Do You Want To Go To Dinner?...Continued from page 1

We don’t attend the dinner because we have our own agendas.  After a long day of work, we relax in our worn-through recliners to watch some TV.  We settle into our schedule, but before we become too comfortable, suddenly, we are shaken by a fury rising just outside our windows.  We scurry to see what is happening, only to find the streets teeming with the “poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”  A circus of the marginalized complete with wheelchairs, seeing-eye dogs, tattered pants, and scooters, limping up the road to dinner.  Our cheeks twinge, a small smile forms, our heads shake just slightly, and a quiet laughter rumbles.  This host must be crazy to invite all these people just because we couldn’t go.  We, like our excused friends in the parable, retire to our own specially prepared meals.  No company, but good food.  We schedule life on our terms and someday the time may come to attend the dinner, but “not now, maybe next time.”     

The host was mad when he received the regrets.  All the guests had agreed to come and then all backed out at the last minute.  But it doesn’t bother us that the host gets upset at first.  We’ve been snubbed, stood up; it hurts.  We like to hear “the owner of the house became angry.”  He should!  He was snubbed.  When he tells his servant at the end, “For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner,” we think, “right on, you get’em!”  But the story ends there, and if we were thinking God was the host of this party, we’ve got problems. 

Even though I turned my friends down when they asked me to go out with them, they called back, and, well, we went the next week.  Friends call back ? shouldn’t God?  Shouldn’t God understand that we live busy lives?  In this parable, our “good-friend-God” is no more.  It’s like running into someone you didn’t get along with so well in high school and thinking that time heals all wounds, only to discover it doesn’t.  Or perhaps, it’s running into a former church member, one who has been hurt by this place, and expecting them to forgive, forget, return, and start tithing, but they don’t.  The hurt is too deep.  Jesus flips our expectations of reconciliation, our expectations that everyone will end up at the dinner.  Here there is no forgiveness, no coming to terms, no reunion, no reconciliation. 

Are you confused?  I am.  This parable leaves us confused.  Every group addressed in or by this parable has their expectations flipped by Jesus’ words and is left confused.  Think of the poor, crippled, blind, and lame; they must be confused.  What was someone so wealthy, so well off, doing inviting them to dinner?  Meanwhile the invited guests become confused when they realize they’ve been shut out ? black listed!  Think of the people first hearing this story.  Luke’s gospel has Jesus telling this parable while at a dinner party in the home of a wealthy Pharisee!  He’s telling a parable suggesting the people with whom he is eating are the one’s locked out of the dinner.  This isn’t preaching to the choir; this is condemning the choir.  Jesus flips all our expectations, and we are left confused.