Strange Apparel

A Man Inside the Hall

The modern pulpit teaches two things about this parable, usually without saying either one aloud. The first is that a man who has been brought in can never be put out. The second is that the wedding garment is a covering laid over a man that his life never touches. Some preachers add a custom the text never mentions, that the king handed a robe to every guest at the door. Where the text is silent, nothing should be filled in.

The parable answers both teachings on its own. The man in question was inside the hall. The king called him friend. He was bound and cast out anyway. A reading that cannot hold that ending is not a reading of this parable.

The garment has to be named from the Scriptures the first hearers held. The man’s failure has to be named from the same place.

The Question in the Temple

The parable does not begin at Matthew 22:1. It begins at 21:23. Yahushua was teaching in the temple, and the chief priests and the elders of the people came to Him with one question: by what authority He did these things, and who gave Him that authority (Matthew 21:23).

He answered with three parables told back to back. The two sons (21:28–32). The husbandmen who beat the servants and killed the son (21:33–44). Then the wedding of the king’s son (22:1–14).

The audience is stated in the text. When the chief priests and Pharisees heard the second parable, they perceived that He spoke of them (21:45). They wanted to seize Him and feared the people. Matthew then says He answered and spoke to them again by parables (22:1). The same men are standing there. The wedding parable is still the answer to their question.

Their question was simple: who gave this man the right to act in our temple? The parable answers it plainly. The house is not theirs. It belongs to the king, and the wedding is for his son. The son does not need permission from the guests to be at his own wedding. The men asking were not the owners of the house. In the parable they are the guests who were invited and would not come.

What They Could Not Yet See

The men in front of Him held the temple, the priesthood, and the teaching of the law. They counted themselves the guests. They could not see three things.

The first is that the invitation had been going out for centuries, and they were the ones refusing it. The second is that the hall would be filled anyway, with people gathered from the highways, both bad and good (22:9–10). The third is that coming in would not settle anything. The king would come in to see the guests, and the inspection would fall on whoever was inside.

That third point is the one the parable was built to land. It is also the one the modern pulpit cannot hold.

The Garment, Named

The hearers did not need a lesson in wedding customs to understand a garment. The prophets had already put one on a man. Zechariah saw Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of Yahuah in filthy garments, with the adversary at his right hand to accuse him (Zechariah 3:1–3).

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. — Zechariah 3:4

The filthy garments are his iniquity. The change of raiment is Yahuah taking it away. Joshua does not wash the old garments or sew new ones. They are taken off him and put on him. The garment is given.

The scene does not end there. Once Joshua stands clothed, the charge is spoken.

Thus saith Yahuah of hosts; If thou wilt walk in my ways, and if thou wilt keep my charge, then thou shalt also judge my house, and shalt also keep my courts, and I will give thee places to walk among these that stand by. — Zechariah 3:7

The garment comes first, and Joshua pays nothing for it. The walk follows. He is to walk in Yahuah’s ways and keep what Yahuah has given him to keep. The walk decides whether he keeps his place in the house.

Isaiah sets the same garment at a wedding.

I will greatly rejoice in Yahuah, my soul shall be joyful in my Elohim; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. — Isaiah 61:10

Yahuah puts the robe on, and the prophet ties it to a bridegroom and a bride. A garment of righteousness worn at a wedding was already in the Prophets before Yahushua told the parable. David prayed the same over the priests, that they be clothed with righteousness (Psalm 132:9). Moses had already said what that righteousness is: keeping all the commandments before Yahuah shall be our righteousness (Deuteronomy 6:25).

The wedding garment is Yahuah’s law worn in a man’s life. Yahuah puts it on him when He takes his sin away, and the man keeps it clean by walking in it. It is given at the door. It is worn at the table.

Moses tied clothing to the law in so many words. Yahuah commanded Israel to put a fringe on the borders of their garments, and He told them why.

And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of Yahuah, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring. — Numbers 15:39

Every Israelite already wore the law on his clothes. A garment that carried the commandments was not a new idea to the men standing in the temple.

The garment is also a priest’s garment. No priest came near Yahuah without the garments Yahuah prescribed, and a priest who did would bear iniquity and die (Exodus 28:43). Yahuah called Israel to be a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6), and Peter calls those gathered in a spiritual house and a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:5, 9). Yahuah dwells in the people gathered, not in the room that holds them. Every guest at that table is a priest, and no priest serves unclothed.

The King, His Servants, and the Guests

The king is Yahuah. He makes a marriage for his son (22:2). The son is Yahushua. The father arranges the wedding and the son is honored by it. Nothing in the parable makes the two one person.

