The Dinner Party Story.

Luke 14.15-24.

Jesus has two very similar parables in the gospels: The Wedding Party Story in Matthew, and the Dinner Party Story in Luke. Christians tend to lump ’em together, iron out the differences, and claim they’re about precisely the same thing. They’re actually not. The differences are big enough to where we gotta look at the variant parables individually, not together.

In the Wedding Party Story, Jesus compares his kingdom to a king holding a wedding for his son. That’s not a mere social function; it’s political. People’s response to that wedding was a political statement; it wasn’t merely some friends revealing how they’re not really friends. Whereas what we see in the Dinner Party Story is an act of hospitality, generosity, and love on the homeowner’s part… and the invitees blow him off because they’d rather do anything than spend time with him. The rebellion and sedition we detect in the Wedding Party Story isn’t in this story. These are just people being dicks to a guy who just wants their company.

God just wants to love his people, and give us his kingdom. And his people would honestly rather do anything else.

Luke 14.15-24 KWL

15Someone reclining at dinner with Jesus,

hearing this, tells him, “How awesome

for whoever will eat bread in God’s kingdom!”

16Jesus tells him, “Some person is having a large dinner,

and is inviting many.

17He’s sending his slave at the dinner hour

to tell the invited, ‘Come! It’s ready now!’

18And every one of them

is beginning to excuse themselves.

The first is telling him, ‘I’m buying a field.

I seriously need to go out and see it.

I pray you, have me excused.’

19Another is saying, ‘I’m buying five teams of oxen.

I have to try them out.

I pray you, have me excused.’

20 Another is saying, ‘I’m marrying a woman.

This is why I can’t come.’

21Coming back, the slave is reporting

these things to his master.

Then the enraged homeowner is telling his slave,

‘Go out quickly to the city’s squares and alleys,

and the poor, maimed, blind, and disabled:

Bring them here!’

22The slave is saying, ‘Master, I did as you ordered,

and there’s still room.’

23The master is telling the slave,

‘Go out of the city to the roads and property lines,

and make people come,

so my house can be full!

24For I tell you none of those invited men

will taste my dinner.’ ”

Now y’notice the consequences of rejecting the dinner party are way less extreme than we see in the Wedding Party Story. In Matthew the king who throws the wedding party burns down a few cities, then has an underdressed guest hogtied and thrown out. Whereas in Luke the homeowner who throws the dinner party simply says, “None of those invited men will taste my dinner.” They’re not gonna be dead, nor cast into outer darkness where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Mt 22.13 They’re only gonna miss out on a really nice meal.

The Dinner Party for the Poor Story.

Luke 14.12-15.

Because Jesus tells his Dinner Party Story right after this story, in which the host of the story does this, lots of Christians tend to not preach specifically on the Dinner Party for the Poor Story. They lump it together with the Humble Guest Story, call them collectively the Parable fo the Guests, and again skip its points unless they’re gonna dive right into the Dinner Party Story. Or they’ll use it as a preamble for the Dinner Party Story—“First Jesus tells us we oughta invite people who can’t repay us, then here’s a story where a guy does exactly that.”

Well today I’m only writing about the Dinner Party for the Poor Story. Here’s the passage.

Luke 14.12-15 KWL

12Jesus also tells the one who invited him,

“When you¹ host a brunch or dinner,

don’t invite your¹ friends.

Nor your¹ siblings, nor your relatives,

nor your wealthy neighbors.

Otherwise they might also invite you,¹

and that becomes your¹ repayment.

13Instead, when you¹ host a dinner party,

invite the poor, disabled, impaired, and blind.

14You’ll¹ be awesome,

because they have no way to repay you.¹

For you’ll¹ be repaid

in the resurrection of the just.”

15Someone reclining at dinner with Jesus,

hearing this, tells him, “How awesome

for whoever will eat bread in God’s kingdom!”

