So, this morning we are continuing with our series on ‘Shared Practices’ and this week we are exploring the idea of the shared practice of hospitality. The New Testament term for hospitality is ‘philoxenia’ and is a compound word made up of ‘philo’ meaning ‘love’ and ‘xenos’ means stranger or foreigner, therefore philoxenia or ‘hospitality’ means the love or welcome of the stranger. It is the opposite of xenophobia, which is the fear or dislike of the stranger. It is an incredibly important practice for the church to engage with at this time because of the divisiveness, tribalism, and the breakdown of trust within our society. The church has a rich history of hospitality and at such a time as this, it should be modelling something profoundly different to the exclusion and fear we see around us.

“Hospitality – The Love or Welcome of the Stranger”

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Something that is key to bear in mind is that hospitality is first and foremost rooted in who God is and how he has acted toward his people. He provides bread, meat, and water in the wilderness, allows them to stay as guests in his land, and in Psalm 23 he prepares a table for the Psalmist, anoints his had with oil, keeps his cup continually filled, and allows him to dwell safely in his home. Hospitality also became a prophetic picture of the future coming of the kingdom of God as the restoration is pictured as a great feast of ‘feast of rich food and well-aged wines for all people’ and where ‘death is swallowed up forever (Isa. 25:6-9). It was out of this kindness and generosity, that the people of God were called to respond in kind toward one another, other peoples, and especially the weak and vulnerable. This brings us to our text for today.

Luke 14:15-24 – Parable of the Great Feast

The context of this passage is Jesus sharing a meal at the home of a prominent Pharisee where others were also present and it begins with one of those present blurting out ‘blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God’. Earlier I had mentioned that passage from Isaiah that described the coming of God’s kingdom in terms of a great banquet for feast and it is this that the guest is drawing on in his statement that the person who is welcomed to this meal is truly blessed. It is a statement about who will, and who won’t, get to be part of the kingdom of God.

This is the context and the question that provokes Jesus to respond with this parable. He begins by saying…

“A certain man gave a large banquet and invited many.
And he sent his servant at the hour of the banquet
to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is now ready.’

It was customary when hosting a meal to send out two invites: The initial one, seen in 14:16, allows the guests to weigh up whether this is an invitation that would be something they should attend, and it also helps the host know how much preparation will be needed. The second invite, found in 14:17, is the one that informs those coming that the banquet is now ready to attend. Note that there is a shift here from the future hope of feasting in the kingdom of God to the host of the great banquet saying ‘come, for everything is ready now! This change of timing presses home the importance of the present moment for all those who were currently dining with him and speaks of the kingdom of God as a present reality and not just a future hope.

At this point in the parable, there would be great social expectation that those who said they would be present would do so and the host’s reputation and honour would be at stake if they went back on their promise. Note what happens…

‘they all alike began to make excuses!

The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land,
and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’
Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen,
and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’
Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’

What happens next?

‘So the slave returned and reported this to his master.
Then the owner of the house became angry’

The response of the host to these excuses is that he became angry and enraged. Why? Well, scholars who have studied the social context of this time have suggested that these are weak excuses and, according to Kenneth Bailey, ‘an implausible excuse is a deliberate public insult’. He says that in that day no-one would have bought a field without inspecting it or yoke of oxen without trying them, and that the last excuse is ‘unspeakably offensive’ and the equivalent of saying ‘I have a woman in the back of the house, and I am busy with her’. These guests might be masking their true reasons for not coming with superficial excuses or they might genuinely be too preoccupied the things of life that they refuse to come: either way these excuses after initially saying yes, would be an egregious personal insult to the host, a complete waste of his time and money, and a knock to his sense of honour. In his anger he tells his servant to…

Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town
and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’

It was the custom of the day to only invite to your feasts those people who were in your social group and could repay you or those who might be able to help move you up the social ladder. Who you ate with, where you sat at the table, what you ate, who presided over the meal, were all matters of identity and social hierarchy that were maintained by things like banquets and feasts. You would never dream of inviting someone from the lower social ranks as this would negatively affect your own social standing, but this is precisely what the host does.

He begins by inviting ‘the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame’, a group of people who were explicitly excluded by other Jewish groups of the time. They were the ones who were not invited to the parties, those left on the outside, and therefore those normally thought to be excluded from the kingdom of God.

However, just moments before telling this parable, Jesus turns the normal social conventions around hospitality upside-down and inside-out by giving explicit and radical instructions regarding what it means to be a host and to show hospitality. He says:

“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 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, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Don’t follow the way of the world and only invite those who can repay and reciprocate your hospitality because that would be your reward. Instead, invite those who cannot repay you for then, and only then, will you be repaid by God. Radical Christ-like hospitality means storing up treasure for yourself in heaven where you will be rewarded by God himself!

