“For many are called, but few are chosen.”—Matthew xxii. 14.
The passage: Many are called, but few are chosen.
These words have troubled many minds. Some ask: “By what tests can we tell the few chosen from the many called? How can we build a Church made up of the first class rather than the second?” Others ask: “How can I know whether I belong to the called or the chosen?” If either doubt needs settling, our Lord must have given us the means to settle it — for St. Matthew shows Him using these words twice, each time attached to a Parable meant to explain them.
The first Parable is the one you heard this morning. The Master of a Vineyard hires men at the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, the eleventh. At day’s end all receive the same wage. The first complain, thinking themselves owed more. The owner answers one complainer, “Did I not agree with thee for a penny? May not I do what I will with my own? Is thine eye evil because mine is good? I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.” The teaching here seems to level rather than to establish distinctions — all are treated alike. Yet the words follow: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
In the Parable of the King’s marriage feast for his Son, distinctions are likewise broken down: servants are sent to the highways and hedges to compel the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind to come in. But then comes an act of discrimination — a man without a wedding-garment is found speechless when asked how he got in, and is bound and cast out. It is natural to explain this offense and punishment by the same saying: many are called, but few chosen. The obvious meaning, we are told, is that the outward call goes to everyone without limit, but only a few are actually meant by God to receive the blessing — only a chosen circle is sealed for eternal life.
This reading has real plausibility, and once a person embraces it he will not easily let it go — nor should he be pressed to, for it holds too much precious truth to be cast off merely because of difficulties. A man should be sure he has drawn all the good out of a notion before discarding it as a husk; sudden reversals of opinion have done, and are doing, melancholy damage, and should make us careful about undermining another’s conviction. But it is not too much to ask, of anyone who reveres our Lord’s words, that He did not contradict Himself or use so solemn a sentence lightly — that both Parables be seriously weighed together before we settle on the sense common to them. And that weighing must suggest one rather startling thought.
The men in the Vineyard parable who were, it seems, only called and not chosen, are exactly those who thought themselves owed a privilege others lacked. They could not accept an equal gift; they needed something exclusively their own, something others had no right to. Their reasoning would have run: “Those hired at the eleventh hour were no doubt called — they could not have taken up a spade otherwise. But we, summoned early, are surely the favorites, the ones He has specially chosen. This will be plain when the accounts are settled.” That was their calculation — and our Lord calls it presumptuous and false. It was proved false when all were paid alike, and their pain at that discovery proved the very judgment they had passed on others true of themselves: they were called merely, not chosen.
No one can say this comment strains the first Parable; it is its plain natural sense, one that would occur to anyone not told to adopt another. It holds whether we say the early laborers are the Jews and the late ones the Gentiles, or take it as different stages of an individual life. However applied, our Lord’s own use of the Parable stands as the right use — and it should make us pause, even tremble, before concluding that He taught exclusiveness in one saying which He used elsewhere expressly to teach the sin of exclusiveness.
I. The same point appears just as clearly in the Parable of the King’s marriage feast. The guests do not invite themselves, just as the laborers do not hire themselves. This is the principle running through all our Lord’s teaching: the Kingdom of Heaven is entered by a divine, mysterious power, not by anything men would do left to themselves. This runs through all Scripture. A calling of God lay at the foundation of Jewish life: the nation’s first father was a called man, the whole nation a called nation. Our Lord, in showing how the Covenant would widen to all peoples, never abandons this idea or its language — King, Husbandman, Sower remain the source of blessing to subjects, laborers, land. The notion that good comes to man by his own effort, his own bid to build a world or climb to heaven, is as foreign to the New Dispensation as to the Old.
But if so, how could the general call have come from messengers, while the limiting of that call came from the King himself? Then either the messengers exceeded their commission, or He led them to think His will more gracious than it really was. The Parable refutes both. The King bids guests to His Son’s marriage; they refuse, going off to farm and merchandise. He then commands His messengers to go everywhere, urging and compelling outcasts to come. Nothing suggests the messengers’ intentions were more generous than their King’s — that He held some secret reserve against those they were pressing so urgently to enter His blessing.
