Sermon for Sunday, June 13, 2007

A Text of Terror: The Great Banquet Parable

by

Dr. Jonathan L. Reed
Disciple Graduation

Scripture:  Luke 14: 15-24

¹⁵ One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, "Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!"  ¹⁶ Then Jesus said to him, "Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. ¹⁷ At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, "Come; for everything is ready now.'  ¹⁸ But 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.'  ¹⁹ Another said, "I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.' ²⁰ Another said, "I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.'  ²¹ So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, "Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.'  ²² And the slave said, "Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.'  ²³ Then 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. ²⁴ For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.' "

We all remember, exactly and vividly, where we were on that fateful day on September 11^th. The images of plane and tower, fire and smoke, rescuer and victim are seared in our minds. And indeed, 9/11 has become a cipher for tragedy, we can’t think of it as anything but a terrible day. After 9/11, our world changed, or maybe, we in the United States were transformed as we became aware of how most of the rest of the world lives and has lived throughout history, in fear of being victimized and under the threat of violence.

Well before 9/11, biblical scholars coined the term “text of terror” to describe some scriptures that are unsettling in their radicality. They are called texts of terror because they undermine the way the listener looks at and lives in the world. Many of Jesus’ parables have been labeled texts of terror. Most of Jesus’ parables tease the listener into active thought, to put it mildly, or to put it more bluntly, some of Jesus parables terrorize his listeners in the sense of that word’s Latin root terrere, to cause to tremble, to cause fear. While I am convinced that Jesus absolutely renounces physical violence, some of Jesus’ parables do psychological violence to the comfortable world which we as listeners try so hard to hold together.

Today’s terrorists’ main weapon is fear, they exploit the media by staging dramatic acts of violence aimed more at the largest possible audience than the actual victims themselves. Whether it be a terrorist act in New York, Madrid, London, Tel Aviv or Baghdad, after we see it on TV, we pause to reflect on our daily lives, and worry about continuing our daily patterns… and we all repeat the mantra that to defeat the terrorists, we must go about our lives as normal, and make it business as usual.

This morning I ask you to keep that strategy the back of your minds and ask, to what extent do we defeat Jesus by going about our lives as normal and business as usual after we hear his parables?  Be open to what Jesus asked of his audience then in first century Galilee and today in twenty-first century Highlands Ranch.

But let me warn you, Jesus’ parables do not provide simple, tidy, answers, but instead they raise complex questions. In this sense, parables are not conclusive but indicative; they do not settle theological problems but point us in new directions and invite us on a journey. Please join me on a journey this morning launched by Luke’s version of the parable of the Great Banquet; what I think is a text of terror.

At its core, the parable we just heard is simple. Jesus is at a banquet of a ruling Pharisee. What must have been a wealthy person, and responds to someone’s comment who shouts out “blessed is he who eats in the kingdom of God.” To that, Jesus tells a parable. It goes as follows. A wealthy man wants to host a banquet, he invites his friends, who seem to be rich also, but they all reject his invitation. Enraged, he invites the poor and outcasts who can’t repay him. They have a feast.  That’s the kingdom of God.

That’s the kingdom of God? A rich person inviting some poor people to dinner? Maybe.

If you think of my sermon as a meal, then everything I have said so far was the appetizer, and what I am about to say will take the form of four-courses, the first course, the Anthropology of Eating, the second course Banquets in the Roman World, the third course, early Christian dinners, and finally, maybe consider it dessert that will be hard to swallow, I will look at some challenging implications, both personal and theological.

First Course. The Anthropology of Eating.

I’ve spent much of my adult life working on archaeological excavations in Galilee, at the sites of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee and at Sepphoris not far from Jesus’ hometown Nazareth. But I’ve always hated the question repeated by friends and relatives each summer when I returned, “Did you find anything?”  You see, I work in domestic areas, houses of everyday people, and what I find is broken pottery, earth-beaten floors, sometimes even plastered but rarely mosaic or marble, discarded scraps, bones, mostly from inside the homes of peasants, villagers, the urban poor and on rare occasions the urban rich. No palaces of Herod Great for me, no Tomb of Jesus, no gold or silver. I may want to be Indiana Jones with hat, whip, and girl at my side coming home with treasures, but that ain’t me.

