Hilton Head Island, SC – October 31, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 14:7-14; Luke 14:15-24
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But (Jesus) said to him, “A man gave a great banquet, and invited many; and at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for all is now ready.’” – Luke 14:16-17 (RSV)
This is one of a series of sermons based on parables that are found in the Gospel of Luke. The parable of the sower and the seeds, the first in the series, is also found in the other two Synoptic Gospels, Mark and Matthew. All the other six parables can be found only in the Third Gospel, the Gospel of Luke. No one knows why, but thank God for Luke that they’re there. Luke was the master conveyor of the parables of Jesus.
As with all of the parables, there is a context out of which Jesus told these six stories. The context of the one for today is a sizeable dinner party in the home of a Pharisee to which Jesus was invited. In all four of the Gospels the Pharisees generally are given a bad rap. Nonetheless Jesus was often invited into conversations or into their homes by the Pharisees, which would suggest that he got along with them fairly well, at least in the earliest stages of his ministry. Many years ago I was given a book by a rabbi friend. It was written by a rabbi named Harvey Falk. It was called Jesus the Pharisee. His thesis was that Jesus himself was a Pharisee. Rabbi Falk’s thoughts were quite convincing, although I never read anyone else who was as impressed as I by what he said. But if Jesus was a Pharisee at the beginning of his ministry, by the end of it he must have withdrawn from that influential group of first-century Jewish scholars.
Anyway, the first verse of the 14th chapter of Luke says that Jesus had been invited to dinner by an unidentified Pharisee. It says of the other people who were invited that “they were watching him.” We may infer that means there were other Pharisees at this meal who were skeptical of Jesus, and they hoped he would say something to trip himself up theologically. (Theologians take great delight in catching one another in intellectual traps. That is a common academic game among many academicians.)
But, as the others were watching what Jesus did, Jesus also watched their body language. Sensing they were silently disagreeing with him, Jesus told an introductory parable to the parable of the Great Banquet. Luke says, “Now (Jesus) told a parable to those who were invited, when he marked how they chose the places of honor” (14:7). Two thousand years ago, as today, the land of Israel was a very stratified society. No one was supposed to go anywhere higher up the social stratum than the place they were expected to inhabit. And at this dinner, everyone went to the place where he thought he was expected to go: the highest mucky-mucks closest to the host, with the middle mucky-mucks farther away, and the lowest mucky-mucks, who were barely mucky-mucks at all, the farthest from the host.
Jesus told everyone they should instead go to the lowest places. Then the host would tell them to go higher up in the social pecking order, and visibly they would be honored by making such a move. This repartee led to the point of what Jesus was telling the Pharisees, which is this: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Lots of religious people have always had a tendency to exalt themselves. It’s a common failing.
The statement about exaltation and humility probably did not meet with enthusiastic acclaim by those who heard it. It even may have felt like a put-down to them. But Jesus wasn’t finished in what he intended to say. He had some things he wanted to get off his chest, and he figured this was a very apropos time to do it. “When you chaps give a feast,” said Jesus, “don’t invite your fancy friends. Instead, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (14:13-14).
The Pharisees to whom Jesus said this almost certainly took umbrage at most of it, except at the very last statement. Only the Pharisees of all the theological factions of that time believed in a resurrection after death. If the historical Jesus was in fact ever a Pharisee, his conviction of resurrection may have been a key reason he became one. One of the guests apparently was pleased with what Jesus said at that point, because he responded to Jesus, “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!” (14:15) (I am giving you a lot more background to the parable of the Great Banquet than I intended before I started writing this sermon, but I decided it was necessary for you fully to understand the meaning I think Jesus intended by his ingenious parable.) In this context, the phrase “the kingdom of God” implies the heavenly kingdom, as in “Thy kingdom come,” from the Lord’s Prayer. The man who made that statement likely imagined a celestial scene in which the religious upper crust of Jewish society would be in heaven, and everyone in the lower strata would be excluded.
So Jesus began his key parable in this chapter of Luke by saying, “A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many; and at the time for the banquet he sent his servant” (14”16) to tell the guests that they were to come to the host’s home. In order to prevent anyone from insulting a host, the host would send out invitations to big banquets many weeks or even months ahead, so people would get the date on their calendars. Then they could have no excuse, and bow out of the party at the last minute. Nevertheless, in the parable, that’s what everybody did who had been invited; they bowed out.
In that very stratified society, everyone had a place, and they all knew their place. And because these are social swells to whom Jesus is speaking, they imagine the folks invited to the banquet in the story are people such as themselves, which is what Jesus intended them to think. But in the Middle East, then as now, one would do everything possible to keep from insulting anyone, because that is the biggest of social faux pas. In the Middle East, you must never offend anyone; you might end up getting killed if you did. In the end, that is what happened to Jesus.
To us, the excuses used in this parable are the lamest of the lame. The first guest said, “I have bought a field, and I must go out and look at it. Have me excused,” he told the host’s servant. Relatively speaking, buying a field back in those days might be the equivalent of buying a Gulfstream jet now. You wouldn’t do it in a hurry, and you would know it would be insulting to the host to say that’s what you had to do on the day of his banquet. The host knew nobody had to do such a thing on the day of his great banquet, whose date the guest had had inscribed in his daily planner for months. At the very minimum, this is baloney, if they had baloney back then, which I doubt they did. But that’s the lame excuse the first man gave.