Would not the meaning then be this: here are blessings meant for man as man, not for one person here and another there — blessings that cannot be seized or bought but only received as gifts, blessings without which man cannot fulfill his being, and so blessings addressed to heart and will. If the heart and will do not consent, do not join with the Giver’s own mind, the gift is wasted; the one thing that could taste the feast rejects it. Why? Because it is too common — because these guests want something exclusively their own: a farm they inherited and can hold against the world, merchandise won by their own luck. A gift that all may share equally, held on no different terms than what they’ve already claimed for themselves, is worth nothing to them. By this they show themselves called — called to the highest honor God gives, called by His own loving voice — but not chosen, because nothing in them answers that voice; their minds are estranged from His.
This is the lesson I think this Parable teaches at once, if we give the King’s Marriage for His Son the meaning Apostles, saints, and martyrs gave it. To them the union of the Son of God with our nature was the greatest of all blessings, by which every other blessing was understood. Every dream of every people and age — of freedom from evil, of union among men, of full possession of God — pointed toward this Marriage and could be fulfilled only in it.
This Marriage meant God’s purpose to reconcile man to Himself; it meant that men could approach Him as justified and redeemed children; it meant the gift of a Spirit to bring them near. Such a gift to the whole race must be the substance of the Gospel. The invitation had to go out to the highways, because the most ordinary, even the vilest of humankind, were being made partakers of this unspeakable privilege. And so the man without the wedding-garment must be the one who stayed shut up in his own self-sufficiency, detected by the Giver’s all-seeing eye as having no grasp of the feast’s universal nature, no feeling for the Divine Love that had stooped to join itself to earthly life, no wish to give up his miserable pride to be filled with that same love.
- This reading brings the two Parables into full agreement. The laborers who had agreed for a penny a day — who worked from the start in the spirit of hirelings — are utterly discontented with their wage, having supposed they’d get something for themselves. The true reward is to be freed from the love of getting, to become like the Master whose eye is good and not evil, who wants all to share His own blessedness. All are called to this inheritance; only those who have the Master’s Spirit actually inherit it, for having that spirit is itself the chief part of the inheritance. To have it is to choose what God chooses — which, in the deepest sense, is to be chosen.
V. I hope this may help solve the two puzzles I mentioned, if indeed they are puzzles and not mere doubts we raise without wanting an answer. As to the first — how to form or select a Church consisting only of the chosen, not merely the called — history and these Parables give the same answer, and a satisfying one: if the words “called” and “chosen” mean anything, God must call, God must choose; we cannot. The Husbandman sends whom He will into the vineyard; the King calls whom He will to the feast; the Husbandman alone judges whose eye was evil; the King alone comes in to see who lacks the garment. If we imagine we can perform any of these functions ourselves, we must learn it from someone other than our Lord, who reserves such judgment to His Father, saying, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” — and who tells us through history that wherever men have tried to build a Church of their own testing, made up only of the chosen, it has ended in members resenting others receiving the same wages, and in denying that the King has truly made this Marriage for His Son with the whole human race.
- But to the second question — how we may know whether we ourselves are called or chosen — the answer differs, for here no vigilance is excessive if rightly used. The better we know ourselves, the more we shall see our own tendency to the sin of those who murmured against their master: to think our work harder than others’, to imagine we deserve pay others can’t have. We shall see how little we have truly entered into the celestial Marriage we are invited to celebrate, how often low thoughts of our own happiness crowd out real thanksgiving and block true participation in Christ’s finished Sacrifice. But we did not discover these things ourselves — the Husbandman who called us gave us the very awareness of our hardness and ingratitude; the King who comes to the feast shows us we lack the proper garment. We must not shrink from such exposures of our own evil. They may show that we have acted merely as the called, not craving the higher gift of being united in spirit with our Lord, of sharing His righteous and gracious mind. We should bear His reproofs, for “As many as I love I rebuke and chasten”; we may be sure He excludes from His chosen no one whom He Himself has called, or withholds grace from none He calls. The fault lies in us — in the pride that resists His counsel, in our reluctance to open to His knock. So the called may become the chosen: even the humblest daily task may be taken as the Husbandman’s summons to labor in His vineyard, to serve Him in His own free Spirit, and to enter into His own Joy.
The King’s call to His Son’s marriage feast may be welcomed as a pledge that He will clothe us in the Marriage-Garment — that He has indeed chosen us as true members of that body which is the blessed company of all faithful people.