Sharing – Luke 14

A text – Luke 14:1, 7-14

14 On one occasion when Jesuswas going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely.

⁷ When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸ “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, ⁹ and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹ For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

¹² He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

A reflection:

Jesus ate not only with tax collectors and sinners but also with Pharisees, once in a while. This story follows a couple of incidents when the Pharisees who were actually drawn to Jesus’s ministry had warned him about Herod’s plot to kill him. So at this dinner, Jesus may have been in the company of both opponents and friends. Jesus was a celebrity by now, drawing big crowds and having healed maany people. Some Pharisees were watching him closely because they wondered eagerly if he would heal someone, and others because they wanted to catch him defiantly healing on the Sabbath again.

Jesus was watching these rich and powerful men, too. He wished they could embody the desires of God, who always takes the side of the outcast and downtrodden, who does not need or expect to be repaid. So he told them so. He told them never to take the highest place. He told them not to invite people who would repay them by inviting them back but instead invite outcasts and the lowly poor.

Jesus’s themes, in this chapter and the following ones, are to lift up the lowly and show how God loves them, and to startle those in power and plenty who do not use their privilege as a blessing to others. He does it over and over until he finally arrives on a humble donkey at the gates of Jerusalem, amid a cheering crowd.

What lesson might we learn from this incident at the Pharisees’ dinner party? Jesus was telling them that God blesses each of us with ways to serve others. What is your blessing? How do you share it to uplift the ignored whom God loves? Jesus was telling them that God gives us what we need. For those of us with a surplus, how do we invest it in the future of children of God who have less than we do? People who will never repay it? Who are all around us?

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us more than we need. Help us to give of ourselves to others who need what we have – make us into sharers. Amen.