The second man had an even more insulting excuse. “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I must go check them out.” That’s ridiculous! That was an enormous purchase, and he would have been checking them out for weeks to make sure they were okay. He certainly didn’t need to do it again on the day of the host’s great banquet, but that’s the excuse he gave.
To our ears, the third guest maybe had a valid excuse; “I have married a wife, and therefore I can’t come.” It sounds plausible, except that nobody would dare to get married at a time that would prevent him from going to the great banquet his high-society friend had prepared for him and his other guests, but that’s precisely what this social schlemiel did. All these attempted excuses are absurd. The host knows it, and they know he knows it, but they do it anyway. This would be like you having an Easter dinner to which you invite your best friend, who happens to be an Orthodox Jew, and you feed him ham --- on Easter. This parable made the skin crawl of those who heard it. Cultural norms are here being painfully obliterated left and right.
“Then the householder in anger” told his servant to go to the low-rent district of town and invite the poor and maimed and blind and lame. Remember them? They were the one mentioned in the first parable Jesus told the Pharisees at the dinner party of the Pharisee. What, exactly, is going on here? This is all very culturally complex!
There was a tradition in the most stringent form of first-century Judaism among the Essenes, another of the elite theological groups. They insisted that one was to avoid everyone who was too poor to stay clean or who was physically imperfect, as the maimed and lame appear to be, because they would endanger themselves before God. Just to be around such people was to defile oneself, they thought. So the servant tells the man giving the great banquet that he has already invited people like that, and still there are empty places at the table. This is a social disaster! Therefore the host says to go out into the highways and hedges and compel others to come in, so that the house may be filled for this great occasion. “For I tell you, none of those who were invited shall taste my banquet” (14:24). What IS going on?
Here is my speculative answer. I don’t know this to be the answer, but I think this is what was going through Jesus’ mind which prompted this biting, piercing, painful story. By this time Jesus was already at least 90% through his public ministry. Already he is on his way to Jerusalem, and Passover, and Good Friday. For two and a half years he has been trying to convince the finest representatives of normative Judaism that they need to institute some necessary reforms to remain healthy and fresh, but they have resisted him at every step of the way.
Today is Reformation Sunday, 2021. On Halloween evening, All Hallow’s Eve, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. That would infuriate his theological enemies, and he would ultimately be booted out of the Roman Catholic Church. On some day and date in the spring of 33 CE or so, Jesus was telling a Reformation parable to his theological frenemies. What Jesus is saying in the parable of the Great Banquet will infuriate those listening to him. They shall become his theological enemies, and for that he ultimately will be booted out of this world. He has tried, and tried, and tried, but he knows he is making little headway, yet he sees himself as being under divine orders. He is doing God’s will, for heaven’s sake! He must say what he says!
Here is how William Barclay interprets this parable: The man who puts on the great banquet represents God, according to Barclay. The original invitees to God’s great banquet are those Jews who reject the grace of God. They don’t want an unmerited invitation; they want to prove that they have earned their invitation by doing good works. The poor people of the city are the tax collectors and sinners; they too get an invitation. Those who are found along the highways and byways are the Gentiles, the non-Jews, the outcastes of a properly-governed world; even they are invited to the Great Banquet. Dr. Barclay didn’t say it exactly the way I said it, but I am giving you a rapid interpretation of what he said.
Every day since Lucy emerged from her cave in east Africa three million years ago, God has had His hands full with human beings. He gives us grace, and we give Him guff. He tries to woo us, and we try to wow Him. He offers us free grace and dying love, and we offer Him lame excuses and lying lives. Jesus was God’s love personified, and very few of his contemporaries were in the necessary frame of mind to accept that. Theirs was a do-it-yourself religion, and God’s religion was an accept-what-God-gives-you religion.
It is very difficult for God and Jesus to break us of our bad habits. We think that somehow we have to get on the good side of God, so we go through all the rigors of religiosity: do the right things; hold fast to the proper doctrines; say the correct words. In doing all that we miss the main point: God is love. God is love. As Mister Rogers used to say, God also says, “I like you just the way you are.” Or, as the great theologian Paul Tillich said, we must accept our acceptance despite being unacceptable. Or as Jesus followed up that notion with some ideas explained in poignant detail, true religion is not a matter of doing anything; true religion is a matter of trusting. We are to trust that God really loves us, all of us, and that He wants us to be with him both now and forever. Nobody is excluded; everybody is included. Nobody is out; everybody is in.
For some strange, perverse, bizarre reason, many people are reviled by the notion of universal salvation. They hate it. They detest it. They run from it. But Jesus just keeps chipping away at their resistance. There are many places in the Gospels where it doesn’t seem like that was the primary message of Jesus, because maybe the Gospel writers themselves had a hard time accepting what Jesus said, and they inserted other, more judgmental things that he might have said, because that’s what they, the writers, also had been taught. But in Luke, especially in Luke, the message of unending grace for everyone comes through in a gangbuster’s fashion.
That, Christian people, is what I think Jesus thought is the essence of the Good News of God, the Gospel. God goes out, via Jesus, and He invites and cajoles and pleads with everyone to come in, to gather around the kingdom table for the Great Banquet, because that is the essence of what God wants us to do.
You are loved and accepted by God. Regardless of your failings, despite your feelings of unworthiness, accept your acceptance. But then, reform yourself and your personal religion. Reform, reform, reform. Make every Sunday, every day, Reformation Sunday.