A Great Banquet

In the Gospel of Luke, in chapters 9 to 19, as Jesus travels from his Galilean ministry down south to Jerusalem to be crucified and raised from the dead, he has the opportunity to visit many villages. He is also invited to dine with a number of people, including Pharisees and even tax collectors. These interactions go a number of different ways. Sometimes his hosts ask him questions; sometimes Jesus challenges them. Each situation recorded in Luke provides an opportunity for Jesus to teach about the Kingdom of God as he’s on his way to the cross.

One particular episode is very telling. In chapter 14, Luke writes, One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully (Luke 14:1). As the other guests are watching him, a man with dropsy comes to the table and Jesus asks those at the dinner if it’s ok to heal someone on the Sabbath. Then he does it. He gives this man a new start at life and sends him on his way. Next, he tells a parable to the dinner guests. He says that when they go to a feast, they should not seek out the best seat at the table. Instead, they should sit in the lowest place so that the host will come find them and elevate them to a better seat: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). He then turns to the host and tells him that when he holds a dinner, he should not invite his friends and family who can pay him back. Instead, he tells the host: “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:13-14). In some sense, he’s criticizing everyone there.

As Jesus lectures his host and the other guests at the table, one of the guests tries to break the tension by saying “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” (Luke 14:15b). Jesus then responds by telling another parable about a man hosting a banquet. The master in his story sends his servant out to gather those who have been invited to the banquet, but one by one the invitees make excuses and do not come. The man becomes angry and tells his servant to bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame who had been left to the outskirts of society. Then the master says, “Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23b). And then he says, “For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet” (Luke 14:24).

Jesus told that story to a room filled with people expecting to eat at the banquet of God, just as one of the guests had stated before. All having been invited into the house of a ruler of the pharisees, they assumed that their status with the religious elite meant that they had the same status before God. Yet, over the course of the dinner, including the final parable, Jesus makes it clear that by seeking out the highest seats and only inviting those who could pay them back, they all had actually rejected the invitation to God’s banquet, the great feast at the end of time. God’s people, whom God had invited, would not taste his banquet. While this was a deeply offensive message to Jesus’s host and the other guests, he made it clear that God was now seeking out the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame, those who had been rejected by society, like the man whom Jesus had just healed of dropsy before them all.

Our status in this world does not dictate our place before God. Our Lord calls us to humility that he might be the one to lift us up. In Philippians 2, Paul writes that we are not to live selfishly but in humility counting others more significant than ourselves. Even Jesus emptied himself and sat in the lowest seat, but God the Father led him to the seat of highest honor that every tongue would confess that Jesus is Lord. When we trust in Jesus, and follow him, we too get to be part of that banquet—the eternal banquet of Jesus himself. May we follow where he leads.