When Jesus Comes to Dinner

This Sunday you’re going to hear Jesus give some very specific dinner party instructions (Luke 14).  Yeah, you read that right: dinner party instructions.  “But I thought Jesus only talked about heaven and praying and stuff like that.”  Uh, well, apparently he cares about dinner parties, too.

At a party given by a group of religious leaders, Jesus notices the scramble for the places of honor at the table.  In response he says, “When you're invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place … If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face” (The Message).

And then he says, “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.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind (aka: the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks).”  In essence, Jesus is telling us that our guest lists are all wrong if we aren’t inviting into our homes the very last people that we would ever consider as nice dinner companions.

Huh…why would Jesus care who comes to dinner?

Well when you read the whole of the Bible, you see how it all comes down to two things: the relationship we have with God, and the relationship we have with each other and creation.  And you can't separate the two.  You can't claim much of a relationship with God if you're relationship with the people around you stinks.  And the reverse is true, too.  Because of our relationship with God, and God’s gift of a dignity and worth we could never secure for ourselves, we are free to do the same for others.  We are free to put them before ourselves, to lead them to seats of honor, to invite them to be our dinner guests, not because of what they can do for us, but because of what has already been done for all of us.

Our society might have one, but the Kingdom of God doesn’t have a pecking order.  Jesus thinks our social ordering, our societal pecking orders, are ridiculous.  They’re more than comical; they’re broken. God doesn’t “prefer” the people who donate a lot of money, or have their names on buildings, any more than God “prefers” those who serve on the board of local charities, or sing in the choir, or teach Sunday School, or whatever nice, good, polite thing you can think of.  God gives himself freely to us out of love.  God “prefers” all of us.  And in response, God hopes that we will give ourselves freely back, and in the process, offer our lives in service to one another.

So the next time you find yourself governed by a set of social rules given to you by a broken world, try to remember God’s preferences, God’s ways, God’s upside-down, inside-out reality.  And see if it doesn’t cause you to do something different.