We can do nothing to warrant entry into the kingdom of God nor are we getting in if we think a seat at God’s table is something to which we are entitled.
In Luke 14, we are given one of the most intriguing and unique interactions in Jesus’s earthly career. We find our Lord reclining at a table surrounded by a coterie of religious elites and other high-ranking officials. While the prospect of Jesus sitting down to have dinner with a bunch of VIP Pharisees sounds more than a little abnormal, this is the third such occasion recorded in Luke. Chapter 7 tells of a dinner with high-society Pharisees at which Jesus was the guest of honor when a woman “who was a sinner” interrupts the party to wash the feet of the Galilean Teacher with her hair (Luke 7:36–50). This prompts Jesus to convey an unforgettable lesson about divine forgiveness. On another occasion, the Lord is invited to eat with some Pharisees until he flips the mood of that dinner by launching into a diatribe against the Pharisees themselves (Luke 11:37–52). Jesus spends the majority of that meal calling out the religious aristocrats for their blatant sanctimony. Despite this display of pitiful table etiquette, in Chapter 14, Jesus is, once again, invited to share a meal with “a ruler of the Pharisees,” but it doesn’t take long to understand that this dinner is a sham (Luke 14:1–2).
No sooner had the appetizers been brought out that a man with “dropsy” descended on the soirée. “Dropsy,” a.k.a. edēma, is a kidney disease that results in painful bloating and swelling throughout one’s body, especially in the limbs. The sight of this diseased and misshapen man at such a swanky banquet undoubtedly cast an uncomfortable pall over the entire room. It makes one wonder: How did he get in there? Did he just let himself in or was he a “plant”? There is a bevy of speculation on this point, with some suggesting that this man was nothing but an unfortunate intrusion like the woman in Chapter 7. However, the presence of this sickly man and the apparent motive of the Pharisees, along with how Jesus responds, tell a different story: “One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy” (Luke 14:1–2).
Luke informs us that the ultra-spiritual syndicate “were watching him carefully.” Ever since they were embarrassed by Jesus at the last gathering, the Pharisees had put Jesus under surveillance (Luke 11:53–54), scrutinizing his every move in hopes of catching him doing or saying something that would discredit him. This is what Jesus “responds to” in verse 3, despite no question being vocalized. He saw through their schemes; he knew the game they were trying to play. This ailing man was there simply to back him into a corner. “What are you gonna do now, Jesus? If you are who you say you are, then this man needs you, but it’s the Sabbath, and we all know what the law says about working on the Sabbath! What are you gonna do about that, Jesus?” The Pharisees are proud as peacocks to see their devious plan to put Jesus in a jam unfold so seamlessly. Nevertheless, the Lord sees through their cellophane strategy, offering a definitive answer to his own question:
And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?’ But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, ‘Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?’ And they could not reply to these things (Luke 14:3–6).
The awkward and deafening silence that ensued exposed the Pharisees as lovers of their own tradition more than their fellow man. Tradition was everything for this religious sect. They prided themselves on their spiritual expertise and carried themselves as if they were the ultimate religious authorities. As one adhered to their pious conventions, the more one could maneuver up the ranks, acquiring status, power, and influence along the way, all of which was couched under the guise of religion. The Pharisees were effectively treating the kingdom of God as if it were just a “game of influence” or spiritual one-upmanship. As long as you did the right things and impressed the right people, you were “in,” you belonged. God’s law was, therefore, made to fit their system of winning righteousness by being religious. The problem, of course, was that their version of righteousness was derived from the criterion they came up with.
It is reminiscent of those ceremonies wherein celebrities celebrate themselves and their achievements based on benchmarks of success that they made up for themselves. At best, it’s self-righteous self-congratulation for the sole purpose of self-preservation, which, in a way, is precisely what the Pharisees had done with entry into the kingdom of God. As long as you played their game of religious rule-keeping, you would be rewarded with the applause and approval of your peers, which affirmed your righteous status. In the minds of the Pharisees, their arrival in the kingdom of heaven would be accompanied by the acclaim of the heavenly throng acknowledging their deservedness. After two brief albeit pointed parables dispelling the fallacy of social and spiritual gamesmanship (Luke 14:7–14), and with the awkwardness reaching a fever pitch, an unnamed brown-noser exclaims, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” (Luke 14:15). Rather than affirming his remark, however, Jesus seems to offer a counterpoint: “But he said to him . . .” (Luke 14:16). The Lord is not keen on letting this moment pass without comment, which is what prompts his parable about a great dinner party that had the most surprising guest list of all time.
