INVITATION TO A BANQUET: Notes for a sermon at Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity in the Cathedral Church of St Peter in Exeter

23 Jun INVITATION TO A BANQUET: Notes for a sermon at Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity in the Cathedral Church of St Peter in Exeter

I’d like to reflect with you for a few minutes this evening on the passage we heard in our Second Lesson. This is one of several times in the gospels when the evangelists set Our Lord’s teaching in the context of a meal—“table talk” as later ages would call it.

The reading we just heard actually began in the middle of the scene. Jesus has already addressed his fellow guests, advising them against being pushy or arrogant. But then he turns his host, and this is what he says:

“When you give a dinner or a banquet, don’t invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbours, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

Our Lord’s opening words—“when you give a dinner or a banquet”—at once make it clear he’s not talking to a modern nuclear family with two children and a dog and a cat, trying to make ends meet in a three bedroom semi. He’s addressing the head of a wealthy household which can afford to give banquets. In those days this will have been a quite complex social group involving family, friends, freedpersons, clients and slaves. Our Lord is reminding them of what was at the time quite widely accepted social and ethical wisdom: that such a wealthy head of household ought to support the poor. That’s why, when Job defends his honour, it’s natural for him to do so by pointing out he’s always helped the destitute, he’s never eaten his food without sharing, and if he ever saw anyone perishing with cold he made sure they were clothed and warmed.[1] Nor, incidentally, should we imagine that such notions of a rich man’s duty were confined to Israel. The Romans, perhaps characteristically, virtually systematised the whole thing, referring to it as patrocinium—“patronage”. And some would argue that “patronage” (which is to say, generosity from the rich) and “clientage” (which is to say, loyalty from those who benefitted from it) were the glue that held Roman society together.

So far then, so good. Our Lord is offering wisdom and common sense about our relationships with each other with which few would have disagreed, and especially not in the house of a Pharisee.

But then, having listened to what Jesus has said (for some reason the evangelist goes out of his way to be clear about this [2]) a fellow guest cries out, “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!”

Now, to talk about “eating with God” (or words to that effect) was already a traditional way of picturing what life will be like when God finally puts the world to rights—what one of my colleagues used to call, “the Great Divine Clean Up.”  The prophet Isaiah had spoken centuries earlier of the LORD God preparing a lavish feast of rich foods and aged wines for all nations on Mount Zion—a  banquet which would also be the end of death and sorrow.[3]

So, by speaking as he does, what Jesus’ fellow guest has done is bring God into the discussion—and thereby (as we might say) he’s upped the ante!

Our Lord, of course, is equal to the challenge.

He proceeds to tell a story.

“Someone,” he says, “was giving a great dinner …”

Who’s the “someone”? For the moment, Jesus doesn’t tell us. But he does tell us what this “someone” did about his “great dinner”: he “invited many”. He sent out invitations to lots of his friends.

And the time when they  received those invitations was, of course, the proper time for any who couldn’t attend to let their host know, so that he would know how many to expect. That was good manners in those days just as it would be good manners now.

But apparently the people he’d invited didn’t do that. They said nothing, which implied acceptance. They were coming, presumably, to the great dinner.

It wasn’t until it was actually time for the dinner, only when all had been prepared and their host sent out the customary polite reminder, only then, they all suddenly chose to say they couldn’t come!! They refused!!

The host—who is now referred to as “the master of the house”[4]—is understandably “angry”. Luke’s choice of word points to his feelings: sadness and disappointment as well as irritation.[5] I can only think of how I would feel if I’d gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a lovely meal for my friends and they all suddenly said they weren’t interested and wouldn’t be coming to eat it!

So now the master of the house sends his servant to go into “the streets and alleyways of the town” and bring in anyone: “the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”! Strikingly, it’s exactly the list of those Jesus had earlier said ought to be remembered by the wealthy banquet giver!

Now of course, if all this were happening in ordinary human life, the already prepared banquet would be stale and cold and probably have cobwebs all over it by the time any of these folk arrived. At this point, it becomes obvious that this is not ordinary life and we realise who this “master of the house” really is—he is God, the offerer of the heavenly banquet of whose blessedness Jesus’ fellow guest had spoken! And Jesus isn’t disagreeing about the blessedness: but he is posing a question. Sure, we are willing to praise God’s banquet. But are we willing actually to accept God’s invitation and go to it?

Human history, alas, suggests that the answer to that question is, “No.”

