the banquet parables, a king holds a wedding banquet for his son and invites guests. Readers and hearers are immediately drawn into the story since people know about royalty and they know about weddings, wedding invitations, and all that goes with such an event. Even accounting for cultural differences across time, space, and cultures, the setting is familiar enough to orient the reader.
Disorientation occurs when something in the parable catches us off guard, surprises us, or disturbs us. In these parables, we begin to be disoriented as the invited guests decline the invitation. Although this may not seem all that odd in our day, professor Alverson explained to the class that in ancient Mediterranean society, such a refusal would have been seen as highly insulting. But where we become really disoriented is through the violence that results, particularly in Matthew’s telling of this parable. Inexplicably, some of the invitees murder the messengers with the result that the king send his troops to kill those individuals and burn their city. At the beginning of class, my students’ reactions to this parable focused on being confused at the meaning of such details, and also of their inclusion in Matthew but their omission in Luke. Further disorientation occurs as the king invites others and eventually compels people off of the streets to come to the wedding. Finally, in Matthew, one such guest who was not wearing wedding clothes (why would he be, if he was a person just dragged in from the streets?) is confronted by the king about his clothing and then bound and thrown out to where there “is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” How such an unpopular banquet with a vindictive, murderous, fashion loving, and unpredictable king represents the kingdom of heaven is indeed a puzzle. Disorientation has fully set in!
Reorientation then occurs as listeners puzzle over the point of the parable and begin to come to grips with the challenge that the parable presents. In this way, parables invite the listener or reader to see the world in a new way. In particular, to consider that the arrival of the kingdom, in the person of Jesus, is not only surprising but also disturbing.
Comparing the two versions of the parable in Matthew and Luke can help us to appreciate the unique emphases of each gospel, and also make sense of what the parable would have meant to the audiences that first heard it from the mouth of Jesus. By framing the parables within their narratives in different ways, and by including different details, Luke and Matthew have told it in a way that speaks to their own concerns and perhaps the issues facing their own readers, a generation or more after the period in which Jesus actually spoke this parable. Matthew thus seems to be confronting the problem of religious certainty, by framing the parable as a response to the attitudes of certain Pharisees. Those most certain that they understand the messianic kingdom and are part of it should think twice; they may actually be the ones who are outside of it. Luke, on the other hand, seems to be emphasizing the extent to which the kingdom is the place where all are welcome, particularly the poor and those of low social status: those that are brought into the banquet at the end when the rest refused. This again offers a challenge to the wealthy and privileged who think their place in the kingdom is assured, but this is a different challenge than the one put forward in Matthew’s gospel.
Naturally we were unable to address all the questions that parables of these kinds raise, and the discussion here only scratches the surface. The parables of Jesus are designed to provoke, challenge, and cause readers to question what this means and how it can be so. But Dr. Alverson helped us understand these parables a little more clearly as he reinforced many of the concepts we had been engaging with throughout the semester. He also gave the class some new language to use (orientation; disorientation; reorientation) which provides a very useful framework for identifying the challenge of each parable that we will read in the remainder of the semester.
