The Times They Are a-Changin'.

Luke 14:1-24.

I.

            The Pharisees keep inviting Jesus to eat and discuss things with them.  Luke assumes their motives are that they are deliberately watching Jesus to trip him up.  Perhaps they have a little competition going to see who can outsmart him with some airtight theological question.  In any case Jesus goes to the dinner, and just to ensure that there will be fireworks, someone, knowing it is the Sabbath, brings in a local man suffering from dropsy.  They want to see what Jesus will do.

            Dropsy is a condition we know today as a form of edema, which is a retention of water in the body, often accompanied by insatiable thirst.  This man may have had his whole body seriously swollen.

            Commentators over the centuries have seen the man as a symbol of our avarice, and greed, our excessive acquisitiveness, and immoral retention of the earth’s resources, so that we are bloated nearly to the point of bursting.  Thus we could see in this man our own affluence and over consumption, leading to the epidemic of obesity under which we now suffer, which is a symbol and expression of the particular spiritual diseases of our culture, like excessive consumption.

            This poor, suffering man is hauled before Jesus, not because people love him and sincerely want to see him healed.  He’s not even a person at all, to them.  He’s an object lesson, a test case.  So the sick man is standing in front of Jesus and everyone goes silent to see what Jesus will do... which everyone knows because this is exactly the sort of thing that Jesus is famous for doing.

            Jesus looks at the suffering man with compassion.  Then he asks the crowd, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”  No one answers.  If someone says Yes, they could get in trouble with the Pharisees.  If someone says No, they would be conscious of condemning this man to several unnecessary hours of pain, and maybe that bothers them.

            So Jesus takes the man to him, and heals him, and sends him away.  Luke gives us no more details than that.

            Then Jesus asks them, “If one of you has a child, or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?”  We forget that children, servants, and domestic animals were about on the same social level until very recently.  No one responds.  Because everyone knows it is completely permissible to rescue a child or a domestic animal even on a Sabbath day.  It would be ridiculous and cruel to leave a child or an animal in distress, letting them sit there howling in pain until sundown, on the Sabbath day.  So, if we would do that necessary kindness for some of the lowest in society, why would we not do it for an adult who has figuratively “fallen into a ditch” by contracting some illness?  Why would we wait until sundown in this case?  Why, if we have the ability to save someone, would we make them suffer even for one more minute? 

II.

            Jesus approaches the Sabbath, not from the perspective of some idealized theological, nationalist, or religious purpose.  He is not looking at it as some arbitrary rule from the Bible that must be upheld.  He sees it from the perspective of the suffering man, the person in need, the victim of disease.  Considering that the Sabbath is originally given to a band of escaped slaves as a way to prevent them falling back into oppression, this is exactly the perspective from which the Sabbath, and everything else in the Bible, is intended to be viewed.

            The Bible is unique in all ancient literature in that it is mostly written by and for the victims, the poor, the sick, the excluded, and the losers. 

            To make this point Jesus observes the way people at this banquet are taking their seats, vying and jostling for the best places, near the head of the table, as if they were entitled to be up there with the host.  Maybe they were even arguing over their relative status with each other.

            Jesus responds to this spectacle by advising people to do just the opposite.  Instead of pride and hubris about your own credentials, he says to adopt a mode of humility.  This avoids the embarrassment of being asked to give up your seat to someone else, and sets yourself up to be invited to come up to a better seat.

            Of course, as with so many of Jesus’ parables, it appears a little crazy when taken literally.  But his point is that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled; and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 

            God identifies with the lowly, the people on the margins, the slaves and sinners, the sick.  Jesus says that if you want to identify with God, those are the people you should be with.  That’s where God is.  And in the end, these are the people who are called up to the head of the table, not the successful, the wealthy and powerful, the famous, or the attractive.

            From the very beginning of this gospel with the hymn his mother sings before he is even born, we learn that Jesus is about reversal.  He comes to turn society upside-down.  Luke has been hammering at this theme the whole time.  Not only is Jesus associating with the outcast and disenfranchised of society, but he is repeatedly reminding his hearers, at key times in his ministry, that this is what he is about.  As Bob Dylan sang 50 years ago, “The loser now will be later to win.… The slow one now
will later be fast as the present now
will later be past;
the order is
rapidly fadin’.  And the first one now
will later be last,
for the times they are a-changin'”

III.

