The Hard Sayings: Matthew 22:14

For many are invited, but few are chosen.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand from a list put together by Lord's Library. To see their list of these verses, go to this page.

This verse was spoken to the Pharisees and chief priests on Jesus’s final trip to Jerusalem, not long before his death. He says this verse at the end of the Parable of the Marriage Feast.

In that story, a king gives a feast for the marriage of his son and sends out messengers to invite the guests, but all the invited guests decline to attend. He again sends out servants to invite them, explaining that he has prepared oxen and fat calves, but they all declined again, being concerned with their farms and merchandise. After the second invitation, some of the invited killed the king’s messengers.

The angry kings sends out his army and destroys the murders’ city. He then sends his messengers to invite people, both good and bad, from the street to fill the hall. However, one of the guests does not wear a wedding garment and he is tossed out.

This line in Matthew 22:14 is Jesus’s explanation of the parable.

NIV: For many are invited, but few are chosen.

The words in boldface are those that are discussed.

Many interpret this verse to be about the “elect,” the few that are chosen to enter paradise. For some, this elect is limited to 144,000. However, this interpretation is impossible if we translate the Greek accurately. In many ways, the Greek says the opposite of this.

The Obvious Analogy

First, let us discuss the obvious aspects of the analogy. The king, as is so often the case in Jesus’s parables, represents God, the Father. The wedding is a celebration of his son, that is, Jesus. The feast is the reward for attending.

The messengers are the prophets, announcing the king’s feast and all the good things in it. The invited guests would be the righteous Judean people. The Pharisees would certainly see themselves among these righteous. But why don’t these righteous come to the feast? They are too concerned with their own earthly goods instead of what the king offers. Some of them kill the prophets and are destroyed themselves in return. This is a brief summary of Judean history.

So, the king invites everyone, both good and bad. He no longer is concerned with only having the righteous attend, but why he is concerned with them changing their clothes? In Jesus’s time, your clothes identified your station in life, the area you came from, and even your house. Wedding robes were provided by the house holding the wedding. So, by not putting on these clothes, someone chose not to honor the house and cling to his own worldly status.

The Greek Words

The “many” are those “invited” at the end of the story, not those invited at its beginning. All the people in the streets, good and bad, outnumber the original guests. The Greek adjective translated as “many” means "many (in number)," "great (in size or power or worth)," and "large (of space), so the sense is the greatest number.

Our English translations go wrong with the Greek adjective translated as "invited". The word means “invited” and “welcomed,” but it primarily means “chosen.” So, Jesus is saying that the many are “chosen,” not the few. This word is only used by Jesus once, in this verse. It is the root of the word translated as “chosen” later in the verse, but that word is more complicated.

The “few” seems at first to be the select guests who were originally invited and didn’t come. However, even fewer is the single guest thrown out for not wearing a wedding gown. Neither of these “few” come off well in the story, which is a problem for the translators.

The other adjective translated as “chosen” is from the same root as the word above that means “chosen.” The difference is that this word has the prefix, “out of,” so the sense is “chosen out of” rather than just the simple “chosen.” The only person who is “picked out” in the story is the one without the wedding garment.

One possible meaning of this verse is therefore:

Listeners Heard: Because many are chosen but a few selected out.

This is where the “many” are the good and the bad, and the few the single guest who doesn’t put in a wedding garment.

However, this last word is a punchline with a double meaning. The surprise is its second meaning.

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