Hungry for Justice: Jesus Disrupts a Chamber of Commerce Banquet Part I

12^th Sunday after Pentecost (Lk 14:7-14)

At the risk of complaining a bit too much about how the RCL fragments Luke’s narrative, we face the problem again this Sunday. The carefully crafted (and uniquely Lukan) sequence of 14:1-24 is diminished by the lectionary’s omission of both its set up/introduction (healing of the bloated man, 14:1-7) and its entire second half (14-24). Whether intentional or not, such attenuation compromises the depth and breadth of this episode’s poignant (if agonizing) “catechism for the rich at table,” which is all too convenient for our middle-class church readership. We are too much like the host in this story, for whom it is a “party from hell”!

I:  The first is the symbolic “embodiment” of the pathology of Affluenza, which we looked at in the second half of last week’s blog, part of a diptych with 11^th Sunday’s RCL gospel;
II & III:  Jesus first problematizes the “seating chart” (aimed at guests), then the guest list (aimed at the host), as we’ll see below;
IV:  The tension introduced there are “resolved” in IV, as Luke repeats key phrases:

• “those who were invited” (vv 7, 24, which effectively bracket the whole “parable”); and
• “the poor, disabled and blind” (vv. 13 and 21).

This episode, which we’ll examine next week, culminates the “flipped script” of Jesus’ parable. We’ll also look at the closing frame: two teachings about the cost of discipleship: Jesus, and ours. 

On the heels of Luke’s amazing “twinned” stories of political bodies representing opposite ends of the body politic, Jesus turns to engage those gathered at a sumptuous dining experience designed to celebrate Affluenza-as-success-and-stature. I do not believe my recontextualizing analogy of a Chamber of Commerce banquet—or perhaps a meet-and-greet at Mar Lago—exaggerates Luke’s intent. The setting, after all, is the home of a “ruler who was a Pharisee” (Gk archōn, 14:1)—a doubling of elite status that underlines this as a political space. Just as Jesus’ healing of the bent-over woman was his final appearance in a synagogue, so will this be his last clash with these local authorities over table fellowship—a plotline that has intensified through 5:30-6:5; 7:36-50; and 11:37-44.
The conclusion to Jesus’ healing in Part I has established palpable tension in the room: his opponents can (or will) not answer him (14:4,6). Jesus now “notices” something (Gk epechōn, which means to focus, fixate or “zero in” on”): namely, how guests are “choosing the place of honor” (14:7).  The Greek prōtoklisias means “first couch,” similar to “first seats” in 11:43, or the scribes’ desire for protokathedria in 20:46. (Today we might add lust for one’s portrait on Mt. Rushmore…) In response, Jesus spins a parable—the rhetorical weapon of prophets speaking truth to power. But it is very thinly veiled: a story about a banquet told at a banquet.
At the outset, Jesus unmasks the politics of honor-shame competition by invoking an inevitable scenario in table fellowship among the powerful: “In the event that someone more honored than you has been invited” (14:8; entimoteros is a comparative form of “respected”). [The ancient Roman writer Pliny the Younger disapprovingly describes a dinner attended at which three different types of food and drink were served to different guests based on social position!] 

Jesus is clearly offering a midrash on Proverbs 25:6-7, but the shock of how he applies this warning to this room might be compared to recent protests over billionaire Jeff Bezos’ ridiculously opulent wedding party in Venice (below, Greenpeace banner unfurling).

Just a few verses earlier in Luke’s narrative, Jesus previewed the eschatological rationale for his counter-strategy of turning the honor code on its head: a vision of a Divine banquet that includes people from the Four Directions, yet where “some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last” (Lk 13:29-30). This scenario is now reiterated in 14:10-11. In the real world (then and now), few who care about social position will voluntarily take a lower place than their “station deserves”—much less the lowest place. The apostle Paul, however, was one, having abandoned his status for a vocation of solidarity with the least (I Cor 4:9; an embrace of Jesus’ teaching echoed in James 4:10). Yet Jesus sees such noncooperation with meritocracy also as a monkeywrenching strategy to subvert economic-cultural systems that support and reproduce hierarchies of privilege—because he knows that it costs a host prestige to have to ask guests to “come up higher.” Turning this world upside down has been the intention of Luke’s story since the outset, as articulated in Mary’s Magnificat (Lk 1:53).

Jesus now moves his critique “up the ladder” by turning to the host with direct interrogation of his guest list, deepening the parable-as-object lesson. His counter-instruction, as in 14:8-10, uses negative examples, then a positive one: “When you host (Gk doxē, from dexomai, to receive people) a meal, don’t do x; instead do y” (14:12-13). Jesus’ points out the obvious: friends, brothers, kin or rich neighbors will reciprocate (14:12)—such logic is the engine of the “upward mobility” system. So to further undermine it, Jesus challenges the “hosting class” to invite the destitute “poor (Gk ptōchos, from ptōsso, to cower), disabled, lame, and blind”—i.e. those whom Jesus has already centered (7:22)! This apparently was the kind of banquet that Levi threw back in 5:29, foreshadowing the conversion of another tax-collector that will conclude Jesus’ efforts to heal the rich (19:1-10).
That such a practice brings “blessing” (14:14a; Gk makarios, echoing the Beatitudes) echoes the Deuteronomic charge to make one’s tithes available to orphans and widows in the third year (Dt 14:28-29; that is, half-way to seventh-year Sabbath Economics redistribution, the focus of Dt 14 and 15).

In Part II and III of this sequence, Jesus appeals to both guests and host to act counterintuitively, abandoning desires of self-advancement in order to help deconstruct the whole system. The final Part will extend the parable to illustrate how “balanced reciprocity” ultimately only serves radical inequality, and how the “house” can be liberated by re-populating it from the bottom up through gift economics. I’ll look at that next week.

Note: These blogs are an effort to popularize and summarize the much more detailed study of these texts in HARP. Throw me an email (chedmyers@bcm-net.org) to let me know if this is helpful to you. Again, we hope you will buy and engage the book, and help getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” The publishing industry has been structurally adjusted such that corporate profit take precedence over marketing books, so it’s up to authors and their readership to promote books that matter. We’re not professional vendors, but together we can spread the word and build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy.  Thanks, Ched