Luke 14:9-14: Don’t Miss Out on God’s Great Dinner Party

INTRODUCTION

If you think back on the most memorable experiences of your life, I suspect that many of them will involve eating together with friends.

Aren’t you thankful that we need to eat to live? What if we were like plants, and we only needed spend a little time in the sunshine and soak up some water, and that would be enough to keep us healthy? Think of how much we would miss!

Dinner is a part of almost all of our celebrations—weddings, and funerals, and Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, and graduations, and reunions.

When we get to Heaven, I don’t suppose we’ll need to eat for nourishment, but I think we will have something equivalent to eating together as we experience God’s love together with the family of God.

It’s not surprising that in the Bible one of the metaphors for Heaven is a great dinner with Jesus and the angels and all of the redeemed.

As we read the gospels, we read many accounts of Jesus dining with friends. Someone said, “Jesus eats his way through the gospels.”

I counted 16 stories from Jesus’s life as recorded in our gospels where we see Jesus dining with friends or acquaintances—

Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding dinner in Cana.

After a synagogue service in Capernaum, we read that Jesus went home with Peter to dinner, and there he healed Peter’s mother-in-law.

After Jesus called Matthew to be a disciple, Matthew threw a party at his house so that he could introduce his tax-collector friends to Jesus.

In Luke 7 that Simon, a Pharisee, invited Jesus to dinner, and a sinful woman shocked Simon by bursting in and washing Jesus’s feet with her tears and drying them with her hair.

All four gospels record the time when Jesus fed 5000 men, plus women and children, outdoors, and two gospels tell of another time when he fed 4000 people.

Once when Jesus was eating with his disciples, the Pharisees noted that his disciples didn’t wash their hands in the approved ritual manner—and Jesus used that criticism to teach an important lesson about something more important than washing hands.

Luke tells the story of Jesus’s dinner with Martha and Mary and their conversation together.

Luke also tells the story of Jesus’s visit to Jericho, when he called Zacchaeus down out of the sycamore tree and invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’s house.

We read of another visit to Mary and Martha’s house during Passion Week when Mary anointed his head with expensive ointment.

All the gospel writers tell us about the Last Supper and what happened then.

And after his resurrection, we read of four times when Jesus dined with his disciples.

I. Today we will talk about something that happened at another dinner, not included in the list I gave just now.

A. In Luke 14:9-14 we read that Jesus had been invited to dinner at the house of a prominent Pharisee.

Jesus was teaching his companions about generosity and humility, and he said, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” He said, “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

B. Then one of those who were at the table took that as an opening to exclaim: “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!”

One of the favorite metaphors for the joys of heaven was the idea that Heaven is a Great Banquet. All of these religious Pharisees were looking forward to being included in that glorious feast in the Coming World. They liked to think about what God had in store for righteous people like themselves.

II. So Jesus used that remark—“Blessed is the one who shall eat bread in the Kingdom of Heaven”—to talk about who will share in that coming Kingdom. These respected religious leaders may have been surprised when Jesus told them who will be the guests will be at that wonderful dinner.

A. This is Jesus’s parable, as told in Luke 14:16-24:

A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many; and at the time for the banquet, he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, “Come; for all is ready.”

But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, “I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused.”

And another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them; I pray you, have me excused.”

And another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.”

So the servant came and reported this to his master.

Then the householder in anger said to his servant, “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.”

And the servant said, “Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.”

And the master said to the servant, “Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited shall taste my banquet.”

B. Here I need to explain how invitations worked in those days.

The host had issued the invitations some days before the banquet. Then, when he had made his preparations and the hour for the feast came, he sent to his invited guests and told them, “Everything is now ready; so come.”

But then the invited guests refused to attend.

The host had invited many to his banquet and that the three excuses we read about are representative all of the other invited guests who refused to attend.

