The Parable of the Great Banquet in Luke

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the parables found throughout Luke’s Gospel, which shared themes of grace and lostness and foundness. Today will be the last of this part of the series, the Parable of the Banquet. It’s a fascinating example because it’s the only parable that both Luke and Matthew tell but take in very different directions. Here in Luke it is a quintessential parable of grace and of the lost and found. But, as we’ll see next time, Matthew turns it into a shocking parable of judgment.

Text

Found halfway through Luke 14, his version of the parable goes like this:

[14.16] And [Jesus] said to him: A Certain man held a great banquet, and he invited many people. [17] And at the appointed hour, he sent his slave to tell the invited guests: “Come, because everything is ready now!” [18] But all of them alike began to excuse themselves. The first said to him, “I bought a field and I have to go see it; please accept my apologies.” [19] And another said, “I bought five teams of oxen and I’m going to examine them; please accept my apologies.” [20] And another said, “I have just gotten married and so I cannot come.” [21] So the slave returned and told his master what happened. Then the lord of the manor became angry and said to his slave: “Go out quickly, into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor, the physically disabled, the blind, and the lame you find there. [22] And the slave said, “Master, what you have asked has been done, and there is still room.” [23] And the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and hedges and tell whomsoever you find there they have to come in, so that my house may be full! [24] For I say to you that not one of those I invited will get a taste of my banquet!

Experience

This comes across as a feel-good story, with the entitled who take the generosity of the lord for granted being pushed to the side in favour of those who could actually benefit from it. But it also strikes me as a parable we don’t want to turn into an allegory: asking why the poor were not on the guest list in the first place, or what happens to to the invitees who didn’t come feels like a Pandora’s Box I don’t want to open.

I also noticed that the parable is said in response to something, so it will be helpful to understand the narrative context.

Encounter

In Luke’s narrative, Jesus tells this parable to a single person (we’ll have to look at the context to know who that is).

In the parable we have a master, a slave, and an assortment of people I assume are wealthy. I’m curious about their excuses and whether they would be seen as legitimate.

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Literary Context

In a scene that will sound very familiar to you by now, Jesus tells this parable before a group of Pharisees and the context is a Sabbath dinner. As we’ve seen, the Pharisees cared a lot about communal dining, but restricted their guest list to those who followed the Law scrupulously. The fact that they invited Jesus means that he wasn’t quite the rebel he’s often made out to be. That said, on the way to the dinner, he heals a man they meet on the road, initiating a conversation about Sabbath-observance (14.2-6).

When they arrive, Jesus continues to goad them out of their comfortable routine. Seeing how they rush to take the best seats, he tells them that it’s better to take the worst seat and have the host honour you by moving you up than assuming a position of honour from the start (14.7-11). Then, he goes even further, saying that when you host a meal, the guest list should focus on those who aren’t in a position to return the invitation: the poor, the disabled, the lame, and the blind (14.12-14). He gives both of these teachings an apocalyptic spin, ending the first by referring to the great reversal and the second with a beatitude blessing those who extend hospitality to cannot return the favour with the resurrection of the dead.

Noting the apocalyptic turn, and perhaps just wanting to break the tension, one guest pipes in saying, “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God!” And it’s this statement that Jesus responds to with the Parable of the Banquet.

This ends the particular scene, but Luke’s narrative picks the theme back up at the start of chapter 15 with a group of Pharisees criticizing Jesus for keeping bad company, which of course prompts the parables of the Lost Sheep, Coin, and Wasteful and Dutiful Sons.

So all the talk we’ve seen about feasts and guest lists — it all starts here.

Dinner Parties

Table-fellowship was an important value in Ancient Mediterranean cultures. Dining with someone indicated relational intimacy, social acceptance, and often involved reciprocity as a sign of good faith. While these are positive values, they are also easily twisted, and so guest lists and table placement often devolved into competitions for social standing, privilege, and insider status (Green 561; Levine & Witherington 387; Walton & Keener).

So at this dinner party, Jesus criticizes not just Pharisaic excess, but a whole series of common practices that were really just ‘how the world worked’. As Spencer puts it:

The kind of humility Jesus demands of privileged classes pushes beyond philanthropic tokenism and solipsistic benefaction, as he prods his host to defy convention and put the disenfranchised and disabled at the top of his guest list. (Spencer 370)

But there was an theological and apocalyptic layer to table fellowship in Second-Temple Judaism (SBL; Levine & Witherington 397; Capon). This idea comes from Isaiah 25.6-9, which envisions the Day of the LORD as a great banquet, where all the peoples of the world will be feasted with the food of kings, and where God will remove the realities of suffering and death (Bailey (2008) 310). Indeed, groups like the Pharisees and the Qumran community understood their own communal meals to anticipate the LORD’s great banquet (Green 557).