The servants sent to call the bidden are the prophets. Yahuah said through Jeremiah that He had sent His servants the prophets, rising up early and sending them, and Israel would not hear (Jeremiah 7:25–26). The Chronicler records how that ended. Yahuah sent His messengers because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place. They mocked the messengers, despised His words, and misused His prophets until there was no remedy. Then the city was burned (2 Chronicles 36:15–19). The parable runs the same course: servants sent, servants mocked and killed, armies sent, the city burned (22:3–7).

The bidden guests who would not come are the men asking the question, and the house they led. They made light of it and went their ways (22:5). The guests gathered from the highways are everyone else the call reached, bad and good alike. The call went to all of them freely. Nobody earned the invitation, and nobody paid his way into the hall.

The man without the garment came in on that same call.

The Feast Zephaniah Saw

The parable has a precedent in the Prophets, close enough to read line for line.

Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord Yahuah: for the day of Yahuah is at hand: for Yahuah hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests. And it shall come to pass in the day of Yahuah’s sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king’s children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel. — Zephaniah 1:7–8

Yahuah prepares a feast and bids His guests. Then He punishes those clothed in strange apparel. The command that opens the passage is to hold one’s peace. The guests are already called. The judgment falls on what they are wearing.

Strange apparel is foreign clothing, the dress of the nations worn inside Yahuah’s house. Zephaniah spoke in the days of Josiah to a Judah that kept the temple running while its people worshipped the host of heaven on the housetops and swore by Malcham (Zephaniah 1:1, 4–5). It wore the name of Yahuah and walked in the ways of the nations. The day Zephaniah announced came. The house of Yahuah was burned, and the people were carried to Babylon (2 Chronicles 36:19–20).

The men in the temple in Matthew 21 were doing the same thing. They had replaced the law with their own traditions. Yahushua told them so to their faces: they broke the commandment of Yahuah to keep their tradition, and made His commandment of no effect (Matthew 15:3, 6). That same week, in that same temple, He said they made the borders of their garments large so they would be seen (Matthew 23:5). The fringe Yahuah gave to remind them to do the commandments had become a show. Outside they looked clean. Inside, He said, they were full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (Matthew 23:28).

That is strange apparel. They were inside Yahuah’s house, dressed for it on the outside, and not wearing His law. They were the man without the garment before the parable was ever told.

When the King Came In

And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. — Matthew 22:11–13

The king calls him friend. The man was not an intruder. He came in on the call like everyone else in the hall. The king’s question is how he came in without the garment.

He was speechless. Zephaniah’s feast opened with the command to hold one’s peace at the presence of Yahuah. The man has nothing to say because there is nothing to say. He heard the call. He sat at the table. He never put on what the king requires. He came into Yahuah’s house and ignored Yahuah’s law, the way the men listening had done.

The strongest objection comes from Isaiah 64:6, “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” Many preachers use that line to say nothing good a man does counts for anything before Yahuah. If that were true, the garment could have nothing to do with how a man lives, and the king would have no reason to look at what anyone was wearing. The verse right before it settles the matter.

Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved. — Isaiah 64:5

Isaiah does not say Yahuah rejects the man who does right. He says Yahuah meets him. The filthy rags belong to people who kept on sinning and never stopped. Their religion was dirty because they wore it over a life of sin. That describes the man without the garment, not the man with it.

Revelation says the same thing in its own words. The bride is granted fine linen, and the fine linen is the righteousness of the saints (Revelation 19:8). It is granted, and it is walked. Zechariah had already said both.

The Verdict

The king’s sentence is the parable’s own ending, and nothing goes past it. The man is bound hand and foot, taken away, and cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (22:13). Then Yahushua closes the whole answer: many are called, but few are chosen (22:14).

The darkness is outside a lit hall. Solomon wrote that the commandment is a lamp and the law is light (Proverbs 6:23). Isaiah said that whoever does not speak according to the law and the testimony has no light in him (Isaiah 8:20). The man sat in the light of the house and never walked in it. He is put where he already stood.

The call is wide. The hall is full of bad and good. Coming in is free, and it is the king’s doing. But being in the hall is not being clothed. The garment Yahuah gives at the door is the garment He looks for at the table.

That is the answer to the men who asked by what authority. The house is the king’s, and the wedding is his son’s. The king decides who sits at the table, and he looks for his law on every guest. A man who comes into Yahuah’s house and sets His law aside is wearing strange apparel, whatever he wears on the outside, and the king comes in to see.