Lunch and dinner – 30 August 2013

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, 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.” [Luke 14: 12-14]

This gospel is actually quite fun.  Jesus says, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbours, to lunch or dinner.  The reason is that they might reciprocate and invite you to their homes.  But that is precisely what we get up to, and what we think matters.  In this way a lot of people derive pleasure and companionship, and make sure nothing happens they don’t know about.  There are those who love giving hospitality in their homes, and love preparing good food.  Along the way, and maybe after the guests have gone, we sometimes indulge in games of comparison about homes and decor, and food, always in a kindly way of course.  Jesus, undaunted, moves right along:  Make sure instead you invite the crippled, the lame and the blind.  The reason...?  Simply that they can’t repay you.  Well, there are some dangers lurking there I would think, particularly if we are tempted to come over all virtuous or even superior. 

Now, yet again, with these narratives, it is better not to have left our brains and imagination at home.  Mahurangi in 2013 differs in some respects from Galilee in 30 AD.  Who are now the crippled, the lame and the blind...?  In contemplative life and awareness, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, we begin to make friends with our real selves behind our facades and the ways we hope we appear to others.  And we discover that in important respects we are the needy.  At any rate, we come to see that it is simply unsustainable and certainly unsatisfying to regard ourselves as serenely in control, arbiters of taste, management success, or of wisdom.  We have greeted humility, learned and acquired through our experiences, and we have found we were not essentially different from the crippled, the lame and the blind – if maybe for the time being a little more mobile and independent.  Part of humility is also that we found along the way that we often don’t possess answers or even satisfying responses to life’s difficult questions. 

You will be blessed, says Jesus in this gospel.  Can it be that the blessing is simply the gift of being grateful that we have been sustained.  I have learned to be content, writes St Paul, with whatever I have [Phil 4:11].  The Greek word Paul chooses here meaning “content”, αυταρχης, actually has little or nothing to do with how we are feeling.  It means literally “independent, self-sufficient” – on the one hand grateful, on the other hand needing nothing more.  I like to think the joke in this story is that each person at our dinner table is crippled, lame or blind, in some respect at least, just like me, whatever they say.  Isn’t that amazing.  Jesus noticed these things.