Session Three - Invitation to feast in a desert

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Session Three - Invitation to feast in a desert

Release date: 4th November

November 4, 2024 • Bishop Joe Kennedy • Luke 9:10–17

Hello and welcome to the third 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 this third in our series of reflection on invitations to dinner with Jesus from St Luke’s Gospel.

Today, we’re reading from Chapter 9 - and one of the best known and most loved stories in the Gospels, the feeding of the five thousand. If you want to read along, we’re beginning at verse 10.

On their return the apostles told Jesus all they had done. Then, taking them along, he slipped quietly into a city called Bethsaida. When the crowds found out about it, they followed him, and he welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who needed to be cured.

The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside to lodge and get provisions, for we are here in a deserted place.” But he said to them, “You give them something to eat.” They said, “We have no more than five loaves and two fish—unless we are to go and buy food for all these people.” For there were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” They did so and had them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke them and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled, and what was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.

So this is a story with three characters – so to speak. The crowds, the disciples, and Jesus. And it seems to me a really interesting way to read this story is to ask who is the story really about? Let’s take them in turns.

First the crowds. Most of us, I imagine, are unlikely to receive an invitation to stay as a guest of The King at his Norfolk home in Sandringham. It’s said that King Edward VII’s commitment to being a generous host was so great that he had a pair of scales installed at Sandringham House.

Guests would weigh themselves in on their arrival and departure – to ensure that they had put on a few pounds during their time as The King’s guest.

Probably King Edward VII didn’t have the story of the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand directly in mind when he was light-heartedly weighing his guests. But it has just the faintest echo of what is going on in this story. Jesus provides more than enough for his guests – 5,000 families, likely; not just 5,000 men. Enough people to fill to capacity Turf Moor, the home of Burnley Football Club. When they had all eaten their fill, there were twelve baskets left over. One for each of the twelve tribes of Israel – so, symbolically, enough for everyone all over again. Enough for everyone to take a party bag home with more food in it.

This is a story about the generosity of God: the God who gives to us everything that we have, and who sees our needs and meets them, with more than enough. So one way we might reflect further about this story is to think of all the ways that God blesses us, or of times when God has met our needs. This story invites us to give thanks to God for his provision, and to trust God in our needs.

Or perhaps, instead, we might read this as a story about the disciples. One of the loveliest features of this story is found right at the start and we often miss it. Taking his disciples along, Jesus slipped quietly towards the region of Bethsaida. Jesus was seeking some time away from the crowds, a period of rest with just those who are closest to him. But when the crowds followed him, he immediately welcomed them and meets their needs – teaching and healing them.

And even when the evening was drawing in, and his disciples suggested that He might send them away to find food and lodgings for the night, even then Jesus (tired though he is and wanting some time away) was unwilling for them to go. He wants to continue to welcome them – to feed them.

And he draws his weary disciples into this ministry of welcome. ‘You feed them,’ he says to his disciples. The Greek text emphasizes the word ‘you’. You feed them. And on his instruction, the disciples gave out the food and collect in the left-overs. Presumably, they also travelled into Bethsaida to buy the baskets.

So another way to read this story is to say that we have been invited along to dinner now for the third time – but this time we’ve been invited as a waiters or the washers-up. If this is a story about the generosity of God, it is also a story which invites us to look to see what Jesus is doing and join in. A story which invites us to be generous ourselves, and to give our time, our talents, and treasure to God’s work. ‘You feed them,’ Jesus says to us too.

Or thirdly, perhaps this is really a story about Jesus. Immediately before this story, and immediately after it, in St Luke’s Gospel, we find questions about who Jesus really is. Is he Elijah, returned to earth; or is he the new Moses; or is he the Messiah – the expected king, who would come to set God’s people free from all that oppressed them?

