Introduction: Will Willimon tells the story when, as a little boy, the preacher was invited over to share Sunday dinner. Will and his cousin Charles were firmly instructed to show their best manners, and to take only the smallest pieces of fried chicken. Well, the blessing was said and the platters were passed. When the chicken came to Charles, he ignored all prior instruction and took the largest piece of breast meat for himself. “Now Charles,” Will’s grandmother said politely but firmly, “you take a wing – all the pieces of chicken are good.” “Yes, m’am,” he replied, “I know they’re all good. I’m just giving the preacher a chance to like them all.”

 

I realize that after worship today we’ll be sharing a meal together. And while I don’t want to make you nervous or self-conscious, the fact of the matter is that you can learn a lot about a person by their behavior at a dinner table. I know corporate recruiters who always make sure that an interview includes a meal because at the table you have a unique chance to especially how a person relates to others.

 

Before we share a meal together, we want to see what happens when Jesus sits at a table with some prominent religious figures of his day. Meal time was important time in the ancient world and Jesus did some of his best teaching around a table. What we’ll find at this particular dinner party is an unhealthy focus on place cards and guest lists. As we continue to look for the signs of real life, kingdom life, to which Jesus points, we’ll see him point out that such life is not found through image management or self-promotion, but by feeding on the delight that Jesus takes in us.

 

I. An Appealing Appetizer?

            A. The text begins with what we might call an “appetizer.” As was customary, a visiting synagogue speaker, which would have been Jesus, had been invited to a home for a post worship meal. It wasn’t just any home; Luke tells us that Jesus was to be the guest of one of the prominent leaders of the religious establishment in this town. Luke also tells us that this man, and probably most of his guests, had their eye on Jesus. He was being “carefully watched,” a term which carries with it an air of suspicion.

 

B. Perhaps, it has been suggested, this was even a set-up. As we saw last week, when Jesus healed a crippled woman on the Sabbath in a synagogue (13:10-17), Jesus was challenging the accepted, traditional ways of doing things. Most healing, like the kind Jesus was doing, had been banned on the Sabbath because the religious folk (not God) had put it in a class of work that was forbidden on the day that had been set aside for rest and worship. At that time, as we said, the synagogue ruler responded with indignance, and as a result, he missed the life – the presence of the kingdom of God – that had come right into his sanctuary.

 

            C. If these leaders were trying to trap Jesus into violating the commandments, they failed, miserably. Either on the way to this Sabbath meal, or at the meal itself, Jesus is met by a man with dropsy (edema: excess water in the joints), and he heals him. His logic for doing so is similar to what we heard last week: if you can rescue a child or an ox that has become trapped in a well, why can’t you free someone who has become trapped by a debilitating illness? The leaders are reduced to silence. This kind of appetizer did not appeal to them. They still can’t see where and how it is that Jesus has come to bring them life.     

 

II. Two Dangerous Courses

            A. At least part of the reason is that they are highly self-focused individuals, each looking out for their own selfish interests, none really willing to consider the interests of others. Had you asked them, they would probably all have denied it. But the proof of what was deep in their hearts could be seen by Jesus as he observed their table manners. So, maybe somewhere between the first and second course, Jesus spun a parable to highlight their self-absorption. It included two dangers courses that we want to avoid, courses that will lead us away from experiencing real life.

 

B. The first dangerous course is recognized by Jesus as he watched how the guests picked their places to sit. Helpful for us to understand is that in antiquity, where you sat at a meal was huge. It was huge because it revealed your social status. Your place at the table was a public advertisement of where you stood in the social hierarchy. People knew that the closer you got to the host, the more favorably others would view you, and so they worked hard to get there, jockeying for position.

 

Illustration: We have some sense of that. At our own wedding banquets, for instance, typically you enter the banquet hall and look for your name on a place card. Next to your name is a table number. The lower the number, the closer you are to the head table. Usually that indicates that your relationship to the bride or groom is much more intimate than those slobs who are seated in the back of the hall. You get served first, you get a better view of things, and for a few hours, anyway, you enjoy a sense of feeling just a bit superior, don’t you?  

