Dinner Party Disaster (and Delight)
St. Luke 14:1-14
October 13, 2019 anno Domini – Redeemer
There’s nothing worse than having a sick person at the table. Whether you’re at a fancy restaurant and the guy behind you is sniffling and sneezing or you’re at the Thanksgiving Feast and Uncle Bob is coughing all over the turkey and sweet potatoes. You don’t want a sick person at a feast. You’re there to forget your problems and enjoy yourself. You don’t want to think about sickness or worry that you might catch something, unless you’re Jesus.
The Pharisees feast isn’t going as planned. One of their own, we’ll call him Bruce, showed up for the meal and he had dropsy. We call it edema today, fluid retention. Fluids collect in the body making a person’s face or legs or hands puffy and swollen. Back in New Testament times people suspected that you got dropsy from having sex outside of marriage. So there’s Bruce, the sick guy, the sinful guy, and nobody looks at him. Who wants to be reminded of sin and sickness and death while you’re enjoying the Coyote Moon Sunday buffet?
Then the dynamics of this dinner party take a disastrous detour. Jesus has been invited, to be impressed, to be watched. It is a high honor to be invited to dinner with the Clergy and the Lawyers – Think Gray, Plant and Moody meets with Rev. Dr. Harrison and the Missouri Synod’s Council of Presidents. Who are the last two people you want to sit together at your party? You’re wishing Bruce hadn’t even come and hopes he takes a seat by the door. You’re watching Jesus because you’re sure He’ll take the head spot. (After all He’s been acting off like He’s God or something.)
Then it happens. Jesus starts chatting it up with Bruce. Listening, caring, most likely touching. Jesus often healed with a touch – lepers, the blind, the deaf, the mute, even the dead. By touching a sick sinner Jesus would have made Himself unclean in the Pharisees’ Then without even using hand sanitizer He went back to His food. Disgusting.
“Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Jesus asked them. They didn’t answer a word. They had so twisted God’s Law that they had outlawed even good works on the Sabbath, works of mercy and kindness. They didn’t answer because they knew he was talking about Bruce and he was the last person in the room who deserved anything. That was obvious just looking at him. Then Jesus goes on, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” They all had bent that rule for their own – they’d help their son if he was hurt. One of them had even rescued a cat from a tree, but Bruce, not Bruce. They didn’t answer because to answer was to convict themselves and show compassion to a sick sinner.
Then Jesus took hold of Bruce and healed him. The puffiness left his face. His hands didn’t look like balloons anymore and when he got up he walked like a young man and left the house ready to break into a run.
The dinner party is disastrous. The hosts are humiliated. An unwelcome guest is now the most popular guy at the party. Jesus whom they hoped to bring down is exalted. Pardon the pun but that sets the table for Jesus’ parable.
When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.”
Saint Luke tells us that these words of Jesus are a parable. It’s grounded in an earthly story but reveals a hidden gem from the kingdom of heaven. If you’ve ever thrown a fancy party you understand seating charts. Important people up front. No so important in the back. And keep Bruce where he won’t do damage. But that’s not how it is in the Kingdom of heaven. Your place before God is not based upon you.
That’s what we learn in Pharisee Bruce. His dropsy was evident to all who saw him. He walked with difficulty. He couldn’t eat very well because his hands were swollen. And along with his dropsy everyone considered Bruce the lowest of the low – a sexually promiscuous Pharisee, an adulterous pastor, a pedophile priest. It may or may not have been true, but that was the gossip. Now imagine the shame that Bruce took upon himself every time he went out. Sure he had been invited to the Pharisee’s dinner party but no one wanted him there. They would be relieved if he didn’t show up. No one talked to him, sat by him, or even made eye contact. But he went – humiliated and humbled, taking the last seat because he knew he wasn’t wanted there, perhaps this time he only showed up because he heard Jesus was there.
That’s the Kingdom of heaven, that’s the Kingdom of Jesus. It begins in the humiliation not of presumed guilt, but of actual guilt. You’ve been invited and called by the Holy Spirit to faith, but you don’t deserve anything. Yet you receive everything solely because Jesus comes down to your place.
That’s how that disastrous dinner party turned delightful. Jesus takes the last and lowest place. He takes a seat next to the man no one wants to be near. At the cross He becomes dropsy Bruce, adulterous Arthur, and belligerent Bonnie, and whoever you are. The least, lowest, most shameful place you’ve ever been in your sin that’s where Jesus hangs out at the cross. Jesus even goes to the place where we never want to be caught – He goes to death and the grave, for you, to save you. He takes last place – the place of the sinner under God’s wrath.
God raised Jesus and seated Jesus in the highest place, but even now as He sits ascended in heaven at the right hand of God He stoops down to serve you. Jesus is under the waters of baptism, in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, with His Word spoken and preached to lift you up, to lift you out of sin and death, to take you from last place – a sinner to the highest honor – to be called a son of God, a child of your heavenly Father.
What does this mean for us? Jesus tells us – “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” (Luke 14:12–13, ESV)
You are in the Kingdom. Jesus feasts with you today and He has not looked upon you as you deserved. He has looked upon you with favor, taking you from the lowest place there is: sin and death, to the highest place, seated with Him, a forgiven and living child of God. So when you regard your neighbor or your enemy or your child or your co-worker or your parents – regard them remembering that you were once last and now you have been made first. If they are among the last and least in your view forgive them, love them, show mercy and compassion to them and invite them over to your table that together you might rejoice in the delightful feast of forgiveness that God serves in the name of Jesus. Amen.