Ep 27 A Really Really Awkward Dinner Party (Luke 14)

Stories from the Bible - episode 27 - Chapter 14 - A Really Really Awkward Dinner Party

Hello and welcome to episode 27. Today we’ll be hearing stories from Luke chapter 14.

Before we get there, what happened in the stories from last episode - Luke chapter 13? At the start of that chapter, Jesus is told by some people about the unfortunate Galileans who were killed by the Romans while they were offering sacrifices. Why did they share this story with Jesus? Perhaps they wanted Jesus to sympathise with them about the plight of the Jews under the crushing power of Rome.

But I think there is another motive. If we look closer at the story, Luke tells us that the people who give Jesus this news were present ‘on that occasion’, that is, they were in the crowd hearing the things that Jesus had just been saying. Their desire to gossip about the Galilean tragedy seems to come as a response to the teaching they’d just heard. And what was it that Jesus had been speaking about?

At the very end of chapter 12 Jesus gives the crowds two sharp little illustrations to underline the urgency of the times that they are in. In the first picture, Jesus calls the crowd hypocrites because they think they are clever at discerning what’s what when it comes to understanding weather signals, and yet they don’t know how to interpret the very times in which they live. Recall that Jesus is addressing people who have the privilege of witnessing his wisdom and miracles, and yet they have failed to grasp the truth about Jesus’ identity and claim on their lives that those signs point to.

In the second illustration, Jesus gets the crowd thinking about what they would do if they were going along with their accuser towards a judge. Jesus points out the obvious thing to do would be to try and settle with your accuser before getting to the judge! Of course you wouldn’t be so silly as to miss your last window of opportunity to influence your future for the better. Because presumably in this illustration the judge will definitely not be merciful but your accuser might feel sorry for you and be generous and punish you less than you deserve. Anyway. The point of this second picture is to help people see the eternal reality that they have a desperately short window of time in which to hear Jesus’s words and respond to him in repentance and faith, and thus influence their eternal future before it is too late. It’s worth remembering how Jesus wants to help change how people interpret their experiences on this earth. Back in Luke chapter six, Jesus taught his disciples to see their lives in an upside down way. He taught them to frame their experiences through God’s eternal lens - and not to judge their circumstances, or one another for that matter, in the ways that come naturally. Listen to episode 20 for more on that if you missed it. And so this illustration (of going with an accuser towards a judge), is meant to help people see their years on this earth not as endless hours to be wasted - but instead as a very limited window of precious time where they have the opportunity to influence their eternal destiny.

So that’s what Jesus had been speaking about on the occasion that these people give him the news of the Galilean tragedy. In a nutshell, Jesus has been challenging the crowds to wake up to reality. The reality that time is short, and that they would be wise to listen seriously to him, and take action before it’s too late.

What action is it, that is so urgent and important? It’s repentance. Jesus makes this clear in his response to the people who tell him about the tragedy. After they give him the news, Jesus says, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”. And Jesus repeats himself, almost word-for-word, with an example from a tower-falling tragedy in Jerusalem. Repetition means it’s really important.

And so why did Jesus give this answer? I think it’s because Jesus reads the hearts of the people telling him about the tragedy. The stories that Jesus was telling on this occasion were geared towards showing people the importance of taking him seriously. Jesus wants people to repent of their sin and follow him. But being urged to repent naturally makes people uncomfortable. It’s because repenting means the humiliation of all my natural pride. To truly repent, means I admit that I am totally wrong in the way I have been living and what I have been living for, and I recognise I need to turn 180 degrees away from living my way, and instead submit to living by what Jesus says. There’s no bigger blow to human pride than true repentance. So when my pride is threatened, what do I naturally do? I become defensive and seek to justify myself. And a classic non-confrontational way of doing this is deflection. I turn the conversation away from my faults, and onto to someone else. This is what I think is happening here.

Jesus reads the hearts of the people who bring up the Galilean tragedy, and he knows what they are really implying. Which is, that people who died in such a horrible way must have been dreadful sinners. They are deflecting attention away from themselves and onto others who they assume must be worse to have had such a dreadful end. Rather than face up to their need of repentance, these people are finding false comfort in the idea that they aren’t as bad as others. Jesus knows that people naturally try to feel good about themselves by way of making horizontal comparisons. This is a deadly trap. Jesus exposes it immediately by refusing to be distracted by the gossip, and instead twice repeats the necessity of personal repentance to avoid death.

And then Luke records a parable Jesus told about a man who waited three years for his fig tree to produce fruit. None came so he asked his gardener to chop it down and free up space in his garden. But the gardener said, look, let me fertilise it and we’ll give it another year. If there’s still no fruit, then let’s cut it down. With this parable Jesus is again trying to help people who are complacently living life their own way. The fig tree is the person who hasn’t repented. Back in episode 17 we heard how John the Baptist explained the fruit that proves true repentance is a changed life towards God and others.