Jesus tells the story of a “great banquet” to which all the most distinguished and well-to-do folks from the highest corners of society were invited to attend (Luke 14:16–17). This splendid affair was augmented by a menu that was carefully tailored to show off the extent of this nobleman’s generous affluence. After the invites went out, the time to RSVP soon arrived and one by one guests started to offer excuse after excuse as to why they could not be present (Luke 14:18–20). One guest conveys his newfound busyness after making a huge real estate investment. Another asks to be excused because he has purchased some new farm equipment and he needs to test it. A third is on cloud nine after his recent nuptials. In a sense, these are all valid reasons to skip a dinner party, but when compared to the nobleman’s banquet they appear more than a little flimsy. After all, you only decline an invitation such as this if you think you deserve it.
Only a sense of “deservedness” or entitlement would lead someone to refuse an offer of this magnitude. As each guest gave their reason to be absent, the nobleman’s hospitality was trampled underfoot. He had already gone to great lengths coordinating this whole shindig, handpicking everything from the catering to the waiters to the decor to the party favors. No wonder he “became angry” when all his guests declined (Luke 14:21). Even though this “great banquet” was on his dime, the invitees dismissed his prodigality as if they had better weekend plans. But since this nobleman delighted in generously giving out of his abundance, he quickly orders a servant to find new guests of honor to fill his dining hall, not in the corridors of government or in gated communities but in the alleyways and underpasses. “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city,” the master says, “and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame” (Luke 14:21).
Those who know they are nothing are the ones who are made to sit and enjoy a meal that never ends.
The nobleman insists that every table setting must be occupied so that those who have nothing can partake of his bounty. Even if the street-dwellers do not think they are worthy, they are compelled to come anyway (Luke 14:22–24). The servant is told to invite them in with a word of promise that removes their fear and trepidation. “No, trust me, he insisted that you come. And don’t fret about what you’re wearing, he has a dinner jacket waiting for you.” Consequently, those who were “poor and crippled and blind and lame” had no reason to be there other than the fact that the master wanted them there. Their only option was to receive this undeserved invitation by faith. The point is that entry into the kingdom of heaven operates in the same way.
To understand what the good news of Jesus Christ offers to sinners, we can liken it to an invitation to a feast that never ends. “The kingdom of heaven,” the Lord seems to say, “is like a dinner party where everyone’s invited to sit and feast with God forever.” Indeed, the quintessential image of heaven is the endless feast of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9; Isa. 25:6–9), at which the only qualification is to know that this invitation is entirely unearned. We can do nothing to warrant entry into the kingdom of God nor are we getting in if we think a seat at God’s table is something to which we are entitled. Heaven won’t be a party for you if you think it’s about who deserves to be there because no one deserves to be there. You won’t be there because you deserve to be there, because you earned your spot, because you did “enough” to impress the right people, or because you accomplished something worthy of being there. You will be there because the servant of the master went into the “streets and lanes” and hauled your crippled and disheveled body out of the ditch to give you a seat at the table.
Like the servant in the story, Jesus goes into the very worst alleys of sin and death to find sinners to sit at his Father’s table. Christ finds his guests of honor in the gutter and summons them to a dinner that he pays for on his own dime, that is with his own life. “We are saved,” notes Robert Capon in his Parables of Judgment, “only by our acceptance of a party already in progress, and God has paid for that party at the price of his own death” (122). Therefore, the only way to get a seat at the table is to freely accept the Master’s invitation. After all, it’s not deservedness that gets you in, it’s grace. “This parable,” Capon writes elsewhere, “says that we are going to be dealt with in spite of our deservings, not according to them. Grace as portrayed here works only on the untouchable, the unpardonable, and the unacceptable. It works, in short, by raising the dead, not by rewarding the living” (133). Those who know they are nothing are the ones who are made to sit and enjoy a meal that never ends.
