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

13^th Sunday after Pentecost Lk 14:15-33

As noted last week, we again this Sunday face the problem of how the RCL fragments Luke’s narrative. The carefully crafted (and uniquely Lukan) scene is radically 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). This compromises the depth and breadth of Luke’s poignant (if agonizing) “catechism for the rich at table.” And our middle-class churches desperately need to understand Jesus’ teaching.
So again, I urge preachers and expositors to keep the story whole. This is why my reflections on this four-part sequence have been spread across three weeks, and why I include the parts omitted by the RCL.  I again reproduce the outline (below), to show how the whole scene consists of discrete but deeply intertwined moments during the same dinner party:

• Part I is the symbolic “embodiment” of Affluenza, which I looked at as the second half of a diptych in my 8/22 blog;
• II & III:  Jesus first problematizes the “seating chart” (aimed at guests), then the guest list (aimed at the host), as outlined in last week’s blog;
• IV: The tension introduced in the first three parts are “resolved” in the fourth, which I examine here. Notice how Luke repeats key phrases:
  • “those who were invited” (v. 24 =  v. 7), which effectively bracket the whole “parable”); and
  • “the poor, disabled and blind” (vv. 21 = v. 13), which represent the “flipped script” of the parable

I’ll also look at the closing frame (which is the actual RCL gospel text for this Sunday: Jesus’ teaching about the cost of our discipleship, echoing the opening frame about the cost of his.

Let’s revisit Luke’s set-up of this scene. It takes place at 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 Pharisees over table fellowship—a plotline that has intensified through 5:30-6:5; 7:36-50; and 11:37-44. We are told that here the authorities are “watching Jesus carefully.” And that healing story ends with palpable tension lingering in the room: Jesus’ opponents can (or will) not answer him (14:4,6).
Remember that the bloated man represents the “spirit” of a room that is about to celebrate Affluenza-as-success-and-stature. Jesus now turns to engage the others gathered (with the bloated man) at this sumptuous dining experience. Given how elites in antiquity and those today act, I do not believe it is an exaggeration to compare Luke’s scenario to a modern Chamber of Commerce banquet—or perhaps a meet-and-greet at Mar a Lago!  In parts II and III, Jesus systematically deconstructs the presumption and entitlement underlying both “seating chart” (14:7-11) and ”guest list” (12-14), effectively undermining hierarchy at both ends.

The final scene (14:15-24) illustrates how “balanced reciprocity” ultimately only serves the elites, and how the “house” can be liberated only by re-populating it from the bottom up through gift economics. Yet this part is—perhaps for obvious reasons—overlooked by the RCL.
   It begins with a nervous response by one of the guests (14:15), perhaps trying to change the subject by looking eschatologically: It’s all about the heavenly banquet!This is a common religious response to social conflict, seeking to resolve it in a theological abstraction. Or perhaps this is pushback—the party closing ranks against Jesus—as the guest tries to defend his host. He deftly mimics Jesus’ own teaching by invoking makarios (one of few times someone other than Jesus uses the phrase “Kingdom of God in the gospels). The notion of a divine banquet is certainly invoked in the Hebrew Bible (see e.g. Is 25:6, 55:1f); but in the first century, the assumption was that this was only for Israel’s chosen, not for outsiders. Qumran had a long list of those who would be excluded, including the physically disabled! The response to this guest’s invocation would have been the pious “May we be counted among the righteous in that day.” At which point Jesus pounces, spinning another thinly-veiled “parable” (see 14:7a) about someone who gave a banquet—told to someone giving banquet! As if to say No, this is all about the company here and now.

• Buying a field (14:18). No one would purchase a field without smelling the soil, knowing its history and examining its dimensions, etc. Moreover, this person put an economic transaction before the banquet relationship.  In every way, this response is a catastrophic insult to the host.
• Buying oxen: Similarly, no one would buy draft animals without testing them. The fact that five are involved suggests this man managed a huge estate, perhaps too much of a land baron to actually attend this soiree!
• Marriage: Breaking the rhetorical pattern in the third excuse, and is the most dismissive (though the parallelism implies the bride is also an economic transaction). He shrugs off any explanation or requisite apology, declining in an abrupt and rude manner.

