A king gives a wedding feast for his son and sends servants to call the invited guests. Everything is ready, the oxen slaughtered and the tables set, and the guests 3"would not come." He sends other servants, and the guests 5"paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business." The rest seize the servants, treat them shamefully, and kill them. A royal invitation is refused twice, and the second time with violence. The king answers the murderers in anger and then turns to the feast, which is still waiting.
He widens the invitation: 9"Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find." The servants gather everyone they meet, 10"both bad and good," and the hall fills. Isaiah had pictured a feast like this for all peoples on God's mountain (Isaiah 25:6), and John hears the invitation again in Revelation, with a blessing on those invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). The people who should have wanted this invitation most turned it down, and it went out to people with no claim on it at all.
Then the king comes in to look at the guests and finds 11"a man who had no wedding garment." He asks one question: 12"Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?" The man 12"was speechless." Every guest came off the same roads with the same empty hands, so the missing garment cannot mean that this man was poorer than the others. The parable does not say where the robe comes from. Scripture mentions robes given as gifts of honor (Genesis 45:22; Esther 6:8), and the man's silence suggests that he had no excuse to offer.
Elsewhere the Bible shows what such a garment is. Zechariah sees the high priest Joshua in filthy clothes, and God has them taken off and replaced with pure vestments (Zechariah 3:3-5). Isaiah says God has clothed him with garments of salvation (Isaiah 61:10). Paul tells believers they have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27) and urges them to put on the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 13:14). In each case the clothing is given. The man in the parable stayed in his own clothes inside a hall where the king himself was the host.
That is why the closing line carries the weight of the story. The call goes out to everyone the servants can find, and the line says that many are called and few are chosen. The king questions the man before he judges him, and the man's silence is the evidence. Hearing an invitation and wearing the garment are different things.
There is comfort here first. If the guest list runs to both bad and good, gathered off the roads, then no one has to manufacture a reason to belong at this table. There is also a question. Have you only shown up, glad to be counted among the invited, or have you put on what Christ gives? Ask him today to clothe you with his righteousness, and thank him for an invitation nobody earned.
Prayer
Father, we were gathered from the roads with nothing to commend us, and you welcomed us. Forgive us for resting on the fact of the invitation as though being counted among the called settled everything. Clothe us in the righteousness only you could provide, so that we are never found speechless before you. In Jesus' name, amen.