Hello and welcome to the fourth session of Bishop Joe's course 'Six invitations to Dinner with Jesus'. Press play above to watch and listen and/or you can read the script below...

Hello, I’m Bishop Joe and welcome to the fourth in this series of six invitations to dinner with Jesus, taken from St Luke’s Gospel.

Today’s we’re reading from Chapter 14, and verse 15.

One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to [Jesus], “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” Then Jesus said to him, “Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’ ”

So then, if we want to hear what Jesus is saying here, we need to start to read not at verse 15, but back at verse 1. Here’s what verse 1 says:

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

Right there are the clues we need.

Jesus is feasting at the house of a man who belongs to both the social and religious elite in his society. The man invites along his rich friends – it’s an elite gathering. What is Jesus doing there, he is not rich. But he’s been invited too. Why is that? Perhaps because he is drawing crowds, and they were curious to meet him. But it’s also there on the page, it’s because they want to catch him out. They are watching him closely, we’re told. Looking for ways to critique him, or even condemn him.

Jesus know this. He knows that his host and his fellow guests have a huge entitlement complex. When Jesus cures a man at the dinner, he knows that they will feel it is their place to police his actions, and tell him off. When he looks round the table, he sees his fellow guests jockeying for position, seeking the places of honour. He had placed himself at the bottom on the table, and was doubtlessly left there by his host.

Then, as we take up the story (verse 15) one of the guests says to Jesus, “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread [there words are blessed is anyone who will come to the feast] in the kingdom of God!” What Jesus sees here a more advanced sort of entitlement complex – here is a person who feels that he and his fellow guests will certainly have places at the feast in heaven, seeing how important they are here on earth.  

Jesus loves his guests, so in response, he tells them this story.

“Someone gave a great dinner and invited many people. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’”

Now this is exactly what has just happened. The rich person who was hosting the meal Jesus was actually attending had, just a few days earlier, sent formal written invitations to Jesus and to the other guests. At this point, the rule was that you either accepted or sent your apologies – and they had all accepted. That’s how come they’re there. Then, when the feast was ready, the host had his messenger sent out to each guest who had accepted, telling them that everything was ready and they should come now. So here they all are. 

We know that this is what had just happened, because this was how members of the social elite in Jesus’ day invited people for meals. That was the routine. So everything so far in Jesus’ story is perfectly conventional, for posh dinners in the society Jesus lived in. As they listen to Jesus, they think he is telling a story about them.

But now Jesus’ story takes an unexpected turn. Jesus says this: when the messenger arrives to tell the guests who had accepted that they should come now, because the feast is about to start, when the messenger arrives - every one of them begins to make excuses. The first says, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my apologies.’ Another says, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out, I can’t come sorry; please accept my regrets.’ Another says, ‘I have just been married, and I cannot come, I’m really sorry.’

Now the important thing is to see that this is absolutely scandalous behaviour. For even one of the guests to duck out at the last moment, having previously accepted the formal invitation, was just completely socially unacceptable behaviour. A sign that you had no manners at all. But in Jesus’ story, all the guests do this, every one of them!

If all of them are ducking out at the last minute, then what’s happening? What’s happening is a plot, a conspiracy, a calculated, public humiliation of the host, who is left with a full table and a room full of empty chairs.

And what’s more, the excuses they offer… bought land, bought oxen, got married…. well, in Jesus’ society, they excused you – or just about excused you – from going to war. The implied comparison of your dinner party with a warzone is hardly flattering, is it? It’s all somewhere in the same ball-park as ‘I’d rather be dead than seen at your party’.

So this is what Jesus’ story is all about: its telling a story about a bunch of elite people, a group of friends, who got together and colluded to publicly insult the host of a party in a totally outrageous fashion. And then Jesus says that the host is, understandably, upset. He sends his messenger first into the town to invite to his party people who have very few means – people with jobs that don’t pay very well and those whose disabilities prevented them from earning a living. And then he sends his messenger into the countryside – the lanes and hedgerows – to compel (in inverted commas) anyone he meets to come to the party. “No, no, I insist, do come!”

Now, here’s the thing. The people round the table, listening to Jesus’ story, would never have insulted one another like this. They had too much respect for one another to act this way. And if, inconceivably, any of them had ever actually been insulted in this way, they would never have responded in the way that Jesus describes. To offer last minute invitations to people further down the social scale would have been to publicise even further the fact that you had been insulted and stood up.

So by now everyone listening to Jesus’ story realises that this story is not about them, after all. They started out thinking that it was a story about one of their parties. But it’s not about one of their parties. But it’s not about one of their parties, so whose party is Jesus talking about?

He’s talking about his own party. After all, these rich, entitled people might just have thought it funny to insult Jesus in the way he described, if he had invited them to a party. What with him not being as far up the social pecking order as they were. They knew that and Jesus knew that too. And they also knew that he spent most of his time not with them, but with the very people that they looked down on.

“Blessed is anyone who will come to the feast in the kingdom of God!” Jesus tells his story to help his hearers see that he was inviting them to the feast in the kingdom of God, but they were too full of themselves, too caught up with themselves, to accept his invitation.

Jesus extends that same invitation to you and to me too. So, will we accept, you and I? In the end, our answer to that question is the only thing about us that will matter.