This is an apocalypse of shame and destroyed honor for the host. How many guests would follow suit? In a social game of hosting that is about building prestige, he has lost spectacularly.
The parable now turns into an object lesson on defection. The host realizes he has hit a “glass ceiling”—and responds in precisely the way Jesus tried to instruct both guests and host through this entire sequence! A messenger is dispatched into the two places where the poor typically could be found in a first-century Palestinian village: the plaza, and back allies (14:21; how little has changed). Here again we encounter the “divine guest list” (14:13; see also 7:22-23). In fact, Jesus has already been rejected by elites in Luke’s story, precisely for eating with such company. [For an important note about language describing disabled people; see HARP, pp.  146f, fns 35, 37.]
This mission is then re-iterated in 14:23, ruling out poetic hyperbole in favor of sheer determination. This time the messenger is sent to the outskirts of the town where the most destitute dwell.  To “compel” (oblige, persuade) these outliers to come to the manse recognizes how those of low estate would be obligated to decline such an invitation as improper. [ See HARP, p. 148, fn. 45 for how that verb has been weaponized in evangelical theologies of forced conversion.]
    By bringing poor folk into his house—even though a full banquet is technically a “success”—the host permanently shames himself from the perspective of his social equals.  It is a perfect strategy for “class suicide.” But from Jesus’ perspective, this strategy represents the host’s “conversion” and embrace of Sabbath Economics! This concluding scene not only de-invisibilizes the poor, it centers them in a “happy ending.” Both aspects were deeply threatening to the social cosmology of ancient elites (and, we can add, of us middle-class moderns).
This final scene certainly resolves the problem Jesus identified with the “guest list.” It also functions to push back on the pushback (the guest’s quip about “bread in the Kingdom” in v. 15), while also bringing the earlier image of the “eschatological banquet” in 13:28-29 firmly down to earth. But the conclusion to the parable (14:24)—addressed to “all y’all,” which is to say anyone left in the room from this “party from hell”!—is Jesus’ powerful rebuke to “the house of privilege.” Yet it is offered as the strong medicine needed to heal friends of the “bloated man” of their dis-ease, too.

Is this whole scene a parable, or an object lesson? One of our HARP Zoom series participants called it a kind of “fever-dream.”  What the strategy of “repopulating the homes of the rich” is not is a theological allegory, but an enactment of Jesus his teaching in 14:13.  Only such practices can liberate and heal “those with dropsy”: the parabolic host, the real one listening to the story, and all of us who suffer from fantasies of meritocratic upward mobility, from the crushing disillusionment of glass ceilings, and from delusions that Affluenza is not a terminal personal and
political disease.
Few today take this gospel teaching seriously. But you can find folks experimenting with it, modestly but concretely, at a Catholic Worker House near you.

This amazing Lukan sequence sets readers up for the even more challenging Dives and Lazarus tale (16:19-31, 16^th Sunday after Pentecost), which we’ll look at in a few weeks. There Jesus contends that the social landscape of the “next world” will be the mirror-opposite of this one—so we’d better be careful about exclusion and entitlement.
Given the difficult and demanding challenge that Jesus has made to this room of rich folk, it’s worth concluding by circling back to the overview I began with, and recalling that two “cost of discipleship” teachings bracket the sequence I’ve focused on for several weeks. Because the second one is the actual RCL text for the 13^th Sunday of Pentecost!
In Luke 13:31-35, Jesus recognizes how the Herodian regime is now targeting him, and how that will lead him to the Capital city to share the fate of biblical prophets. He clearly speaks of his cost of discipleship. The closing frame, in turn, addresses our cost. Breaking with the socializing family in 14:26-27 reiterates Jesus’ earlier stipulation of how kin will be “divided” (12:52-53), while the call to cross echoes the longer passage in 9:23-25. These are followed by two very political examples of “not counting the cost”— likely allusions to failed Herodian construction projects and military policies (thus echoing the first frame).  Jesus’ final invitation to “renunciation” of possessions (the oft-used huparchonton) deploys an interesting verb: in all other uses in the N.T. it means to “say farewell.” So he is bidding us to say good-bye to our insular material prosperity, and welcome Sabbath Economics as a way of life. 

Note: These blogs are an effort to popularize and summarize my more detailed study of these texts in HARP. Let me know if this is helpful to you (chedmyers@bcm-net.org). Again, we hope you will buy and engage the book, and we need your partnership in getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” Because the publishing industry has been structurally adjusted such that corporate profits take precedence over marketing books, it is now up to authors and their readership to promote books that matter. None of us are professional vendors, but together we can spread the word and build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy.  Thanks, Ched