Er. Yea, here you go. I’m too tired to be witty.
Luke 14:1,7-23; Hebrews 13:1-8,15-16; Psalm 112; Proverbs 25:6-7
This week’s gospel is an excerpt from another scene, in which Jesus is having dinner at a prominent Pharisee’s house on a Sabbath. His first order of business is to heal another man at the dinner who was suffering from “dropsy”, about which the Pharisees had absolutely nothing to say, and neither do I because I talked about healing on the Sabbath last week. But as the dinner went on, Jesus says a couple more things.
First he expands on the proverb that is our first lesson, telling the guests to assume they deserve a lower place at the table instead of a higher, and oddly enough telling them to do so for extremely selfish reasons. Did you notice that? The advice wasn’t given because that’s “how it is in the kingdom of God”, like a lot of Jesus’ advice is. It’s so that the one who takes the advice doesn’t look like an idiot in front of the other guests.
Then Jesus goes on to say to his host not to invite friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors to his dinners(by the way, the host was probably hosting Jesus as well as his friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors at that moment), but instead to invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind. The rich would be able to reciprocate, hosting a dinner of their own and inviting the host to it, but the poor wouldn’t be able to, so Jesus says that someone who invites the poor would be repaid at the resurrection.
Now at this point our reading stops, but I want to look at the next scene because it’s equally important. One of the people at the table says to Jesus, presumably trying to break some of the awkward that Jesus is causing at the dinner table, “That feast at the resurrection sure will be great, won’t it?” And Jesus, in his very Jesus-y way, replies with a parable:
“A man held a huge feast and invited all his friends, but when he sent out his servants to tell everyone the feast was ready, they all had excuses, and rather lame ones at that. The servants came back and told the man that his guests all copped out of his dinner, and he wasn’t very happy about it. Then, not wanting to let a good feast go to waste, he sent the servants out to get the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame; and then, when there was still room, to go into the countryside and bring anyone they could find to come to the feast.”
So here’s the thing, that probably isn’t the nicest thing you can say to your dinner guests. Already Jesus was working on thin ice with the “invite the poor” comment, but then to say that the feast in the kingdom of God will be filled with those very same poor people was not something you want to say to a bunch of rich people who thought themselves to be very religious.
But what Jesus is doing here also fits very well with the theme of Luke’s gospel – namely that Jesus is going to shift things up with regards to power and wealth. A while ago, I mentioned that one of the big themes of Luke is the “Great Reversal”: the poor become rich and rich become poor; the hungry become fed and the fed become hungry; the happy become sad and the sad become happy; and so on. What Jesus is saying to the Pharisees is quite in line with this idea.
In this case the original guests are the friends, brothers, relatives, and neighbors of the host, but they refused the invitation. Jesus’ listeners were pretty smart, especially when Jesus was talking about them, so they would have figured out that they were those guests. Jesus was rather obviously talking about the “feast in the kingdom of God” with this parable, so these Pharisees would quickly figure out that Jesus was saying that they are working on missing their chance to go to that feast.
So the question for us is, “Are we missing the invitation too?” Or perhaps even worse, “Are we causing others to miss out on an invitation?” Those are really the two problems that Jesus’ statements at this dinner bring up. The first asks if we take God at his word and accept that he, through Jesus Christ, expresses his love for us – symbolized by going to the feast, in the parable. The second asks if we create opportunities for those who need to hear about God – symbolized by the people who one should invite to the feast.
It’s a question that doesn’t have an easy answer, but one that should make us think about who we are as Christians. Have we become like the Pharisees, seeking to keep out of God’s kingdom people who aren’t like us, or are we still following Jesus, seeking out those whom no one else is seeking?