I remember taking geography in eighth grade. I’m sure there are subjects less excruciatingly boring for a thirteen-year-old… but for the life of me, I can’think of one. They should subtitle it in the syllabus—Geography: Applied Boredom. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why anybody thought I needed to learn that the state animal of Texas is the nine-banded armadillo or that Vermont has an official state flavor. Vanilla, if you’re wondering.

I felt unnecessarily put upon that someone thought I needed to spend my precious time learning about regional mineral deposits or each state’s fourth-largest city.

One thing I do remember appreciating about geography class was the sense of permanence. I took for granted that maps used to change back in the old days, because we hadn’t discovered everything yet. But by the late 70s, I guess I figured that we’d discovered everything we were going to discover. So I assumed the globe I got for my room for Christmas one year would last me for the rest of my life.

I didn’t realize that geography, like our understanding of everything else, from mathematics to biology to astronomy, is always evolving. Apparently, now we can even have people in power arbitrarily redraw maps by fiat. Ironically, in fits of middle school petulance, at least one man thinks it’s possible to arbitrarily rename part of the Atlantic Ocean and one Great Lake. In his mind, “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” amount to a sick burn on the playground.

Maps are definitely not static. This summer, the Supreme Court said certain states could redraw their electoral maps so one party could stack the deck and increase its chances at the voting booth. Turns out, gerrymandering is a political weapon because those in power know that whoever gets to move the boundaries holds the power.

But the thing is, maps change constantly. We often take for granted that geography is fixed, that the boundaries will always be what they always were. Has that ever happened to you?

You take a new route to work or to see the kids in Schenectady, whether you want to or not, and after a short time, the old route starts to fade from memory. New maps help you get where you want to go in a new situation, but they can add to the confusion of remembering how things used to look.

No matter how disconcerting it feels to forget something you figured you’d remember for the rest of your life, you’re still poring over a new map. And the new map can make the old one look fuzzy, or even start to disappear.

But it’s not just maps that get updated, is it? Stuff is changing around us all the time. The way landmarks and milestones we’ve used to make sense of the world fade, and before we know it, the world we’ve been so at home in is an entirely different place.

Unfamiliar places require maps. And unfamiliar times require that we tell ourselves new and different stories about the world we live in right now—what it all means, how we're supposed to survive, and what we need to focus on. The stories we used to tell don't always fit our situations as things change. Sometimes, we need a new story or at least a different take on an old one.

As much as we need the new map or the new story, the old ones keep bleeding through. We catch hints of them here and there, out of the corner of our eyes. And we’re reminded that the urgency of the new maps never completely replaces the familiar landmarks, the old stories. They’re still there, but we need new ways to incorporate those old landmarks and lost highways into our understanding of the world we inhabit. Otherwise, the new maps will never connect us to the dreams we’ve held dear for so long.

Take this story from our Gospel this morning. Matthew has Jesus tell it a few days before he’s crucified—the culmination of three stories that directly attack the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.

The only other Gospel that tells a version of this story is Luke, who includes it early on in Jesus' ministry. It seems clear, then, that Matthew includes this story for his own reasons.

Since Matthew most likely writes his Gospel somewhere between 80-90 CE, he uses this story of the wedding banquet to alert the community he’s addressing to something specific. Something that will set off their familiarity sensors in a new situation. But the question is: What’s going on? What's happening with the congregations Matthew’s writing to?

Matthew—whom scholars believe is connected to a church or group of churches in Antioch, Syria—applies this parable of Jesus to the situation his readers face in Antioch at the end of the first century. The consensus view of Matthew is that his readers are probably Jewish Christians. Which is to say, they’re likely Jews who practice a form of Judaism that recognizes Jesus as God's promised Messiah. Remember, this new Jewish Christian sect began as a Jewish reform movement. It was in an increasingly contentious intramural debate with their traditional Jewish cousins over Jesus’ identity as THE messiah. But according to conventional Jewish and Roman wisdom about crucifixion, Jesus was, at best, a humiliated prophet—and, at worst, an executed felon—a revolutionary.

In Matthew's allegorical telling of this parable of the wedding banquet, God is the King who first invites the children of Israel to receive Jesus as God's Son and Messiah. But the local Jewish religious leaders have rebuffed the invitation. So, the King disinvites the local bigshots in favor of spurned outsiders (that is, Matthew's readers) who respond positively to the King's invitation.

The moral of the story, when told this way, is that God has invited everyone to the wedding banquet. Still, the people who most “deserve” the invitation (the Jewish religious leaders and their followers) reject the invitation, and so those who wind up going to the wedding are the ones who deserve it least. But they’re honored by God's grace toward them.

But—and this would not have needed to be said to Matthew's readers—the big correlation between Matthew's original audience and the people in the parable collides when the King—after his invitation is refused—“sent his troops, destroyed those murderers and burned their city"—which, frankly, feels like a bit of an overreaction to having your intended guests snub your party invitation.

But Matthew's readers would have immediately picked up on this part of the story because they could all remember how Rome murdered their kin, destroyed their temple, and burned Jerusalem some ten years prior in 70 CE. They knew exactly what it was like to have their neighbors killed and their holy city burned.

This is the traditional interpretation of the parable of “The Wedding Banquet,” where God is the King and is genuinely furious with the Jewish leaders for rejecting the Son God sent.