This gets called a parable because it’s inbetween two parables. It’s not straight-up called a parable like the Humble Guest Story, Lk 14.7 but it’s considered one… and unfortunately because parables are analogies which describe God’s kingdom, we get plenty of Christians who never do anything like this. Never invite the poor, needy, and disabled to their celebrations. NEVER.

Never even think to. Because this is a parable; it’s not advice or instruction from Jesus; it’s only describing God’s kingdom, to which everyone is invited. It doesn’t mean we have to demonstrate this. No no no; we can continue hosting soirées in which we only ever invite friends, relatives, and the rich and popular. Relax; we can keep doing as the world does, and keep conforming to it, not God’s kingdom.

Y’know, someone who’s actually striving to follow Jesus is also gonna follow the heroes of his parables. Not because we’re taking the parables literally; we should know better than that. But we should also recognize that the good Samaritan is a role model; the generous vineyard owner is a role model; the obedient son is a role model; even the shrewd butler is a role model. If God’s kingdom is like these guys, be like these guys.

The Humble Guest Story.

Luke 14.7-11.

At first glance this passage doesn’t look like a parable; we only know it’s one because Luke straight-out begins it with, “And he put forth a parable…” Lk 14.7 KJV If we didn’t know this was a parable, we’d think it was simply shrewd advice from Jesus; we’d even teach it as such in our churches. “Whenever you go to a dinner party, go sit at the kids’ table till the host tells you no, come sit with the adults; come sit by me. I know, I know; you’re afraid they won’t ask you to move, and now you gotta listen to kids talking all day about [thing kids are into].” (Depending on whether the preacher has little children, it’ll either be something kids really are currently into; or something kids were into years ago, and Pastor hasn’t updated his data any more than he’s updated his stash of corny “dad jokes.”)

It’s the first of five parables Jesus tells in this chapter, and the first three all have to do with dinner-party guests. This one’s the Presumptive Guest Story. There’s the Dinner Party for the Poor Story in verses 12-14, which people tend to skip because Jesus sorta tells a fuller version of it in his Dinner Party Story right after it, verses 15-24. Then his Counting the Cost Story, verses 25-33; and Unsalty Salt Story, verses 34-35.

This story is often lumped together with the other dinner-party stories and called the Parables (or Parable) of the Guests. Or the first two stories are the Parable of the Guests, and the third story is the Parable of the Dinner Party. Or sometimes this is singled out as its own parable—which it is—and made the Parable of the Exalted and Humble Guests, or they just focus on the jerk in the story and call it the Parable of the Ambitious Guest, Arrogant Guest, Embarrassed Guest, Presumptive Guest, and so forth. I prefer to focus on what Jesus wants his followers to do. So, the Humble Guest Story.

It comes right after Jesus cures a guy at a dinner party held on sabbath. After our Lord deals with the bad attitudes about helping others on sabbath—which, Jesus states, does not break sabbath; and since Jesus never sinned 1Pe 2.22 let’s not start foolishly claiming he did because he supposedly did away with the Law of Moses. But now that this controversy was put to bed—for now—Jesus has some observations to make about dinner parties. And since they’re parables, they’re actually about God’s kingdom—if you have the ears to hear Jesus.

Luke 14.7-11 KWL

7Jesus is telling a parable

to those who’d been invited to dinner

while noticing how

they’re choosing their places at table.

He’s telling them,

8“Whenever you’re¹ invited to a wedding by someone,

you¹ shouldn’t take the first place.

Perhaps someone more honored than you¹

was invited by them.¹

9And coming to you¹ and the other guest,

the one inviting you two will tell you,¹

‘Give this guest this place,’

and then, with shame,

you’ll¹ have to go to the last place.

10Instead, whenever you’re¹ invited,

go sit in the last place!

This way, whenever the one inviting you¹ comes,

they’ll¹ tell you,¹ ‘Friend, go forward!’

Then honor will be yours¹

in front of everyone dining with you.¹

11For everyone who exalts themselves¹

will be humbled,

and everyone who humbles themselves¹

will be exalted.”

You’d think first place at the table at a wedding banquet would go to the couple who’s getting married. Nope! They have their own table. Like our weddings, there were lots of tables.

