Parable of the wedding feast

“For many are called, but few are chosen.”

— Matthew 22:14 (ESV)

The parable of the wedding feast (Matt. 22:1-14) tells of a king who prepares a wedding feast for his son. The invited guests refuse to come, some killing the servants sent to fetch them; the king destroys them in judgment, then sends servants into the streets to gather anyone they find, “both bad and good,” until the hall is full. Inspecting the guests, the king finds one man without a wedding garment, has him bound, and casts him out. The parable closes with its own stated lesson: “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14).

Biblical Basis

Matthew places the parable third in a set of three Jesus tells against the chief priests and elders during his last week in the temple, following the parable of the two sons and the parable of the tenants, after which “they perceived that he was speaking about them” (Matt. 21:45). “Again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son’” (Matt. 22:1-2). Servants are sent to summon the invited guests, “but they would not come” (Matt. 22:3); a second summons meets the same refusal, and some of the invited “seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them” (Matt. 22:6). The king answers in judgment, destroying “those murderers” and burning “their city” (Matt. 22:7).

With the original guests excluded, “the wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy” (Matt. 22:8), so the king sends servants to “the main roads” to “invite to the wedding feast as many as you find” (Matt. 22:9). They gather “all whom they found, both bad and good,” and “the wedding hall was filled with guests” (Matt. 22:10). Inspecting the guests, the king finds “a man who had no wedding garment” (Matt. 22:11); asked how he came in without one, the man is “speechless” (Matt. 22:12), and the king orders him bound and cast “into the outer darkness,” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 22:13). Jesus draws the parable’s own conclusion without further figure: “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14).

Louis Berkhof cites the parable, alongside its parallel in Luke, as scriptural warrant for a call that is real but not always effectual:

The parable of the marriage feast in Matt. 22:2-14 clearly teaches that some who were invited did not come, and concludes with the well-known words: “For many are called, but few chosen.” The same lesson is taught in the parable of the great supper, Luke 14:16-24.¹

The parable belongs to the wider body of Jesus’s parabolic teaching treated at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to this parable, but its chapter “Of Effectual Calling” states the same two-stage pattern the parable narrates, a call that reaches many, and an effectual work of the Spirit that reaches only some of those who hear it:

Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, he is pleased in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ, enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh, renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.²

The Westminster Confession states the same doctrine in nearly identical wording.³ The confession states the same distinction the parable pictures, between those merely summoned and those actually gathered in:

Others not elected, although they may be called by the ministry of the Word, and may have some common operations of the Spirit, yet not being effectually drawn by the Father, they neither will nor can truly come to Christ, and therefore cannot be saved.⁴

The wider doctrine of that outward summons belongs to gospel call; this parable supplies one of its own scriptural texts, “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14).

Doctrinal Significance

Reformed expositors have found different significance in the wedding garment without treating their readings as rivals. John Gill lists the wedding garment among Scripture’s names for the imputed righteousness of Christ:

It is said to be change of raiment, and the wedding garment (Zech. 3:4; Matthew 22:12), yea, the “best robe” (Luke 15:22), a better robe than Adam had in Eden, or the angels in heaven; theirs, at best, being but the righteousness of a creature, and that loseable, as the event showed; but Christ’s righteousness is the righteousness of God, and an everlasting one.⁵

On this reading, the man’s fault is the specific absence of the righteousness God himself supplies, the same righteousness treated at justification and imputation. Calvin reads the same scene more broadly: not one particular gift lacking, but a general absence of holiness in someone who, in his words, has entered the church “by a profession of faith” without being “invested with the sanctification of Christ.”⁶ Gill’s and Calvin’s readings point toward two different doctrinal centers, justification and sanctification, that Reformed theology holds together.

Thomas Goodwin uses the same image polemically, against theories of grace that credit fallen nature with more than it has. Surveying religious experience that rises high without ever becoming saving faith, he concludes that such experience, however impressive, still falls short:

All those who have lower works than these, of what kind soever, are with ease discovered to have had no grace, when these for a deficiency and want of a wedding garment, or marriage affection to God and Christ, are sent speechless to hell.⁷

He aims this at “Pelagian, semi-Pelagian, and Jesuitical doctrines, and all Arminian tenets about converting grace,” positions that mistake natural religious feeling for regenerating grace.⁷

Opposing Views

James Petigru Boyce engages a rival reading of the parable’s own language. G. S. Faber had argued from this parable and the parable of the laborers that Scripture’s “Elect” or “Chosen” language names nothing more than membership in the visible church:

These contain the passages where the term Elect or Chosen first occurs, and in these parables the Chosen or the Elect are all those who so far obey the call of the gospel as to enter the pale of the visible Christian Church.⁸

Boyce answers from the parable’s own structure, which sorts guests into three groups (those who refuse the invitation outright, those who enter the feast, and the one man removed from it) and from its own summary line: “the phrase is added, ‘many be called but few chosen,’ which is the key to the parable,” proving that “there are two classes, the called and the elect,” the first far larger than the second.⁸ Pressing the point, he asks of the man without a wedding garment, “does not the word chosen here evidently point out those who are the saved, as distinguished from those who are outwardly privileged?”⁸ On Boyce’s reading, entry to the feast pictures membership in the visible church, and removal from it shows that membership and election are not the same thing, against Faber’s identification of the two.

Objections and Responses

If “many are called, but few are chosen” is true generally, doesn’t it mean that most people who ever live will be lost? Loraine Boettner argues that the saying, like the “narrow gate” of Matt. 7:14 paired with it, describes conditions Jesus and his hearers actually saw in first-century Palestine rather than a fixed ratio for all of history. These words, he writes, are “meant to be understood in a temporal sense, as describing the conditions which Jesus and His disciples saw existing in Palestine in their day,” spoken “from the standpoint of the moment rather than from the standpoint of the distant Judgment Day.”⁹ He argues, following B. B. Warfield, that nothing in the text rules out the proportion of saved to lost eventually reversing as history goes on rather than staying fixed at what one generation happened to see.⁹

Does the parable license using its details, or a sibling parable’s wording, as warrant for coercing outsiders into the church? Augustus Hopkins Strong sets out the underlying hermeneutical caution: each parable, he writes, “teaches some one main lesson, the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine authority to our private impressions of their meaning.”¹⁰ Strong’s own worked example of the danger comes from this parable’s sibling in Luke: Augustine “defended persecution from the words in Luke 14:23, ‘constrain them to come in,’” a use of the text Strong treats as a warning rather than a precedent.¹⁰ The same caution applies to this parable’s own details: the king’s judgment on the city that refused him (Matt. 22:7) and his removal of the man without a garment (Matt. 22:13) describe what God does; they are not a warrant for the church to act as the king does toward outsiders or the unworthy.

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 444. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 10, para. 1. Substantially identical wording to 2LBCF chap. 10, para. 1, though the Westminster text adds “and those only” after “predestinated unto life,” a clause the 1689 omits. ↩
2LBCF, chap. 10, para. 4. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VI, chap. 8, “Of Justification.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 3, chap. 24, sec. 8, 247-48. ↩
Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 332. ↩ ↩²
James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 346. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 103-4. ↩ ↩²
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 234. ↩ ↩²