But there’s nothing to beat a personal
invitation. It’s one thing to get a
pretty letter in the mail, but it’s another to get that letter hand-delivered
by a living, breathing human being.
And back then, an invitation from a rich
land owner would be like getting the Order of Canada, a once in a lifetime
event. The hospitality code of the day
would be very clear; this showed the person that they had been noticed and seen
as worthy of respect.
People with Jesus at this dinner party
would know that the invited guests would have dropped everything in their
eagerness to attend. Dinner invitations
were serious business. They had to be
reciprocated, they had to pander to the rich man in return.
It was a complex back and forth,
calculating and measuring who had been honored by whom, who owed who a dinner
and favors, and back and forth. So the
shock of this story would have had everyone listening to Jesus scratching their
heads in surprise.
First, he’s telling about a dinner while
being at a dinner. He was invited by the
top Pharisee to a special supper, which showed that the Pharisee was interested
in hearing him, and showing Jesus he could gain some status. But Jesus turned around and gave him a
lecture on how to run a dinner, how to invite guests. That’s some nerve! It would be like being invited to the Mayor’s
breakfast and then telling the Mayor that he had done it all wrong. And Jesus had, in the part of this chapter we
didn’t read, lectured the guests to not assume they deserved a seat close to
the host, but to take a lower seat until the host told them otherwise. Because even the seating arrangement showed a
pecking order.
The twist in this parable is that first
there’s the shocking rejection of the invitation. That it happened once might be
understandable, but when none of the guests rsvp, that would have been seen as
a dreadful insult. If someone offers you
the Order of Canada or the Nobel Peace Prize, there must be a pretty strong
reason to turn it down. It would have
been a real slap in the face, a dishonor to the host that said much about how
the people saw him. Here’s a man that we
disrespect so much that we refuse his invitation. We don’t care if we lose status by attending,
we’d rather lose than come for a free meal.
So Jesus describes the landowner inviting
the riff-raff instead, the people without status, the people without wealth,
the people who will not kiss his ring, the people who cannot invite him back,
the people who are sick and desperate and lonely and poor. They come.
The servant brings them until the banquet hall is full and everyone is
fed. The other people, the high status
people who are wealthy enough to be able to marry or buy work animals or land,
they are left out in the cold.
Don’t invite people like ourselves, Jesus
taught. Invite everyone who is hungry
for something that maybe they don’t even know they are hungry. We have a very hungry world right now. People are hungry for their fair share,
people are hungry to get ahead, people are hungry for more. Some of the rhetoric we are hearing around
the referendum is around entitlement, like how there are a lot of people
talking about how much immigrants are taking from regular Albertans. Or how there’s a blanket assumption that
people on AISH are defrauding the system.
The actual statistics are very different than what people fear. The number of fraud cases is small, the
amount of money spent on immigrant healthcare is small too. Yet people are
hungry for someone to blame for how they feel they are not getting ahead as
fast as they should.
But they are also hungry for hope. And hope has been in short supply these past
few years. They are hungry for equality,
justice and kindness. Those things are
worthy of hungering for. But there are
better ways than working for justice for only me and my household, but to work
for justice for everyone. This is what
the United Church, the Anglican and Catholic bishops are asking us all to think
about what is the common good not just for myself but also for my
neighbor. The Common Good is making
decisions that show kindness and empathy for people whose stories we haven’t
heard yet. That is what Jesus was inviting the Pharisees and dinner guests to
consider. Not who had the highest
status, but need to be fed with enough. The Common Good is here we practice gratitude
and generosity and love. Where we
remember to practice gratitude for our needs being filled. Where we include everyone, even the sick and
the lame and the poor. Where we invite
everyone, regardless of their status, to be fed with God’s abundant grace. May we keep inviting, inviting and inviting
our neighbors to feast and know that God is good. Amen.