This story provides an answer to that question that becomes immediately before and afterwards. Jesus is greater than Elijah – who miraculously fed just one family, at Zarephath. Jesus is greater than Moses too – who miraculously fed the People of Israel in the wilderness, but just one day at a time with no more left over. Jesus is greater because he is the Messiah, who invites us to the heavenly banquet, the feast which will fill the Lord’s house and which will have no end.

More from NEW! Six invitations to Dinner with Jesus

Session Four - Invitation to God's eternal banquet

November 11, 2024 • Bishop Joe Kennedy • Luke 14:15–24

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.

INTRO to Six invitations to Dinner with Jesus

Bishop Joe Kennedy

Join Bishop Joe as he leads us in responding to six invitations to dinner with Jesus, as they come to us in Luke's Gospel. With each invitation, Jesus calls us to experience for ourselves the generosity of God. Session one begins on Monday 21st October, and then a new session will be released each Monday until Monday 25th November. Press play above to watch and listen to the introduction and/or you can read the script below... Hello and welcome to Six Invitations to Dinner with Jesus. I’m Bishop Joe, and I’m delighted that Bishop Philip has commissioned me to offer six biblical reflections and conversation starters for our Diocese’s Fruitful App. Before we open the Scriptures together, I want to invite you to think with me for a moment about the wonder of God’s Word. And the first thing to say, surely, is that it is astonishing that God communicates with us at all. We don’t often consider how startling it is that God should communicate with us – tiny creatures on a rocky outcrop in the middle of nowhere much. And yet, God gives us the Scriptures as his written Word. And the Father sends Jesus, who is his living Word. It is said that Queen Victoria used to complain that Gladstone spoke to her as if she were a public meeting. Matters are quite different between us and God. God never addresses us as if we were a public meeting. God speaks to each of us as though we were the only person he speaks to. God’s Word is always a word of personal invitation, from person to person. In this series, I shall be inviting you to join me in accepting six invitations to dinner with our Lord, which come to us in St Luke’s Gospel. Each invitation is personally addressed to you. With each invitation, Jesus opens the door for you to experience the generosity of God. Join me, as together we respond to the invitation of Jesus.