After this we’re told how Jesus was judged by a religious leader for healing a woman on the Sabbath day. Now the Sabbath command was given by God to the Israelites after he’d rescued them from Egypt. It said, “keep the seventh day holy by resting on it from all your work”. God wanted his people to remember that they were his free children, rescued by him from cruel bondage. Back in Egypt when they were oppressed slaves of Pharaoh, they were forced to work seven days a week. Now as God’s dearly loved rescued people, they were not to return to a slavish way of living. Central to the Sabbath command was enabling those under your authority to also rest - your children, your servants, your animals. But what happened over time, was that the religious elite lost sight of the real purpose of God’s command, and instead created a multitude of human rules that focused on defining what did and didn’t count as work. When Jesus heals the woman who was bent over, so that she is finally free to stand tall, the religious leader is indignant. Healing, according to religious tradition, counted as “work” and was forbidden on the Sabbath day. And so the leader points this out to the witnesses of the miracle.

But Jesus answers, ‘You hypocrites! You untie your animal on the sabbath to make sure it gets a drink - this poor woman has been tied up by Satan for 18 years, shouldn’t she be set free on the Sabbath?’ By this response, Jesus exposes the religious tradition as totally inconsistent with God’s true Sabbath command of celebrating freedom and rest. He publicly humiliates the religious leaders, and the watching crowds love it.

Thus Jesus grows in popularity with the people. But his response is to tell two parables of the Kingdom that emphasise it’s hiddenness. He says the Kingdom of God begins like a mustard seed in the ground, or yeast in some dough. It doesn’t look like anything much from the outside. One day it will be very visible, but that time is not yet come. Jesus knows the people are excited about his growing popularity and the evidence of his power and wisdom. He knows they crave a visibly mighty king who will save them from their visible bullies. But the Kingdom of God is not a worldly kingdom built upon force and power. It’s a Kingdom built not by human strength, but by God’s strength working through human weakness.

And so Jesus continues his journey towards Jerusalem. The place he will experience betrayal, rejection, mockery and painful death. Someone asks him along the way, ‘Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?’. And Jesus gives a scary answer. He tells the people listening to ‘strive to enter through the narrow door’ and that many people will come, after the narrow door to heaven has been shut, wanting to enter, expecting they will be able to enter, and then getting told to leave. Outside the door will be a place of incomprehensible suffering. And what is the reason these many people are expecting to be let into heaven? Their confidence rested on the fact they associated with Jesus and heard the things he taught, they say ‘we ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets’. But simply hearing Jesus words and even agreeing with what he says, or even hanging out with him, doesn’t equal repentance from sin. As the door to heaven is shut in their faces these people are condemned as workers of evil. They are like the foolish man in the parable who built his house on the sand by hearing Jesus words, but not actually putting those words into practice.

Entering the narrow door is difficult. Jesus said back in chapter nine, that anyone who desires to come after him, must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow him. Jesus is not paving the way towards a temporary human kingdom defined by power and popularity. He is establishing God’s eternal kingdom, defined by sacrificial love, currently hidden, yet to be revealed in splendour.

The stories from chapter 14 start here:

Now one Sabbath when Jesus went to dine at the house of a leader of the Pharisees, they were watching him closely. There right in front of him was a man whose body was swollen with fluid. So Jesus asked the experts in religious law and the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So Jesus took hold of the man, healed him, and sent him away. Then he said to them, “Which of you, if you have a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” But they could not reply to this.

Then when Jesus noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. He said to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, because a person more distinguished than you may have been invited by your host. So the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ Then, ashamed, you will begin to move to the least important place. But when you are invited, go and take the least important place, so that when your host approaches he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up here to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who share the meal with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you host a dinner or a banquet, don’t invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors so you can be invited by them in return and get repaid. But when you host an elaborate meal, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

When one of those at the meal with Jesus heard this, he said to him, “Blessed is everyone who will feast in the kingdom of God!” But Jesus said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time for the banquet he sent his slave to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, because everything is now ready.’ But one after another they all began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going out to examine them. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I just got married, and I cannot come.’ So the slave came back and reported this to his master. Then the master of the household was furious and said to his slave, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ Then the slave said, ‘Sir, what you instructed has been done, and there is still room.’ So the master said to his slave, ‘Go out to the highways and country roads and urge people to come in, so that my house will be filled. For I tell you, not one of those individuals who were invited will taste my banquet!’”

Now large crowds were accompanying Jesus, and turning to them he said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t sit down first and compute the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish the tower, all who see it will begin to make fun of him. They will say, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish!’ Or what king, going out to confront another king in battle, will not sit down first and determine whether he is able with 10,000 to oppose the one coming against him with 20,000? If he cannot succeed, he will send a representative while the other is still a long way off and ask for terms of peace. In the same way therefore not one of you can be my disciple if he does not renounce all his own possessions.

“Salt is good, but if salt loses its flavour, how can its flavour be restored? It is of no value for the soil or for the manure pile; it is to be thrown out. The one who has ears to hear had better listen!”

The Story ends here

Thanks for joining us for today’s story.  You might like to take a moment to pause and think about what you noticed. Things you liked, things you didn’t like, something the story showed you about Jesus. To read it for yourself it’s in the book of Luke chapter 14. If you can find someone willing to read it and talk about it with you, even better! You’ve been listening to stories from the Bible - I’m Jen and I look forward to sharing more stories with you.