Nevertheless, I’ve been able to make some interesting observations about how people ate in Jesus’ Galilee and across the Roman world. Anthropologists have long suggested that a culture’s rules and patterns for eating together reflect that culture’s basic values and structures. The term they use is co-mensality, from the Latin mensa, table, and co, together. Anthropologists use the term commensality and look at how groups or societies eat at the table together. In short, how you eat is a microcosm of your society. Not so much individually, you are what you eat, but collectively, we are how we eat.

That, by the way, is a bit frightening if you think of American society today. Our number one export is fast food, we try to eat as quickly as possible and then discard a mass of paper, cardboard, and plastic when we’re done. We love the drive through, so we can get it in and out and eat alone on the road. And we invented the TV dinner—why talk when you can watch. Remember the old unspoken rules of exchange that hopefully don’t but probably do still apply today? When I was young and in High School the boy paid for dinner, but there was an implicit agreement that some day the girl would have to “pay up.”  (prom tickets).  That’s our culture at its worst. Even at its best, we can see our values, relationships, and hierarchies reflected in the way we come together at the table. Think only of the classic Thanksgiving Dinner, women and girls do all the work, men and boys lay around the TV and watch football, but who gets the ceremonial first cut after he sharpens the knife?  The father.

Now the Second Course, Banquets in the Roman Empire.

Let’s take a look at the parable of the great banquet in Jesus’ setting, in his context, and see why it’s considered a “text of terror” given the Roman empire’s commensality practices. In the ancient world of Jesus, archaeology and history teaches us that the banquets were not only design to entertain but to display social stratification, it was an opportunity to rank people and to divide between the haves and the havenots, it was a time to put people in their place. Excavations all across the one-time Roman empire show that the wealthy build their houses with dining rooms opening onto the street, so that through the wide doors everyone outside could glance in and get some sense of the host’s wealth. Poor beggars would sit outside along the street, like in another of Jesus’ parables, that of Lazarus and Dives, and beg for leftovers from the table. At the banquet itself, Roman society’s rigid social hierarchy was on display. The host reclined at one side, his wealthy guests of honor, from whom he no doubt expected return invitations, would sit at his right and left. Lower class citizens sat on chairs or stood to eat, and the lowest classes, freedmen, would often sit on the floor crowded in the corners.

One Roman poet complained bitterly about this system. Keep in mind that most poets in antiquity, like so many artists today, were starving. He wrote once after being invited to a dinner party of a rich. “While a group of invited guests looks on, you alone feast on the delicacies.” About the different meals served at the same banquet, he quipped ‘…why do I dine without you, even while I dine with you?” …

Pliny the Younger, a Roman statesman and amateur philosopher from the second century, tells this story when he was invited as the guest of honor to a banquet. And I quote: “Some very elegant dishes were served up to the host and me; to others of some wealth a few nice dishes were also served, but those that were served to the rest were cheap and paltry. The host has divided up into jars three kinds of wine … One for himself and me, the next for his friends of a lower order, the third for his freedman and mine (servants above the status of slave).” Knowing Pliny to be of high moral character, another guest leaned over to him and asked him if he approved of this common practice. “Not at all,” Pliny said, “I give all my company the same meal, for when I make an invitation; it is to dine, not to discriminate. Every man I treat as equal when I admit them to my table.” Even freedmen, Pliny was asked. “Even them, for on these occasions I treat them as equal.” A radical position, by this pagan Pliny, maybe not too far from the Kingdom of God, as Jesus might say. But … there’s more to the story and his attitude. When asked again by the guest, “This must put you to great expense,” Pliny responded “not at all, I assure you, for you must know that my freedmen then do not drink my wine, but I drink theirs.”