The entire biblical history is, in one way, a story of humankind preferring its own way to the joy that God offers—

from God in the Garden of Eden calling out “Where are you?” after Adam and Eve have hidden themselves,

through God’s word to Isaiah, “I have nurtured sons and daughters, and it is they who have rebelled against me”

and again

“All day long,” God says to Isaiah, “I held out my hand to a rebellious people!” 

to John’s word in the Gospel: “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”

And thereby we break God’s heart. The Bible faces us with what a great Old Testament teacher of my generation called the pathos of God.[6] As a race, it seems that humankind consistently will not serve God in the way that will befit God’s love for us and will actually make for our happiness and the happiness of all. Instead, we prefer to stick to the chaos we have created and continue to create. I just spoke of this as the “biblical history,” and indeed it is. But anyone who doubts that is also all history, the world’s history, needs only to switch on the television news to see that this is exactly what it is.[7]

If that were the last word—if the news on the television were the last word—then we might well feel despair. As Jesus tells the story, however, there is still hope because God will not allow that to be the last word.

First, when the master sends and invites those others who hadn’t previously been invited, the servant (perhaps to our surprise?) actually comes back quite pleased with himself. Some of the new people have accepted! The banquet does have guests!

But that doesn’t satisfy the Master, for there’s still room. There’s room for all. So he says his final word: “Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.” Why do that? Simply because there are still empty places. And why are there empty places? There are empty places because “none of those who were invited will taste of my banquet”—which is not a threat, but a statement of fact—a description of the situation created by those who had been originally invited.

But then – “compel them to come in!”  Does God compel? It all depends on what we mean by “compel”. If we mean compulsion by force, then surely the answer is “No”. God will never compel in that way. Rather, God’s “compulsion” is the kind of compulsion I remember CS Lewis hinting at when describing his own conversion to Christianity:

 “Even the prodigal decided he would go home. I had to be dragged, kicking, biting and scratching every inch of the way!”

The compulsion that we have from God is the kind of compulsion we feel in response to the appeal of a trusted lover or friend or servant.  It’s the compulsion to confess his wickedness that King David feels when Nathan the prophet stands before him and declares him guilty of murder: “Thou art the man!”[8] In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing it’s the compulsion to act that Benedict feels as he hears Beatrice express her frustration and fury at the wrong that has been done to her friend.[9]

And this is the kind of appeal that God makes to us.  “Behold,” our Lord says to a lukewarm church, “I stand at the door and knock.” “Come to me, all you that are heavy laden, and you will find rest unto your souls.”[10]

God give us grace to hear that call!

God grant us to be so moved by its promise that we are indeed “compelled to come in.”

Amen.

[1] Cf. Job 29:12-16.

[2] See Luke 14.15: “Ἀκούσας δέ τις τῶν συνανακειμένων ταῦτα”

[3] The creator of the bon mot about the “Great Divine Clean Up” (with “a capital G, a capital D, a capital C, and a capital U” ) is John Dominic Crossan in N. T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan, “The Resurrection: Historical Event or Theological Explanation: A Dialogue,” in The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue, Robert B. Stewart, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) 24-25.  Much though I have disagreed with Crossan on many issues, I have always admired his gift for a striking turn of phrase! For the Isaiah passage about the banquet with God, see Isaiah 25:6–8.

[4] Luke 14.21: ὁ οἰκοδεσπότης

[5] Luke 14.21: ὀργισθεὶς cf. Bovon, Luke 2,371.

[6] “God’s call to humankind, which resounds so frequently in the utterances of the prophets, presupposes an ethos based, not upon immutable principles, but rather upon His eternal concern. God’s repenting a decision which was based on moral grounds clearly shows the supremacy of pathos. Crime is not a violation of a law, but a sin against the living God… To the biblical mind the implication of goodness is mercy. Pathos, concern for the world, is the very ethos of God. This ethical sensitivity of God—not the ethical in and for itself—is reflected in the prophets’ declarations.” (Abraham Heschel, The Prophets Vol. 1 (New York: Harper 1969 [1962]) 217, 219. The entire section, pp. 217-20, is magnificent, as indeed is the entire book.

[7] And of course it reflects a sad reality about life. Put at its most basic—we have a wonderful planet, with plenty for everybody if we shared reasonably. But we don’t. Instead we indulge in greed. I do not say that everything ought necessarily to be equally shared by all. But it is obviously unreasonable that 1% of the world’s population should own about 45% of the world’s assets, while the bottom 50% owns less than 2%. And this (which is actually our situation) is made worse by being repeatedly set amid war, bloodshed and chaos. In other words, as a species humankind may claim to believe in rules like putting yourself last and being generous to the poor, but  evidently we do not live by such rules at all. It’s almost invariably about my group first, which in the end quite frequently seems to come down to me first and hang everyone else. The heavenly banquet is spread out around us even now: but instead we prefer the war zone and chaos of our own creating. The parable of the Great Banquet is Our Lord’s sad view of life as he sees it: full of high professions and people who do not live by them. And we may well feel that nothing much has changed.

[8] 2 Samuel 12.1–15.

[9] Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing IV.1.257–end.

[10] Isaiah 65.2, Rev. 3.20, Matt. 11.28-29.