C. Notice what foolish the excuses these three guests gave for not attending.

Who would buy a field without inspecting it? Who would buy five yoke of oxen without looking them over? And why didn’t the man who had just married a wife just bring her along and show her off to his friends at the banquet?

In turning down their host’s invitation with such flimsy excuses, these men showed their contempt for the one who honored them by inviting them to his banquet.

The host was angry at their insult. The house was decorated, the tables were set, the food was cooked, and there were no guests.

D. Our host was determined to have his house full.

So he sent his servant out to bring people in who would appreciate his good meal—and they were the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.

But when they arrived, there was still room for more.

So now the host sent his servant outside the city gates to invite the homeless people who lived in the roads and lanes.

He told his servant, “Compel them to come in!”

I take this “Compel them to come in” to mean that the servant was to urge the reluctant ones—any who thought they were unworthy—to come and be welcome.

The host was letting his rich friends know that he no longer cared for their friendship. He substituted humble people for these high-class friends who had snubbed him.

APPLICATION

This parable is a warning to all of us.

God invites everyone to his feast, but those most likely to respond are not the wealthy and powerful but the poor and needy.

Jesus is telling us that Heaven will be a reversal of earth.

On this earth, it is the rich, the powerful, the talented, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the popular people who have all the advantages.

In the world to come it will be the humble who will be lifted up, and honored.

We must include ourselves among the lowly, helpless and sinful. We know that we are unworthy of God’s gracious gift of eternal life.

Most people don’t think they are rejecting God—they just don’t choose him. And not to choose is to reject God’s invitation, and to reject his invitation is to miss out on all that is best.

I used to volunteer in a nursing home. One of my best friends was Millie. Besides my regular volunteering, After I had finished my volunteer assignment, I played Scrabble with Millie. But Millie didn’t agree with my faith. She said, “I don’t believe in forgiveness. I’ve always done the best I could. If that’s not good enough, that’s just too bad!”

I said, “Well, haven’t you ever fallen short of what you ought to be?”

She said, “Well, maybe I would get an A- rather than an A.”

I told her, as gently as I could, “Then Jesus didn’t come for you. He said he came to call sinners to repentance.”

We are now in the time when Jesus, the Servant in the parable, is making the rounds, inviting us to come to God’s banquet in Heaven.

The things that hinder us from responding to God’s call may be evil things—sins we refuse to forsake, sinful pleasures we cling to, habits we refuse to break.

But the things that hinder us from responding to God’s call are more likely to  be good things—innocent pleasures that we give too high a priority to so that they take the place of God in our lives.

This Great Dinner God is inviting us to is not just “to get to heaven when we die.” We will experience the fullness of salvation in Heaven, but salvation begins now—here on earth.

God’s invitation—“Come, for all is ready”—is for us now, to accept or reject. We come to the banquet now. We enter into its fullness when we get to Glory.

But when come to Jesus for salvation, we, in a sense, enter the banqueting hall. We enter into the blessings of fellowship with Jesus and with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

So we keep responding to God’s invitation. Every day we come into fellowship with God. Every day we enjoy the blessings of salvation—and every day we have the opportunity of turning away and going back.

And every day we have the opportunity to re-affirm our commitment to Jesus Christ. Every day, we renew our trust in Jesus for salvation, and every day—in small ways and great—we consciously obey Jesus as the Lord of our life.

Every day we prove our love for our Savior by turning away from trivial pursuits to pursue God in Christ.

We who follow Jesus can enjoy the common pleasures of life with our friends, but we do all these things in the conscious presence of God. As St. Paul says, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

One way we can judge whether an activity is drawing us toward God or drawing us away from God is to notice whether we thank God for that pleasure. If we thank God for the good book, the entertaining TV program, or the friendly game with our friends, that pleasure is not going to draw us away from God—then we will glorify God in that pleasure.

The parable of the Great Dinner is story language for God’s invitation to come to Jesus for salvation. And salvation is the joyful feast that begins on earth and ends in Heaven.