But the theme of universal welcome present in Isaiah’s oracle did not fare well as the centuries wore on. The Targum (an ancient interpretive paraphrase of a biblical text that circulated once Hebrew ceased to be the language of the people) on the passage insists that the invitation of the Gentiles is just a ruse and God will destroy them upon their arrival. A similar thing happens in Enoch. The Qumran community (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame) went even further, removing not only Gentiles from the invitation, but also striking anyone with any physical illness or deformity from the guest list (Bailey (2008) 310)! While it’s unclear how common the Qumran community’s prejudices against the ill and injured were in society writ-large, we do see in the Gospels a tendency to assign spiritual significance to disability; for example, the only question in the minds of the disciples when they see the man born blind in John 9 is whether it was his parents’ or his own sin that was to blame.

Jesus had just referred to Isaiah’s banquet in the previous chapter, but there had reiterated the original message of welcome, “from east and west, from north and south,” and again pronounced the great reversal (13.29-30). And here, his exhortation to extend table fellowship to those living in poverty or disability — to say nothing of his own extension of that fellowship to ‘tax collectors and sinners’ — reinforces that message. If indeed they see their dinners as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, then their guest-list should reflect that: “The table-fellowship Jesus envisions advances God’s right-making (Spencer 371).

The Narrative

Moving on to the story itself, the scene starts when the host sends a servant to tell the guests everything is ready. This is not the first they’d have heard of the celebration; they’d have previously received and accepted the invitation and this is just their signal that it’s time to arrive (Walton & Keener; Bailey (2008) 313; Levine & Witherington 397). The reference to a real estate deal and especially the purchase of five teams of oxen, reveal the invitees are of the highest social status and their attendance would have raised the host’s honour in the community (Walton & Keener).

But despite having originally accepted the invitations, now they’re full of excuses: two decide they need to inspect things they have already bought (which no person of right mind would have purchased without inspecting first), and another begs off because he is newly married, which is either a poor excuse since he has his whole life to live with her or, a crass sex joke, or passing the blame (Bailey (2008) 314f). In other words, these are bad excuses, which would add further insult to the injury of their lack of attendance (Levine & Witherington 397; Spencer 371; Bailey (2008) 315). There is quite a bit of commentary about whether the excuses call back to the reasons for which ancient Israelites could avoid military duty (Deuteronomy 20.5-7). The reference is at most ironic (Levine & Witherington 398; Green 559; NIV BTS; Spencer 372f). Even if they are not deliberate insults to the host, they reveal people “wrongly embedded in their possessions and family relationships” (Green 559; cf. Spencer 372).

Understanding all this as the slight that it is, the host is understandably upset. The question now is what will he do with his anger. One might expect him to retaliate or stew in his shame, but what he does instead is to “reprocess his anger into grace” (Bailey (2008) 316f). Lest a good feast go to waste, and wanting a full house, he sends his servant out, first to the streets and alleys, and then to the roads and hedges to invite everyone he finds there: “the poor, the disabled, the blind, and the lame.” These are the very people the Qumran community had uninvited from the messianic banquet (Bailey (2008) 317). (In the next chapter, Jesus will eat with law-breakers and the religiously unobservant — the very people the Pharisees uninvite from said banquet.) This is scandalous behaviour (Capon), but could very well be seen as a way of saving face. Rather than having a wasted expense and shameful rejection, the host uses it as an opportunity to demonstrate his overwhelming generosity and concern for those less fortunate. This breaks the system of patronage and reciprocity and establishes a new social order “grounded in gracious and uncalculating hospitality” (Green 562).

Meaning

Part of the difficulty in interpreting the parable comes from its operating on two levels. On the one hand, Jesus is talking about literal parties and earthly hospitality. The hero of the story does nothing more than do exactly what Jesus has just told his audience to do when they host parties (Levine & Witherington 399). But, the narrative context, the symbolism of table-fellowship, and the repeated mentions of the heavenly banquet demand that it also be interpreted on an eschatological level (Spencer 373; SBL; Bailey (2008) 318; NIV BTS; Marr; contra Levine). The two are closely linked in Jesus’ inaugurated eschatology — that is to say, the now-but-not-yet of Christian life in which we live in and participate in God’s Kingdom while still living within the confines of the ‘kingdoms of this world’: We reveal that we are participants in God’s kingdom by living it out in the here and now.

And so, yes, this parable has important practical applications for those of us who follow Jesus: We shouldn’t base our guest lists on who can reciprocate or on social standing, but on need. This is a simple but challenging teaching; it’s very natural to want to invite our friends into our homes; it’s quite another to invite those from whom we might expect or gain nothing.