“First place” at a table would usually be the place closest to the food, so you’d be the first person to dip your (hopefully washed) hand in everything. Last place would get the stuff everyone’s already touched, then licked their fingers and touched some more. Yeah, even though ancient Israelis were way cleaner than ancient Romans, hygiene back then sucked. And you can see why first place was a big deal.

Why 𝘤𝘢𝘯’𝘵 we cure people on sabbath?

Luke 14.1-6.

One of the regular Pharisee complaints about Jesus was he cured people on sabbath. He’d even cure them right in the middle of his synagogue lessons.

Y’might know Pharisees were strict about sabbath. Y’might also know they weren’t all that strict about a whole lot of things. Like Christians nowadays, they cherry-picked the issues they cared to be strict about, based on their own prejudices and conveniences. Like us, they’d come up with loopholes in the Law of Moses which let ’em do the bare minimum. If they wanted to do a certain kind of work on sabbath, they’d easily find a pious-sounding reason which let ’em get away with it. And like many a hypocrite, they likely hated when Jesus called ’em on it—which he basically did every time he cured someone on sabbath.

Pharisee attitudes about curing people on sabbath were mixed. Life-saving procedures, like slapping a choking person on the back, was fine; like helping someone who’d just been curb-stomped by the Romans was fine. Praying for the sick was usually fine—we can always pray, and if the Holy Spirit answers the prayer and cures someone on sabbath, that’s on him, not us. (Shammai and his disciples felt this teaching was pushing it, but they recognized they couldn’t legitimately rebuke anyone for praying.)

But both these schools of thought rebuked the practice of any medical treatments on sabbath. Any of that stuff was supposed to be done Friday, before sabbath began at sundown; then held off till sabbath ended at sundown on Saturday. In that 24-hour period, you could pray, but otherwise you did nothing.

This story takes place during a dinner party. Luke doesn’t say whether it’s breakfast, brunch, lunch, or supper. But y’know, let’s just say it’s the evening meal. Let’s say it happened at 5PM—let’s even say it happened a half-hour before sundown, when it wouldn’t be sabbath anymore and nobody could object to Jesus curing this guy. Because it doesn’t really matter what time it was: Jesus is establishing the principle that it’s always right to help people on sabbath.

Luke 14.1-6 KWL

1This happens on sabbath,

when Jesus goes to eat bread

in the house of one of the Pharisees’ leaders.

People are watching him closely—

2look, a certain person who has an edema

is in front of Jesus.

3In reply, Jesus speaks to the lawyers and Pharisees,

saying, “Can one cure on sabbath,

or not?”

4The lawyers and Pharisees are silent.

Laying hands on the sufferer,

Jesus cures him

and sets him free.

5To the Pharisees, Jesus says,

“If a child or ox will fall down a well,

who among you² will not quickly pull him out?

—even on the sabbath day?”

6The Pharisees are not able

to reply to these things.

The KJV translates ὑδρωπικὸς/ydropikós, “fluid build-up,” as “dropsy.” Nowadays we call it an edema. You know those people whose ankles swell up, so they have to wear compression socks or they’ll have cankles? That. It’s not necessarily life-threatening, but it can make you miserable.

Luke says this person was ἔμπροσθεν/émprosthen, “in the face of,” Jesus. It gets translated “before him,” but he wasn’t just really close to Jesus; he was unavoidably close. Probably on purpose. In Jesus’s day, people ate dinner Roman-style, laying down on couches, and it’s entirely likely this guy’s cankles were right next to Jesus’s head. Whoever was in charge of the seating put Jesus right next to this guy.

And the rest of them were watching to see what Jesus would do. Would he break sabbath?

Well, Jesus never sinned, 1Pe 2.22 so he never did break sabbath, regardless of what your favorite dispensationalist preachers might claim. But he totally broke Pharisee customs about sabbath. Broke a lot of their customs, intentionally, because they were just godless hypocrisy. The custom about not helping the needy on sabbath?—perfect example.