Session Five - Invitation to not come to tea

November 18, 2024 • Bishop Joe Kennedy • Luke 19:1–10

Hello and welcome to the fifth 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 this is the fifth of our six part series on invitations to dinner with Jesus. In each session, we’re looking at a story from St Luke’s Gospel, and today our story comes from the beginning of Chapter 19. [Jesus] entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” So: invitations to dinner with Jesus. But this time, Jesus invites himself, doesn’t he? Jesus looks up at Zachaeus and tells him, ‘Hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’ The Bible tells us that Zacchaeus made his money by collecting taxes. And the system worked like this. The Roman Empire assigned a certain amount of tax to each region. And then it sold to the highest bidder the right to gather in that tax and send it to Rome. So long as the right amount was handed over to Rome each year, the local tax collector could charge as much as they liked and keep the profit for themselves. In effect, tax collectors in the Roman system paid for the right to steal from people. For this reason, the popular imagination lumped together robbers, murderers, and tax collectors. Now, for tax collectors, the real money was made by charging duties on travel and trade: tolls for use of roads; entry fees for markets; vehicular taxes on carts, even the wheels on the carts, the donkeys that pulled carts; import and export taxes. You can see how this could be a real money-spinner. Since no-one knew how much was owing for each of these taxes, you could stop any cart on the road and make up a sum of money, and charge them that. And since Jericho was on a busy trading route, and was itself a famed exporter of agricultural produce, it provided particularly rich picking for its tax collectors. Now Zacchaeus was no ordinary tax collector. He had bought up a series of these licences, for Jericho and the surrounding area, and then he hired men to run the business all over this area. So the best model is to think of Zacchaeus as a mafia boss running a bunch of mobsters – and a traitor, a collaborator with the occupying army as well. Well, so now that we’ve seen all of that background, surely the first surprising thing in today’s story is that Zacchaeus was so keen to see Jesus. Why does he want to see Jesus? And the second surprising thing is that Zacchaeus was having such difficulty fighting his way to the front of the crowd. Presumably, had he chosen, he could have simply had some of his heavies clear a path. Well, for whatever reason, he decided instead to climb a sycamore fig tree – a species native to Africa, which also grows in Israel – and he hid there, where he could see without being seen. Only Jesus did see him, and stopped to call to him, ‘Hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’ The words that Jesus uses are heavy with meaning. In the Bible, when someone is invited to ‘hurry’, it often means that God is at work. And often in the New Testament, when we’re told that something ‘must’ happen, it means that it is part of God’s plan of salvation. Understandably, perhaps, that’s not how the crowd sees it. ‘All who saw it began to grumble’ we’re told, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”’ Given that Zacchaeus is the local mafia boss, it’s not hard to see why they’re upset. So: this is the fifth in our series of invitations to dinner with Jesus, but will you be getting an invitation to this meal? No! I shouldn’t have thought so. Only Zacchaeus’ family, and the mobsters who work for him, are invited to this dinner. And perhaps some of the Roman occupying force. And even if Zacchaeus had invited anyone else, surely no-one would have accepted the invitation. We wouldn’t have gone, would we? I mean, he’s the local mafia boss. But Jesus invites himself. And then, when Zacchaeus stands up to make the customary speech at the dinner that evening, the third surprising thing happens. In his speech, Zacchaeus promises to give away half of his wealth to the poor. To poor people in the area. And then the says that he will pay back fourfold any money he has stolen. It’s actually quite difficult to see how Zacchaeus is going to do this – since all of his money is stolen money. Unless he inherited money – perhaps he’s going to give away his inheritance too. Either way, he’s going to be left with nothing by the time he has kept his promise. Left with nothing but the shirt on his back. So, the people of Jericho regain some of their money in the coming weeks and months, as Zacchaeus repays them. Presumably, this cheers them up quite a lot. But Jesus invites them – and us – to rejoice not for that reason, not because we’ve go that money back but for another reason. “Today,” Jesus says, “salvation has come to this house, because he, too, [Zacchaeus] is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” To be lost is to be in the wrong place, isn’t it? So Jesus speaks about the lost coin which was not where it was expected to be, the lost sheep which had wandered away from the sheep pen, the lost son who had walked away from his family. And here Jesus describes Zacchaeus also as lost – for he has wandered far from God in search of ill-gotten riches, and has left the community of his people as he collaborated with those who oppressed them. But Jesus, the Good Shepherd, has gone and searched for this lost sheep, and now has found him and brought him home. Now again, Zacchaeus has been returned to his right place, as one of the children of Abraham. How will the crowds treat Zacchaeus once Jesus has left town, do you think? Presumably, he will need a new way to earn a living. He’ll need new friends as well. Protection, even, from the local mobsters, with whom he previously associated. Will the people of Jericho give Zacchaeus what he needs after he has returned to them what was rightfully theirs? Don’t know. What do you think? This is a story about repentance. We may find it difficult to identify with Zacchaeus, the mafia boss. And yet – OK we’re not mafia bosses, but we too have things in our lives which are out of place – bits of our life which are lost. Zacchaeus, at the start of this story, surely recognised in some way his need to put things right; and yet it was only when he spent time with Jesus that he found the strength to actually put them right. So Zacchaeus can teach us too about how spending more time with Jesus in prayer and in Bible reading, how that could transform our lives, and set us free. This is also a story about offering, or not offering, forgiveness, and about finding the grace to allow other people to make a new start in life after they have messed up. Doubtless the people of Jericho found it hard to forgive Zacchaeus. Perhaps some of them found it impossible. But Jesus points the way by inviting them to rejoice that Zacchaeus, who had been lost, is now found. So, on reflection, perhaps not an invitation to a meal after all, this one. But something better. An invitation from Jesus to spend more time with him each week, and to work on forgiving people who have hurt and offended us.