Perspective: Dinner Parties and Ladders

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Dinner Parties and Ladders

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

James 4:10 (CEB)

Calloused and muddied are His hands

From healing the blind and tracing the sand

The King of Kings on hands and knees

Scruffy and sweaty and tempted like me

It's worth it for Him to get messy to clean us

The filthy, unwanted know the Dirty Jesus

From "Dirty Jesus" by My Anchor Holds

In Jesus' day, the Pharisees would have been generally regarded in society as the good, upstanding, salt-of-the-earth religious folk.  That said, when Jesus speaks to them, modern-day Christians really need to take notice.  According to the Gospels, the Pharisees didn't seem to like Jesus very much.  They didn't like that He didn't observe the rules they considered important, and they didn't approve of the company he kept.  They ultimately became critical of everything He did.  On one Sabbath day, Jesus was invited to dinner at the home of one of the leaders of the Pharisees, and the other guests in attendance were watching Jesus closely.¹  It must have been one tense dinner party.

Jesus and the Pharisees have been engaged in an ongoing argument about what is permissible on the Sabbath day.  On one occasion the Pharisees criticized Jesus for allowing His hungry disciples to pick food on the Sabbath day.²  On multiple occasions, Jesus healed people on the Sabbath day, to the disapproval of the Pharisees.  Instead of simply celebrating the fact that people were being freed from their chronic ailments, they complained that the healings were in violation of their religious rules.³

During dinner, Jesus sees a man who suffers from edema.  Knowing that He is being scrutinized, He asks the other dinner guests, "Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?"  Nobody says anything.  Jesus heals the man and then asks everyone, "If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?"  Again, the Pharisees will not engage with Jesus' questions.  No opinions are being changed that evening.

Jesus notices how people are selecting their seats at the dinner table, and He encourages everyone not to choose for themselves the seats of honor.  Someone who sits down at a seat of honor would be very embarrassed if he or she was asked to move because someone considered more "important" came along.  One who chooses to live by such a game could end up being disgraced by the same game.  On the other hand, a person who chooses a lower seat would be in for a welcome surprise if he or she was invited to take a seat of honor.  Perhaps Jesus isn't talking merely about the seats we choose at parties but rather our opinions of ourselves in general.  He says, "All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

Next, Jesus encourages His host for the evening to invite to his dinners or luncheons people who cannot do the same for him.  If he invites people who can return the favor, He will be rewarded through reciprocity.  If he invites people who cannot return the favor, he will experience an altogether different kind of reward.

One of the dinner guests says, "Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!"  This exclamation prompts Jesus to tell a parable about a man who throws a lavish dinner party.  When he sends out his messenger to tell the people he invited that dinner is ready, they all send their regrets because they all have things that require their attention at the moment.  One has just purchased a piece of property; another has just bought some oxen; and another has just gotten married.  Because none of the intended guests will attend the party, the man sends his messenger out to invite people on the streets to attend.

The Pharisees believe that they want to be a part of the Kingdom of God, living their lives in ways meant to prove themselves worthy, but ironically they've been missing out on the Kingdom altogether.  They are like the people in Jesus' parable who were invited to the dinner party but chose not to attend because they thought they had more important things to do.  Perhaps, if the Pharisees weren't so caught up in bickering about their religious rules and in jockeying for positions in society, they might have seen the Kingdom of God breaking into the world all around Jesus.  The would have seen it in His miraculous healings and in His befriending of outsiders, and they would have heard it in His teachings of love and hope.

The religious and social outcasts whom Jesus befriended certainly didn't miss the Kingdom of God.  With nothing to distract them, they welcomed it with open arms.  In another Gospel account, Jesus says to the Pharisees, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you."⁴  Perhaps the people who think they're the closest to God run the greatest risk of missing God.

People like to climb proverbial ladders.  Some try to climb ladders to establish their position in society, while others try to climb ladders to God through their religious practices.  The Pharisees apparently tried to climb both kinds of ladders.  Ironically, the bottom of the ladder is where we are usually best able to see God.  In fact, Jesus identifies with the people who don't even have a place on the ladder - the hungry and thirsty, the immigrant, the destitute, the sick, and the prisoner, those considered "the least of these."⁵  It is the spiritually poor, the mournful, and the meek whom Jesus calls blessed.⁶

What might be distracting us from the ways in which the Kingdom of God is breaking through in the world?  How might our priorities be out of sync with the purposes of God?  If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: there is a reason that the announcement of the coming of the Kingdom of God is coupled with a call to repentance.⁷  We pray, "Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," but we must remember the Kingdom of God is not exactly what we expect it to be.  We must be willing to change the way we think, and we must not be afraid to reconsider anything and everything we think we know.


Notes:

1. This perspective is based on Luke 14:1-24.  Quotations from this passage are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
2. Luke 6:1-5
3. Luke 6:6-11; Luke 13:10-17
4. Matthew 21:31
5. Matthew 25:34-40
6. Matthew 5:3-5
7. Mark 1:15; Matthew 3:2; Matthew 4:17

The photograph of the ladder is public domain.