When we hear only short portions of the gospel at Sunday worship, we often miss the context for the story. Why does Jesus provoke local Pharisees by telling the parable we hear this Sunday? Because Jesus is arguing back and forth with these Pharisees about keeping Sabbath laws. A pair of miracle stories raise the Sabbath issue.
Miracle one. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath when he notices and heals a woman who has been bent over for 18 long years (Luke 13.10-17). When she stands up straight, she immediately praises God. The synagogue official chides the congregation, insisting, “You can come on six days of the week to be healed, but not on the Sabbath.” Jesus shames him for being willing to water his animals on the Sabbath but unwilling to free the woman from her suffering.
Miracle two. On his way to a Pharisee’s house for a meal, Jesus meets a man with dropsy, a serious case of edema, which indicates the man’s organs are failing. Jesus asks the Pharisees and lawyers who have gathered to eat with him if it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. They are silent. Jesus heals the man and asks, “Would you pull your ox or your own child out of a pit on the Sabbath?” Again they don’t answer but they are watching him closely.
At the dinner Jesus notices guest claiming the best seats and launches into the parable that skewers two kind of people, those who take the places of honor at banquets and those who invite people just like them, or better than them, to dinners they give. Invite the poor, Jesus tells the guests, the lame and the blind. The two healings they have witnessed demonstrate that God’s will is to have people restored to community, able to praise and worship.
In his advice for making guest lists, Jesus prefers those who cannot repay their hosts with a return invitation and places of honor at their tables. Luke wants to widen the circle of those who eat at the tables of the elite rather than tighten the social circle. He wants our guest lists to help distribute food justly rather than cut people off as chronically inferior, deserving distance from us rather than place among us. Luke urges us to seek God’s blessings rather than honored places at earthly meals.
- What places of honor might you give up? What would you lose or gain?
Immediately after Jesus cautions about taking first places, he tells another parable about a man who gives a dinner but whose invited guests refuse to come. Instead the man fills his tables with people from the streets who are poor, crippled, blind, and lame. This parable holds up people who are poor and chronically ill as the best guests to share the host’s abundance. Luke wants the justice we do on earth to reflect the seating priorities at the heavenly banquet. He calls us to social justice as well as personal conversion.
One doesn’t need to be sick or homebound for very long to feel out of the loop, left along the roadside. Helping friends and neighbors get to church or the store can nourish their spirits and include them in the life of the community.
Our Eucharists anticipate the messianic banquet. Jesus’ advice to the assembled dinner guests in Sunday’s gospel also applies to our meal of faith.
- Who, if anyone or any group,should your parish move from the lowest to the highest place at the meal that gives our community its identity?
- Volunteer to create a welcoming liturgy that invites the diversity of people in your parish to recognize the parish community values their participation. What might differently-abled, teens,immigrants, single parents need from your group?
The feast for all peoples is an ancient Israelite image of peace and communion in God. Isaiah promises, “On this mountain the Holy One will make for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines.” At that feast, “the Holy One will swallow up death forever and wipe away the tears from all faces” (25.6-8).
The last chapter of Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) invites “everyone who thirsts to come to the waters, and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” This feast with God will satisfy like no other, so why, Isaiah asks, “do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55.1-2).
These ancient visions of God’s abundance flowing free of charge to all remain visions rather than realities in our world. More than one in five children in the United States live in poverty, in households that don’t always have enough food. They are food insecure. Wars around the globe spread hunger wherever they happen.
Luke’s gospel challenges us to live Jesus’ word, do what Jesus did, and renew that pledge at every Eucharist.
- Share all the good news that group members know about the many people who help others get the extra food they need each month or who put their lives on the line to get humanitarian aid into places of international emergency.