Jesus is a terrible guest at your dinner party. While you’re worrying about who’s going to show up, he’s inviting everyone in.
Jesus and the art of the dinner party
Proper 17C | Luke 14:1,7-14
When I was young, I loved sleepovers. This was the real political currency of junior high school. Whose house you went to, how late you stayed up. Maybe what movie their parents let you watch.
Before we were old enough to care about dinner parties, our parties involved Swiss rolls and barbecue chips.
But before the party, there was always the consideration of the guest list. Who is coming? That can determine whether or not I am coming.
This small detail—the guest list—starts really early in life. It seems innocent enough. Natural even. And Jesus is asking us to reconsider this thing we take for granted.
Now, this shouldn’t surprise us. He just told us that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. But surely some social sorting is OK, right? Right?
This story isn’t just about sorting, though. It isn’t about opinion or personality. It cuts down to something much deeper.
This is a story with three parts and we’ve only heard the middle of it! We need the rest of it!
Part 1: The Invitation
One of the most powerful men in the region invites Jesus to a dinner party. We’re not sure what his motivation may actually be, but the author gives us a clue of Jesus’s.
In the Greek, it says that he went to eat bread. So this isn’t a pre-teen sleepover or a dinner party consisting only of bread. He’s going to break bread, commune with them. For Jesus, this is about coming together with those who oppose him.
As for the Pharisees, well…not so much. It says “they were watching him closely.” And remember, Jesus warned us in chapter 12 not to trust them.
While Jesus makes his way to the estate, he finds that 1) there’s a man in need of healing and 2) it is the sabbath. But this is no coincidence. It is a trap.
Jesus, however, doesn’t skip a beat. He asks them if it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. And they say nothing. Of course, if they were truly interested in protecting the laws they care so much about, how can they keep silent?
[Because it’s a trap.]
So Jesus heals the man and makes virtually the same case he made last week. Who wouldn’t save a life on the Sabbath? And then keeps moving.
Part 2: The Dinner
Now we get to the dinner. And all the people are claiming the best seats. Which means if this dinner were a church service on Sunday morning, everyone’s grabbing the back rows.
It’s natural. Like where people stand in the elevator or sitting in your favorite pew. People go to these places intentionally and willfully. Because we are comfortable and this is an unspoken negotiation. But the dinner party at the house of the most powerful man in town isn’t ruled by comfort. It’s about power. And how close everyone there can be to it.
These hierarchical power structures aren’t neutral.
So when Jesus opens his big mouth to point this out, he’s just being helpful, right? He’s trying to make sure they don’t feel the shame of being moved in favor of someone more important!
Oh, but that’s not what they’re thinking, is it? We know they’re already plotting his demise so it is safe to say they’re probably taking this badly.
And same with the host. He’s super powerful and he’s collecting powerful people. This isn’t really about being social, is it? This is 100% about power.
So Jesus’s suggestion that the host invites people who can’t help him keep power sounds completely bonkers to him. That’s the point of this party! Hobnobbing is the point!
Part 3: The Parable
This has got to be the most uncomfortable dinner party since the last one Jesus went to!
So somebody nervously blurts out
“Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”
Which is the kind of platitude everyone could latch onto like a liferaft. But that just gets Jesus going even more!
So he tells a parable about a rich man hosting a dinner party. Which is crazy because they are at a dinner party! What are the chances?
But in the story, nobody wants to come to the party! In fact, it seems like they are colluding to avoid the party. Why is that? Perhaps because they are afraid of who this man is actually willing to invite.
So nobody shows. But he’s having a party regardless. So he sends his slave out to find guests saying
“Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”
The host does precisely what his first invited guests are trying to avoid. Because they come to the table to hobnob with the powerful. To sit at the Lord’s right hand. Not to sit next to regular people.
They want their party to be for special people, not all of humanity.
The Kin-dom
So Jesus is saying that idea isn’t the kin-dom of God. The kin-dom was found in his healing the man just outside and that woman in the synagogue last week. It grows like a mustard seed and its door is open to all these people the rich and powerful call cursed.
That’s why this isn’t really a story about party etiquette.
Jesus came to break bread with the most powerful men in society. He went into that cigar-smoke-filled chamber in a mansion on a hill with a message about God. A message about their gatekeeping and how they’re keeping out some of the people God has invited.
And more than that.
He’s warning them that their behavior isn’t keeping “the wrong people” out of heaven. It’s keeping them out. Which means the only people on the other side of that wall have refused to come to the real party.
The Guest List
This story has me thinking about what I was taught about congregational leadership in seminary. And all of the leadership books we read, like those business books by Ziglar and Maxwell describe intentional behavior. We’re encouraged to manicure the guest list and raise up saints and pick out the best and tend to the needs of the powerful and never say the wrong thing in public.
The subtle message of everything we teach in congregational leadership is to never be controversial, never offend, and suck up to the most powerful people we can find.
This is precisely the kind of thinking Jesus condemns. So part of me has no idea what to say here. Precisely because the path to effective leadership runs directly counter to Jesus.
And yet thousands of people are following him around. So his message is connecting with thousands of times more people than the handful he’s offending.
That’s why Jesus is so revolutionary because he’s trying to rewire our foundational circuitry or recode our operating system.
Not because we’re wrong. But because we’re too bloated with malicious code.
Our dinner parties aren’t supposed to only make us feel good. They’re to make a lot of people feel good at the same time. We celebrate good things and invite people who don’t get invited to parties.
Dig down deeper with me. Just one more level.
Dinner Parties are for Celebration
We’ve all played the game where we ask each other which three people alive or dead we would most want to eat dinner with. And people are always like Gandhi, Einstein, and Jesus. And stories like this make me go No no no no no. You don’t want that.
But remember Jesus came to break bread with people who assume the whole point of a party is to gain or demonstrate power over other people. He goes to them and shows them the source of their sin.
You’re putting your heart and treasure in the wrong place.
Jesus challenges us to change our hearts by changing our guest list. If we expand that guest list, we transform the dinner party.
So if we take that phrase: the right people or right kind of people and cross out the bad words, what happens? We get the right people. Just people.
And before our very eyes, the purpose of the party changes, too. We’re no longer jockeying for power and influence, pushing to get to the better seats. We see the purpose is to eat. To break bread and make sure all are fed.
So ultimately we get a different party. The party Jesus keeps trying to tell us is a kin-dom party.
This is an invitation to stop obsessing over the guest list and instead figure out the playlist. Where are we going to hang the mirrorball? Don’t worry so much about what food we’re going to serve or how big the portions are supposed to be, just bring it in because we’re going to eat it.
The point isn’t the rules or the power or the expectations. The point is to celebrate together. Because the kin-dom is here.