God Demands Our All

or …

Come as you are, but clothed in your “right” minds.

Once more Jesus spoke to the people in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Matthew 22:1-14

Parable of the Great Banquet

Brunswick Monogramist

1525

National Museum

Warsaw

Poland

In Matthew, the parable immediately follows the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, to which it is linked.^[3] This connection helps to explain the treatment of the man without wedding clothes.^[3]

Some commentators ^[4] suggest that the wedding clothes or garment in this parable were provided by the host, but this is unlikely to be the intended implication.^[2] Augustine of Hippo interpreted the garment as symbolizing charity,^[5] an interpretation not widely accepted even in medieval times.^[6]

Martin Luther suggested that the garment represented Christ himself.^[7]

John Calvin alluded to previous controversies in interpreting the meaning of the "wedding garment":

As to the wedding garment, is it faith, or is it a holy life? This is a useless controversy; for faith cannot be separated from good works, nor do good works proceed from any other source than from faith. Christ intended only to state that the Lord calls us on the express condition of our being renewed by the Spirit ... and that, in order to our remaining permanently in his house, we must put off the old man with his pollutions ... and lead a new life.^[8]

In the Gospel of Thomas, the parable "becomes an exhortation against the affairs of business and a life of gain."^[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Great_Banquet

The Brunswick Monogrammist was an anonymous Netherlandish painter, active in the mid-to-late 16th century. He (or she) painted religious scenes but also several scenes of secular merriment, including brothel and tavern scenes, and has been called "the most significant precursor of Pieter Bruegel the Elder".[1]

Identity

The monogram for which the Brunswick Monogrammist is named appears only once, on his (or her) Parable of the Great Supper in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Brunswick. It is composed of the interlocked letters J, V, A, M, S and L,[2] and neither it nor careful analysis of his work have yielded consensus about his identity. His (or her, as Verhulst was female) paintings have been attributed to a number of painters, including Jan van Hemessen, Mayken Verhulst[2] and Jan van Amstel.[3] [4]