 

C. How is it that we measure value in life? Maybe we remember what it was like to be picked last for the team, or to have finished last in a race. Maybe we remember what it was like to have flunked an exam. Maybe we remember what it was like to compete with others for a special someone’s attention but never receive it. Maybe we remember what it was like to be one of several hundred applicants for a job we never got. Conversely, maybe we were highly successful on our team, or in our class, or at our workplace, and we know the pressure of trying to hold on to that position. The danger is that either way, we become trapped in a value system that says our worth in life is determined by where we land on some particular scale and how we thus become viewed by others. Such a value system, Jesus’ parable suggests, always carries a high price. Image management is exhausting. It can cause us to live with the anxiety that our inadequacies will be found out, that someone else will come to take our place, and, like the host in our parable, our coach or our teacher or our boss will bump us back to the last seat at the last table, or maybe even out of the room altogether. We’ll be worth nothing.

 

That’s a horrible way to live! Real life is not found by jockeying for position, elbowing others out of the way, and managing our image, whatever that might look like in your experience.

 

            D. A second dangerous course to avoid is found as Jesus expands the parable to address not only guests, but the host. Really, he is still addressing everyone in the room because everyone who is a guest will eventually become a host, will eventually have to put together a guest list. And in putting together such a guest list, an ethic of reciprocity ruled. It was understood that gifts were always given with strings attached. This expectation extended to the table. To accept an invitation to a meal was to obligate oneself to extend a comparable invitation. As a host, therefore, you would invite only those who could pay you back and you might especially invite those who were higher on the social scale, anticipating that their return invitation would lift you a rung or two higher on the social ladder.

 

Illustration: I was speaking with a pastor last week who serves in Manchester, N.H. In Manchester, he says, you cannot find a place to eat out on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night. That’s because rarely, in the Manchester culture, to people have one another over for dinner. That’s because to have someone over makes you obligated to return the favor. Further, if someone served you hamburgers, you would have to serve steak, and then the next meal would have to be lobster, and so on. So, people in Manchester go out to dinner, and they go “Dutch.”

 

            E. Despite the good efforts of the people of Manchester, this second danger observed by Jesus reveals a real and dangerous part of the human condition. That is, we pretty much live our lives with a tit-for-tat accounting system. We wonder who we “owe” as we put our own guest lists together. We reach out to those with similar interests. We want to get to know the “right” people. We want to cultivate relationships with those who we think will do us some good. The danger with this kind of social bookkeeping is that we only give when we know we can get. Our life becomes all about us, and our ability to promote or better ourselves by using others.

 

It also, dangerously, leaks over into our relationship with God. We end up doing what we perceive as religious acts as a way of trying to cultivate a God whom we hope will return the favor by doing us some good. We can begin to think that God owes us. If we keep the rules and do good things, God will do good things for us, or at least he will keep disaster from darkening our door. But, if something tragic happens, from illness to loss of job to financial reversal to a marriage breakup, we are led to believe that God somehow failed us and isn’t paying us back as we feel we deserve.   

 

III. The Ultimate Guest and Host

            A. So, in the midst of all of this stumbling around that we do as human beings over place cards and guest lists, over how we can manage our image, and promote ourselves, where is the good news, where is the gospel? The good news for those of us who are honest with ourselves and who are seeking to shore up our identity in the wrong places and by the wrong means is that there is One who has come to the dinner party of life and willingly taken the last seat at the last table. This is Jesus, who, Paul writes to the Philippians, did not hold on to trying to sit in the place of honor with the Father, did not seek to promote himself or look out for his own interests, but who willingly humbled himself, becoming obedient, even to death on a cross. Because he did this for us, we do not have to fight and scratch to grab honor for ourselves. We don’t ever have to feel like we’ve been abandoned or forsaken, sitting alone in last place. Rather, this Jesus sits beside us, wherever we are; our worth and well-being come from his delight in us, not from the way we are trying to delight others. He is the ultimate guest. He is also the ultimate host, because as he sits beside us, he says, “Friend, come up here with me. Leave all your striving and your elaborate bookkeeping system and be seated at my table, forever. Not because you’ve earned it but because I’m simply giving it to you in my love.”

 

            B. And what does receiving this invitation free us to do? It frees us to have the same attitude, to let go of image management and self-promotion. It frees us from having to derive our worth from achieving the blue ribbon or the perfect score, the hot date or the trophy spouse, the better job or a bigger house. It frees us so that we can think of ourselves less and of others more. It frees us to minister to the poor and the crippled and the lame and the blind, not because we will get anything from them in return, but because in Jesus, we already have all that we need.

 

If we give our life to the One who has given his life to us, if we feast and fill ourselves at his table, what we will find is that then, we will really begin to live.