On the Kingdom level, Jesus has rejected at least the restrictive views of the Qumran community and Pharisees, insisting that neither physical disability nor social status nor even sinfulness can exclude one from God’s Kingdom feast. But is he doing more? This parable, and especially its references to ‘those along the roads and hedges’, have long been interpreted by Christians as referring to the welcome of Gentiles (Spencer 373; Bailey (2008) 318). On the one hand, this seems out of place, since this has not been part of the conversation and the issue at play really does seem to be social hierarchy, not Jewish exclusivity (Levine & Witherington 399; Capon). But on the other hand, as we’ve seen, the whole messianic banquet idea is charged with the ‘Gentile question’. And the parable does move from the inside (the host’s friends and neighbours), to the wider community (represented by the urban streets and alleys), to outside the community’s boundaries (the roads and hedges). That last term is particularly interesting in this conversation; not only is it out of place (translations such as ‘lane’ or ‘hedge path’ are too loose but reveal just how out of place it is), but in Ephesians 2.14, it’s used to describe the ‘diving wall’ separating Jews and Gentiles (Spencer 373). In other words, even if the parable itself doesn’t address the Gentile question, quite a bit about it pushes us in that direction.

The point of all this is just to say that this is a story about a party where no one who had any ‘legitimate’ right to attend came, and so the host invited those who had no right to be there (Capon). It’s therefore a story about grace, God’s unstoppable generosity towards creation. God is throwing a party and all that’s important is that it’s a full house. In this way, it looks forward to the parables of the lost and found, which also focused on unexpected turns and big celebrations. As in those stories, the only people left out are those who simply refuse to attend (Bailey (2008) 318; NIV BTS).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

This was a wildly subversive story in its original context, rejecting widespread and longstanding cultural practices surrounding the rules of table-fellowship and its relationship to social hierarchy (Levine & Witherington 399). It also puts a stop to any common religious limiting of Isaiah’s vision of the messianic banquet, perhaps even hinting at inclusion of the Gentiles.

Contemporary Challenge

This parable can get messy if we try to allegorize it. If we do we have to ask why the poor and needy weren’t on the guest list in the first place. Compared to other images of the messianic banquet, such as the Feeding of the Five Thousand (and Four Thousand), this comes across as stingy if we take the details too far (Green 556; Marr). But this largely goes away if we just allow the story to be a story and not try to make every detail meaningful: the point is that God wants the banquet to be full, and, since those with the greatest ‘right’ to be there refuse to come, God has gone to increasingly great lengths to make this happen.

One detail in the story has a chilling history: the host’s command that the slave “compel” those outside of town to enter. St. Augustine, the Spanish Inquisition, and Christian imperialists have all used this text to justify forced-conversions (Bailey (2008) 317). Bailey believes, on cultural grounds, that all this meant was to use every means necessary to convince them that they were welcome, not to actually bring them in at sword-point: “When an outsider, with no social status, is invited to a banquet in the home of a nobleman, the outsider has a very hard time believing that he is really wanted” (Bailey (2008) 317). Arab commentator ibn al-Tayyib agrees, saying “This does not mean compulsion or force or persecution, but refers to the strength of the need for urgent solicitation, because those living outside the town see themselves as unworthy to enter into the places of the rich and eat banquets” (cited by Bailey (2008) 318). And after all, the host has already shown he will let people walk away.

More generally, there’s a huge challenge here to contemporary North American Christianity, especially White Christianity, which is so strongly associated with the upper middle class and its concerns. It’s a good reminder that we’re the people who are the least likely to be able to truly see, understand, and embody God’s grace, and are far from the centre of what God is up to in the world.

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So how has our study helped us to grow in faith and love? By reinforcing the Gospel teaching that the ‘winners’ and ‘insiders’ in this world, by whatever standards we define them, are going to have a harder time accepting God’s grace than its ‘losers’ and ‘outsiders’, it helps us to turn our attention on “the last, the least, the lost, and the little,” upon whom God’s grace can work more readily (Capon). In so doing, it asks us to truly and deeply become ‘losers’ ourselves, since that is the way to open ourselves up to grace. Again we see the fractal nature of our faith at work in the story: what is true in the Kingdom of God must be true as much as possible in our own lives.

Summary & Conclusions

Jesus, put off by the social scheming and politics he sees at a dinner party, exhorts those in attendance to set all that aside and invite instead those who have nothing to offer them in return. He then tells a story about a man who throws a lavish feast only to have his invited guests make lame excuses. Wanting his house to be filled with celebration, he sends a servant further and further out from the centre to bring in all the rabble he can find. It’s a story about the shocking grace of God, who is more than happy to look over the world’s best and brightest to populate the Kingdom, and how overconfidence in our status as ‘insiders’ and over-concern about our success and concerns in ‘this world’ can make us prone to ignore the real joys to which God is calling us.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.