Homily, August 31, 2025, Rev. Holly Cardone

Jesus Gets Invited to Dinner August 31, 2025 Luke 14:1, 7-14

Last Sunday we heard the gospel story of Jesus healing the woman who had been bent over for 18 years. The leader of the synagogue called Jesus out about healing on the Sabbath. Jesus called the religious leaders hypocrites and challenged every notion about the Sabbath Jews had always had.    Now, all eyes are on Jesus. So much so, that on the occasion he is invited to dinner at the house of the leader of the Pharisees, they are watching him. 

            And Jesus doesn’t miss a thing. He does not miss an opportunity to turn life on its head for any crowd. To tell them a parable or work a miracle or heal someone that will directly contradict everything his contemporaries know about how God works and how life is supposed to be.

            Noticing how each had tried to elbow into the place of honor, he says, from The Message by Eugene Peterson (a pastor and scholar) was created in the 1990s–early 2000s to make Scripture sound like the kind of language people actually speak — conversational, vivid, and accessible. “When someone invites you to dinner, don’t take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he’ll come and call out in front of everybody, ‘You’re in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.’ Red-faced, you’ll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left.

“When you’re invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, ‘Friend, come up to the front.’ That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I’m saying is, if you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face. But if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”

Then he turned to the host. “The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.”

            This is the story of the messianic banquet. The image for Jews, of a great banquet, when God gathers His people into His kingdom under the Messiah’s reign. Where those worthy and righteous would get the best seats. The people who are impure, unclean, disabled, bent over, mentally ill,  aren’t going to be part of that banquet. They were not allowed to join the assembly of the God. 

The reason this parable would have been so shocking to Jesus’s audience is because hospitality was a high moral ideal, a kind of “law of the desert.” Nomads and semi-nomadic people needed hospitality for their own survival. Welcoming a stranger into your tent ensured the same treatment when you were in need. In the ancient world there was this expectation that your host would provide food, shelter and protection for the foreigner. But hospitality was always supposed to be reciprocated. When you do something for someone else, show hospitality, then you can be assured that the same would be done for you when you were in need.

            But Jesus turns this whole idea on its head. Upside down. Over and over again Jesus is turning upside down those paradigms, ways of being in the ancient world, that people had been living out for centuries. The way it had always been done and telling stories and healing and being an example of doing the exact opposite. You can see how this would make the Pharisees crazy. Everything they have been teaching, Jesus says and does the opposite. 

Here, the grace of God trumps the law. Because what has always been done, this desert law of hospitality, Jesus says, don’t worry about being paid back. Don’t worry about reciprocation. Give and expect nothing.

I can remember as a kid, complaining about something that I didn’t get and someone else did, and I’d cry that it wasn’t fair, and my mom would say, “Life’s not fair.”

That’s a hard lesson. And grace is not fair either. Matthew 5:45, “It rains on the just and the unjust alike.”

This is who Jesus says God is. Jesus is asking us to be a little bit like God. Extend that grace to each other and to someone who will least likely be expecting it. Repayment will come in the least expected ways. This is grace. And our world needs a lot of it. 

I have a friend who just could not give up drinking. A hard case. He would stop drinking, 30, 60, 90 days, and I’d get angry and frustrated and wonder what was his problem. And I’d reach through my anger and when he was drunk and couldn’t leave his apartment I called and asked if he needed something. Can I do anything? You have to be really careful when you ask this question because the other person might just say, as a matter of fact, yes.  And he said he needed some food but couldn’t drive his car to the market. So, I drove down to Koreatown from my house on a hot summer afternoon and went to the market and delivered him some food. 

How many times in my life had someone just extended some grace to me when I didn’t deserve it. When they gave me the best seat, or the best cut of meat, or just said ok, no problem, when I had to cancel plans one too many times. Grace. 

And the last verse of Luke today:

But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you…

I found this quote attributed to John Bunyon, English writer of The Pilgrim’s Progress and puritan preacher. “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."

Give without expectation of what you might receive back. Our lives are God’s gift to us. What we do with that is our gift back to God. In this period in the world where war, violence, and oppression lead the news headlines, extend Grace to everyone you meet whether they deserve it or not.

Amen