A fascinating point here is that there is a sense of progression and movement in the parable from the centre to the margins. Biblical scholar Richard Rohrbaugh has argued that the city of the first century had walled enclosures inside that separated the elites in the centre from the non-elites in the outer areas. The host has instructed the servant to go out into the streets and lanes of the town, into the realm of these ‘non-elites’ in order to invite them in.

After doing this, the servant says…

‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’

So the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes,
and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.

The geographic movement away from the centre, begun with the first invite, continues here as the servant is now sent to ‘the roads and lanes’ (tas hodous kai phragmous) to ‘compel people to come in’. According to Rohrbaugh,the terms ‘roads and lanes’ describe the area outside of the city walls that was ‘inhabited by both outcasts and those requiring access to the city but not permitted to live within it’.. Lukan scholar Joel Green says that this would be ‘the location of the dwellings of those of low status, whether due to their despised occupation, their family heritage, their religious impurity, their poverty, or some other cause’ and that ‘this householder will include anyone among his table guests—that is, no one is too sullied, too wretched, to be counted as a friend at table’. These are the people who were considered more socially marginalised and excluded than the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame that had previously been invitedThe host has sent his servant even further afield both geographically and socially in order to find people to bring to the feast.

Notice that this group are not just invited, they are compelled or made to come in to the feast. Why the reluctance? Probably because they knew they could not repay or reciprocate this invitation and blessing and would therefore be worried about the implications of attending. This invitation is pure grace for the people cannot repay or reciprocate this blessing. In the words of the prophet Isaiah…

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

However, despite the sense of welcome and celebration, the parable ends with the foreboding statement…

‘For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner’

These closing words echo and mirror the opening words of the parable that spoke of the many had been invited to the dinner. This suggests that the primary intention of the parable is to challenge and warn the hearers about the consequences of rejecting the invitation to the feast. In context, the invitation to the feast comes in the proclamation of the gospel and there were some who were in danger of missing out on the blessing of the kingdom of God because they were rejecting it.

However, this parable is not just about who is in danger of being excluded, it is also about the surprise of who will be included. The theme of the gospel as being ‘good news to the poor’ continues here as the invitation is extended to the social outcasts and vagabonds of the day. This highlights the consistent theme of God’s gracious welcome to all people regardless of social status or class. As theologian and mental health practitioner, John Swinton, says, ‘It is not right … to say that Jesus sat with the marginalised. He certainly sat with those whom religious society had excluded and rejected as unclean and unworthy of attention. However, in sitting with such people, Jesus, who is God, actually shifted the margins. Now, it was the religious authorities that were marginalised’. To refuse to welcome the marginalised in society is to marginalise ourselves from God’s purposes in the world but to embrace the call to show welcome and hospitality to all people regardless of who they are or what we get in return, is to find ourselves right in the centre of God’s work in the world.

The Call of the Church

That this kind of hospitality is the call of the church is clear from the number of times that the New Testament calls us to such a response. The work of welcoming all people begins within the church family as we are exhorted to

• ‘Welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you’ and to be ‘hospitable to one another without complaining’ (Rom. 15:7; 1 Pet. 4:9)

But this does not stop at the boundaries of the community however, because it also says to..

• Extend or practice hospitality to strangers’ – Rom. 12:13
• And to ‘not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels without knowing it’! Heb. 13:2.

To practice this kind of lifestyle, to make it part of the DNA of our church community, is to simply extend and continue the kingdom way of being that began with Jesus. For Jesus, sharing a home, a meal, a cuppa with someone was one of the primary ways that he embodied and furthered the kingdom of God. For the Pharisees it was a case of ‘repent, get your life together and then we can have fellowship’, but Jesus turned this upside down and said, ‘no, I will come and fellowship with you and out of this relationship will come the opportunity to repent and sort your life out’. Relationship, fellowship, hospitality came first and this led to transformation. When Jesus was challenged to justify his eating and drinking with sinners, he said, ‘its not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick’.

If you read the book of Acts, the early church were a little slow to catch up with all that God was doing in the world, but they did continue the practice of sharing meals together and with strangers. This was the way that kingdom of God advanced and made such an impact in the ancient world. Through radical kingdom focused hospitality time spent eating and drinking around shared tables with those who were different from themselves, the church shook the powers that be to the core. The gospel advanced one meal at a time.

So, if we go back to the start, to shared practices, the goal is for us to figure out how we implement this practice into our lives today and it is this that we will be tackling on Sunday.