The earth’s salt.

Mark 9.43-50, Matthew 5.13, Luke 14.34-35.

If you’ve ever heard someone called “the salt of the earth,” usually they mean an ordinary but decent person. And no, that’s not what Jesus meant when he coined the phrase “salt of the earth”—or as I translated it, “the earth’s salt.” I’ve no idea how it evolved from a remarkable person to an unremarkable person. When Jesus uses it in his Sermon on the Mount, he means remarkable.

He means a flavor enhancer. Be the salt of the earth: Enhance it. Make it taste better.

Mark 9.49-50 KWL

49“Everything for the fire will be salted. Lv 2.13

50Salt is good—

when salt becomes saltless,

in what way will it season anything?

Have salt in yourselves:

Have peace with one another.”

Matthew 5.13 KWL

“You’re* the earth’s salt.

When salt is tasteless,

in what way will it salt things?

It’s good for nothing—

unless it’s thrown outside for people to walk on.”

Luke 14.34-35 KWL

34“So salt is good—

when salt is also tasteless,

in what way will it salt things?

35It’s useful for neither the ground nor the dungheap.

They throw it outside.

One who has an ear to hear: Hear me!”

Where your church meets, and where the needy are.

My church (I’m not a pastor; just a longtime member) meets in a strip mall. We’re next to a Walmart Neighborhood Market. We moved in during the recession, before Walmart moved in and the building owners drove up the rental prices. The higher rent was part of the reason we had to give up our Fellowship Hall; there’s a carpet store there now. It’s next to a junior high school, next to a 7-Eleven, across the street from a health club. It’s not a good neighborhood. We got crime. We got homeless people. Which means it’s a really good place to put a church. Needy people and sinners need Jesus!

So occasionally homeless folks come into the building. Usually it’s because we have coffee in the hall. They see free coffee; they want free coffee; I don‘t blame ’em. Come in and have some coffee! Sometimes we also have pastries, doughnuts, muffins, or other baked goods; they’ll eat those too. The hope is they’ll also stick around for the worship service. And every once in a while they do.

We had the same situation at one of my previous churches. (Still wasn’t a pastor; just a board member.) We met in the city’s community center. The building used to be a Lutheran church, so it was a really suitable place for a church to meet. Because it was centrally located, and pretty close to a bus line, sometimes transients would wander in to use the bathroom. And they’d notice we had a table with coffee and bagels and pastries on it.

THEY. “Is this for anyone?”

ME. “Yes. Help yourself.”

THEY. “Thank you!”

ME. “You’re welcome to stick around for the service too, if you want.”

THEY. [some excuse to get out of that]

ME. [shrug; well I tried]

But every so often one of the church ladies would come to me, scandalized: “There’s a homeless person over there. Eating our pastries. What should we do?”

“Invite ’em to the service,” I said. Duh.

But you know how suburban Americans are: We want our churches to accommodate us, not the needy.

“Efficacious grace”: When God’s grace turns dark.

Because popular culture tends to define God by his power, not his character like the scriptures describe him, 1Jn 4.8 a lot of Christians do it too. The result is a lot of bad theology, where God’s love, grace, and justice unintentionally (but hey, sometimes very intentionally) take a distant second to his might and glory.

Take grace.

Properly defined, grace is God’s generous, forgiving, kind, favorable attitude towards his people. It’s what reaches out to people who totally don’t merit God’s attention whatsoever, loves us anyway, turns us into daughters and sons of the Most High, and grants us his kingdom. It’s amazing.

But when you imagine God’s single most important attribute is his power… well, grace looks extremely different. It’s no longer an attitude. It’s a determination. You will receive God’s grace, become his child, and be on the track for heaven. Or none of these things will happen, because God’s grace will never touch you, because God doesn’t want you. No we don’t know why; he just doesn’t. No you can’t change his mind; piss off.

