And Jesus answered and spoke unto them again by parables, and said,
All Commentaries on Matthew 22:1 Go To Matthew 22
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
First we must ask whether this lesson in Matthew is what Luke describes as a dinner, since some details appear inconsistent. Here it is a midday meal, there a dinner; here the one who came to the marriage feast improperly dressed was cast out, and there none of those said to have entered is shown to have been cast out. From Matthew we can infer that in this passage the marriage feast represents the church of the present time, and the dinner in Luke represents the final and eternal banquet. Some who enter the one will leave it, but no one who has once entered the other will later go out. But if anyone argues that it is the same lesson, I think it better to save the faith and yield to another’s interpretation than to give in to strife. Perhaps we can reasonably take it that Luke kept silent about the man Matthew said came without a marriage garment and was thrown out. That one called it a dinner and the other a midday meal does not stand in the way of my interpretation, because when the ancients took their daily midday meal at the ninth hour it was also called a dinner …. A clearer and safer thing to say is that the Father made a marriage feast for his Son by joining the church to him through the mystery of his incarnation. The womb of the Virgin who bore him was the bridal chamber of this bridegroom, and so the psalmist says, “He has set his tent in the sun, and he is like a bridegroom coming forth from his bridal chamber.” He truly came forth like a bridegroom from his bridal chamber who, as God incarnate, left the inviolate womb of the Virgin to unite the church to himself. And so he sent his servants to invite his friends to the marriage feast. He sent once, and he sent again, because first he made the prophets and later the apostles preachers of the Lord’s incarnation. He sent his servants twice with the invitation, because he said through the prophets that his only Son’s incarnation would come about, and he proclaimed through the apostles that it had. Because those who were first invited to the marriage banquet refused to come, he said in his second invitation, “See, I have prepared my meal; my oxen and fattened animals have been slain, and everything is ready.” What do we take the oxen and fattened animals to be but the fathers of the Old and New Testaments? Forty Gospel Homilies,