            So he turns to his host.  “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.”  I can just hear the Pharisee saying, “And that’s bad because….”  From his perspective Jesus simply makes no sense.  Don’t I have dinners specifically to celebrate with those close to me?  Should I not celebrate Thanksgiving with my family?  Should I not also invite wealthy neighbors who have been my benefactors?  

            Jesus continues.  “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

            Of course, Jesus isn’t really talking about parties and social life.  He is talking about the Kingdom of God, and the kinds of relationships that overflow from there to here.  In the Kingdom of God social hierarchies are collapsed, and social differences are dissolved.  So we should reflect that order in advance here and now.  There should be no insiders and outsiders, have and have-nots.  There should be no exclusion of some from our fellowship because they are deemed unimportant losers.  Those are the people God is closest to!

            Someone at the dinner blurts out in charismatic enthusiasm, “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God!”  So Jesus looks at him, and tells him the next story, as if to say, “Be careful what you wish for.” 

            Jesus loves to use the example of a banquet, and big dinner, like a wedding reception.  He says that someone gave festive dinner, but people rsvp’d with various excuses.  One person says he just bought some land and has to go check it out, maybe close the deal.  Another says he has just bought 5 yoke, that’s 10, oxen, and he has to try them out.  Another says he just got married, and Jesus needs to give no explanation why he is unwilling to attend.

            A lot of busy people with a lot of responsibilities.  Things to do, people to meet, places to go.  These are successful people, acquiring land, livestock, a wife.  They are active participants in the economy, the market, family, the hustle-and- bustle of life.  These are all good excuses.  We would understandingly accept any of them as being of sufficient importance to overrule attendance at a dinner any of us were giving.  I have to close on my new house; I have to pick up my new car; I’ll be on my honeymoon.  Those all work.

IV.

            But in the story, everyone who was invited comes up with an excuse, a sure sign that people really don’t want to come to this particular party given by this particular host.

            So the host sends out a second wave of invitations, into the streets and lanes of the town, to the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  The broken losers, the victims of circumstance, the needy… they now get invited to the banquet.

            These people don’t have anything else to do.  They don’t have any real estate deals going, they have no important businesses to manage, and they may not even have many enduring personal relationships to attend to.  They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from showing up at the banquet.

            They all show up.  But there is still room in the hall.  So the host, not wanting any place to be empty and at the same time leaving no opportunity for any of the people who rejected his invitation to change their mind, sends out yet a third invitation even farther out into the margins of society, the “roads and lanes,” and find even forgotten, invisible people and insist that they come.  Maybe there are some who are so destitute and broken that they did not receive or think themselves worthy of the second invitation.  Maybe there are people lower than the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  Maybe foreigners.  Maybe people who have committed awful sins.  The radically and universally unpopular.

            Insist.  Don’t take no for an answer.  This host wants even them, and they must come.  Let nothing separate them from the generosity and benefaction of the host. 

            But none of the original invitees will get in.

            Jesus aims this kind of parable at the pious, sanctimonious, entitled, privileged, religiously exclusive and judgmental people of his, and our, time.  He says that they are probably too busy doing other things, and that this distraction is what separates them from God.  Faith, for all their visible and audible demonstrations of it, remains in reality a secondary thing to them.  They’re too busy being successful, and responsible to come to the banquet.  They have better things to do than share in communion with God and their neighbors.  They’re too caught up in the kingdom of the world to have time for the Kingdom of God.

            The “banquet” is God’s saving, redeeming, healing, reconciling, and blessing Presence.  It is the source of spiritual energy and power.  It is the Kingdom of God that we anticipate and imitate when we extend communion and blessing to all in Jesus Christ.

V.

            So Jesus heals a man whose body is killing itself by retaining, keeping, hoarding, storing too much.  And then he gives a series of teachings lifting up those who have too little.  It’s like the people making their excuses are too bloated in their own self-importance.  They are so stuffed that they don’t even realize it.  They don’t want to be healed because they don’t think they have anything to be healed of.  Who wants to be healed of success?

            Jesus Christ defines success rather differently.  Instead of gain, profit, and acquisition, which veer very easily into a kind of spiritual dropsy where we are bloated to bursting, and contributing nothing to the common good.

            But Jesus calls us to this life of sharing as equals in the overflowing beneficence of the Creator, passing the blessings to each other, realizing we are all beloved guests in receipt of astounding and miraculous gifts, all the time.  In order to enter we have to place ourselves with the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  For that is the only way in to the one place where we may find the true wealth, true wholeness, true sight, and true power.

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