I know: Under this redefinition, God’s grace is still amazing… but only for its recipients. For everybody else, God seems arbitrary, and downright cold. Because only a third of the planet considers themselves Christian. (Figure some of them aren’t really, and figure there are those, like Abraham ben Terah, whom God’s gonna save despite their inadequate knowledge of Jesus. I think it’ll still come out to be a third.) This means God’s perfectly fine with two-thirds of humanity going to hell. If so, he created an awful lot of unwanted people… and is deliberately making hell more full than heaven.

Yeah, that’s the usual problem when you make God out to be deterministic: Suddenly his plans for the universe are mighty evil. But hey, determinists don’t care: God wields all the power they could ever covet, and they’re going to heaven. They get theirs.

Calvinists tend to call this deterministic form of grace irresistible grace. Although lately a number of ’em realize just how rapey “irresistible” sounds, so they prefer the term efficacious grace—that if God decides to be gracious to us, this grace is so powerful, so mighty, it will have an effect upon us, and will do as God intends. ’Cause to their minds, the Almighty doesn’t merely want things, or wish for things: He determines things. And since he’s almighty, what force in the universe could possibly stop him from getting his way?

Hyperbole. So I don’t have to explain it a billion times.

You saw what I did there, right?

Hyperbole /haɪ'pər.bə.li/ n. Deliberate exaggeration: A claim not meant to be taken literally.

[Hyperbolic /haɪ.pər'bɑl.ək/ adj.]

You may not be so familiar with this word, but you’ve seen examples of it all your life. And that’s not hyperbole.

Humans use hyperbolic language to get attention. You might not think much of the statement, “I had to clean a lot of dishes.” You pay a little more attention to, “I had to clean a truckload of dishes.” The exaggerated image gets attention. May even inspire a mental image of a literal truckload of dishes. May even strike us as funny, horrifying, sad, irritating; like most acts of creativity, it runs the risk of pushing the wrong buttons.

Of course some hyperboles are so overused, they get no reaction anymore. They’ve become clichés. “I worked my fingers to the bone” probably horrified someone the first time they heard it—“No, really? Ewww”—but nobody bothers to flinch at it anymore. Not even if people claim, “I literally worked my fingers to the bone.” Usually no they didn’t.

Humans have always used hyperbolic language. Nope, that’s not a hyperbole either: We really have. We find it in every culture. We find it in the bible. Even God used it.

Amos 2.9 KWL

“I destroyed the Amorite before their very eyes,

whose height was like that of cedars, strong like oaks.

I destroyed their fruit above, and root below.”

So, do you imagine the Amorites were literally as tall as cedar trees? After all, God said so. And surely God doesn’t lie…

See, that’s the problem with hyperbole and biblical interpretation. Too many people take the scriptures literally. They figure if God’s word is nothing but truth, Jn 17.17 the scriptures oughta be absolutely valid in every instance, and contain no exaggerations whatsoever. ’Cause liars exaggerate, but God’s no liar. Tt 1.2 And if these two ideas (“liars exaggerate” and “God’s no liar”) are equivalent, it logically follows God doesn’t exaggerate. Ever.

Neither does Jesus.

Luke 14.26 KWL

“If anyone comes to me yet won’t ‘hate’ their father, mother, woman, children, brothers, and sisters,

or even their own soul, they can’t be my student.”

See, I put “hate” in quotes, ’cause Jesus doesn’t literally mean hate; middle easterners used that word when they spoke about things which took lower priority. Top priority was “loved.” Lower priorities might’ve also been loved, but in comparison to that top priority, they weren’t loved as much; so “hated.”

This is one of those examples, like “working my fingers to the bone,” where the exaggeration is such a cliché, middle easterners thought nothing of it. Problem is, our culture doesn’t. To literalists—particularly members of cults—this means they’re to cut themselves off from their families entirely. Divorce spouses, abandon children, have nothing more to do with anyone from their past. Don’t honor parents; Ex 20.12 hate them. In so doing, the cult can gain greater control over their followers.

This is why I had to add quotes. The NLT went with, “You must hate everyone else by comparison.” Lk 14.26 NLT That works too.