Pliny in his meal simply keeps the best wine for himself, and lowers himself, condescending to a lower level, but he’s certainly not sharing from his abundance, the sense of equality is merely for show. It’s for people like Pliny that Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet was a text of terror. But it might also have been a text of terror for the earliest Christians.

This leads to our Third Course this morning, The Meaning of Early Christian Meals

The apostle Paul writes some scathing words to the wealthy Christians at Corinth for how they practiced the Lord’s Supper, which at the time was not just a ritual meal as it is in most Christian congregations today, but a full meal in which everyone brought what they had and they shared. Not so at Corinth, since Paul characterizes their meals as follows: “when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with his own supper, and one goes hungry as another gets drunk.” Instead of sharing, there were at Corinth a series of private meals, and of course those better off had better meals and better wine, more wine, and were apparently even getting drunk on it. Paul asks “Do you show contempt for the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” What made the Lord’s Supper at Corinth the Lord’s, and what made the meal in Jesus’ banquet parable the kingdom of God, I think, is that they are communal share-meals, inspired as a response to Jesus; teaching including the parable of the great banquet.

What I mean by that is that originally the Lord’s Supper was a meal to which those early Christians brought whatever they had and shared it among one another. If you had something you gave, if you had nothing you were not discriminated against but received an equal portion. What made the meal intrinsically sacred was its equality and its openness, moreso than the explicit ritual words spoken at it. Let me put that in different words. What makes communion holy, what makes it an act of the kingdom of God, is that at communion, we are all equal, and to it, we are all invited. All kinds of people are invited (even people I don’t like). The Lord’s Supper in the early Church was not handout, not charity, nor was it welfare, but an attempt to participate in a new creation that acknowledged God as the owner of all things and humans as but stewards of a world not their own.

Finally, the fourth course of dessert.

I said earlier that that Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet was a text of terror for people like Pliny. And it was a text of terror for the early wealthy Christians. But it might also be a text of terror for people like me.

Family Dinners this summer (Jewish friends, German visitor) wish I could control them all and dictate who comes and who eats what.

At the material level, the story of the banquet reminds us to accept people for who they are and not try to use social occasions for selfish gain. But is that it; is the parable merely a lesson in dining etiquette? There would seem to be deeper spiritual meaning to the parable, but to spiritualize the parables is dangerous, because sometimes we domesticate their radicality in the process. In fact we can already see that tendency in the Gospels themselves, as Matthew takes Jesus’ original parable and changes it into an allegory. His version is about a king (God) who invites a set of people (the Jews) to his feast, but they refuse, and go so far as to kill his son (Jesus) whom the king sent to invite them again. The king then destroys that city (Jerusalem), invites those outside the city (the Gentiles) but only those with proper clothing (ie, Matthew’s orthodoxy) are allowed to stay for dinner. That’s a nice, tidy, and comfortable interpretation of the parable, all danger is avoided for oneself and one’s own community, but woe to the others. I’m not sure that is what Jesus intended, however, but this is the problem I have with the Bible. It always seems to include a call for radical inclusion and justice, whether in the Old Testament Prophets or in the New Testament parables, which are softened or domesticated by other portions of scripture. The challenge for Christians is to know which to follow.

As I reflect on the divisions in my Church, the Church of the Brethern, a small, mostly progressive Anabaptist tradition with roots in 18^th century Germany, we are having, like so many Churches in America, a debate about who we are going to let in. The question today is do we let homosexuals to our banquet? It’s not unlike the older question of past centuries of whether or not descendents of slaves are welcome or whether or not Native Americans are welcome. Just like in those debates, I am sure in this debate over homosexuality, we can find this or that verse, this or that prescription to support our views. But if we look to Jesus’ parable of the banquet, then it really is a text of terror, not just because it points to admitting all kinds of people in, but because it reminds us that the banquet is not ours. It is God’s. And it is difficult to live up to the meaning of the parable, which calls me to participate in a new creation that acknowledges God as the owner of all things and me as a steward in a world and Church not my own.

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