Jesus is invited to dinner by a Pharisee, and takes the opportunity to offer some advice to those gathered around. First, he offers some advice on how to be a good guest. Dinner was often an event in Jesus day, and guests would gather, reclining around a cushion in groups of 3 or so. The closer to the center of the room you were, the more important you were. Don’t risk disgrace, Jesus advises, begin by reclining at some far away place, and let your host elevate you to a better position. Don’t start in the center, only to be moved further out. The advise wasn’t unique to Jesus, it was pretty common advice for his day. The kind of thing you’d see in a column from Miss Manners or an answer from Dear Abby on how best to handle a dinner engagement.
Jesus seems in a grand mood, so he offers a little more advice, this time to the host. When you host a party, he says, don’t just invite those who are likely to return the favor. Don’t invite someone who’s dinner party you are angling to get invited to. Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. That was not “Dear Abby” kind of advice. That was the kind of advice that got Jesus into trouble, annoyed his hosts, and made his followers uncomfortable.
The poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind are probably getting tired of getting grouped together and referred to unfavorably these days, so just a word about that. These were commonly the groups of people who were denied access to the temple. The poor often couldn’t afford the proper sacrifices, and anyone with an obvious physical handicap was excluded from temple life, in part because their lack of “healing” might offend God and also because their physical ailment was assumed to be the result of some kind of sin. So when we translate this passage to today’s terms, substitute in anyone whom we are likely to exclude from our “regular” social life.
Why is Jesus offering this dining advice? Surely, there are better things to quote parables about.
Jesus often told parables about the common things of life, things experienced by a large number of people. He used imagery and metaphors that would be well-known to the common person. His dinner-hosting advice is actually in this same vein. Dining was not such a private thing in Jesus’ day. Eating together was very common, and a “dinner party” might be hosted by anyone and might be hosted any number of nights a week. His advice actually does hit people on a very common level; everyone’s been to dinner at someone else’s home, and everyone’s invited others to dinner. His remarks regarding being a good guest and being a good host would have struck his listeners as very apropos, even if they made them uncomfortable.
His parable has two points. One is about hospitality. Through the parable, he chastises the use of a meal as a way to elevate oneself socially. In his mind, the meal is a time to come together, and a time to include everyone. It’s not a time to make sure that the right people are on your guest list, nor is it a time to leverage an invitation by offering an invitation. Jesus wants to make sure that people have care and compassion for the members of their community uppermost in their mind.
When my mom was in elementary school, she said that her teacher made an announcement to the class. The teacher had noticed that there was one child who had been by herself during recess a lot. It seemed that she didn’t have very many friends, and the teacher was hoping some children in the class would befriend her. She asked them to raise their hands if they would be willing to befriend this lonely child. My mom’s hand shot into the air. She didn’t have many friends either, and she was delighted at the opportunity to make a new friend. The way the story goes, my mom was the only one who raised her hand. And the teacher was in the very uncomfortable position of having to explain to my mom, privately, that she was the child she had been describing. Dinner parties have taken on a whole different place in our lives, but we still engage in many communal activities. Look around you next time; who is left out? Who could you greet, befriend, care for?
The other point Jesus is making in this parable is a point about humility. He may have offered common advise for dinner attenders about taking the seat less prominent, but in light of how the story continues, his point is deeper than that. In many ways, he is asking us to take some emotional and ego stock. Do I consider myself the center of society? Do I do things, attend event, in the hopes of being elevated?
I got invited to a wedding once, I was invited as the guest of someone else, and when we got to the reception, the seats were assigned. The reception tables banked two edges of a large room where there would be dancing later, with the wedding couple and wedding party on the third side and the parents seated on the fourth. Where the two sides of tables came together, one more table had been added, at a diagonal, and almost cut off from the dance floor and from any view by the angle of the other tables. That’s where we were seated. Along with the interracial couple who the bride had insisted on inviting, but whose wedding the father of the bride had refused to attend, and a few other “social outcasts.” As soon as we sat down, looked around at each other and at the seating arrangement, we all burst out laughing. Considering I hardly knew anyone, I had the best time. We felt free from any social constraints, and we laughed, talked, and danced all evening.
Is there some other lens for us to use when looking at the community we are part of? With humor and a good story as a higher value, we all had a good time, and it reminds me that that lens served me a lot better than the lens of social status. What if we changed our lenses around? How would we relate to others? View our gifts? See ourselves in relationship to our communities and God?
In a few minutes, we will be having a symbolic dinner party. The Last Supper was just one of those events, and we commemorate it with communion. In the United Methodist church, we believe that everyone is invited to the table. We understand communion as a sacrament, and as a way in which God’s grace in imparted to others, but we don’t put prerequisites on receiving that grace. Who am I to get in the way of something that might impart God’s grace? And so we invite everyone. And in doing so, we try to model for ourselves the way we should behave in all the other aspects of our lives. Reminding ourselves that we are always on the guest list for God’s dinner party, and we always get the seats of honor. As we have been loved compassionately, then, let us go out to treat the world the same way. Amen.