10 - Chapter 10
CHAPTER X THE GREAT SUPPER Luk 14:15-24; Mat 22:1-46. IN the Sower the problem was put from the point of view of the evangelist: ’ Why does our appeal so often fall on deaf ears? ’ but the Great Supper is a parable for the people. ’ The feast is spread: why will ye not come? ’ The picture, too, is different; here we have no demand for fruit of seed that has been sown, but an invitation to a joyous experience. This is one of Jesus’ favourite thoughts: the Kingdom as social joy, as the satisfaction of hunger, the fulfilment of desire. ’ They shall come from east and west and from north and south and take their places at the feast in God’s kingdom ’ (Luk 13:28). “ Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” Nor was the host content with providing the feast; he could not rest till every seat was occupied, till the guest-chamber was filled. In the Sower the explanation of fruitlessness was that the ground had not been prepared. That leaves us with the question: ’ If the ground is carefully prepared, ploughed and harrowed and weeded and given a sufficiency of soil, is the harvest certain? ’ Even in the sphere of agriculture, the result is still contingent; frost, or deficient rain, or excessive rain, or blight or birds or insects or animals, may blast the hopes of the farmer, however careful his work of preparation. In the spiritual sphere we have to reckon with free will; the invited guests are not brought into the kingdom by violence, The first guest pleads that he is engaged in the operation known to economists as extensive agriculture. Having some capital to spare he thinks he can best use it in taking in some more ground. He wants one of the healthiest and most satisfying of all joys, the joy of looking on a piece of God’s earth and saying: “ This is mine, to do with it what I will.” The second is engaged in intensive agriculture. His superfluous capital he proposes to use in cultivating more efficiently the ground he has; so he has bought five more pairs of bullocks and now wants the thrill of seeing his new teams at work. The third intimates that he has just got married: ’ That is why / cannot come.”
They were all apparently, certainly the first two, busy men, but it was not their work that kept them from the feast. The first wanted to see his new field, the second to try his new bullocks, the third to be with his new wife.
They were all prosperous men, extending the sphere of their operations and responsibilities; it was in this “ newness “ that their trouble lay. The things they were doing were all things that could wait, but they would not wait. In no case was it vice that kept them from the feast. They were all respectable men, engaged in useful work, and presumably good citizens; but they were preoccupied. Their minds were so engrossed with the things that had caught their attention at the moment that they forgot that there were other people in the world beside themselves and that life held other interests than theirs. At first sight the parable seems to suggest a depreciation of work or of family life. In so many of his parables Jesus made the worker, especially the agricultural worker, his hero, that we may be sure this first impression is wrong; yet it need not be altogether wrong. As Dr. Marshall pointed out a generation ago the farmer, especially the peasant proprietor, is under a grave temptation to allow his work to dwarf every other consideration, to lead him to forget the claims not only of culture, not only of the arts and graces of life, but even of happiness, of health and comfort, nay of common decency. But there is a much bigger question involved.
Nowadays we scorn the teaching of the third chapter of Genesis that work is a curse imposed on us as a penalty for the sin of our first parents. But the Genesis story does not suggest that the ideal for man is a state of chronic idleness. The curse it has in view is not labour, but a particular kind of labour, the unremitting toil of hard and bitter wrestling with a reluctant soil. When we think of it dispassionately, is there not a certain degradation in the fact that so much of the time, the energy, the thought of so large a proportion of the population even in the most advanced countries, should be devoted to the satisfaction of our elementary economic needs? In ancient Athens, the citizens made the intellectual life possible for themselves by handing over the drudgery to slaves, as the favoured few in our day hand it over to the wage-earners. It is true also that those forms of labour which do not turn men into robots, which are not essentially disgusting, and which leave the worker a certain amount of leisure, are consistent with lives of a lofty and even a noble quality. The fact remains that so long as the economic motive reigns supreme, so long as for multitudes life is one long, hard struggle for the means of subsistence, the human race is at an elementary stage. For the first time in history modern science is pointing to us a better way. The pains from which the world suffers to-day are “ growing “pains. We are already able to produce, not faster than the world can consume, but faster than the world can buy, and our means of production are increasing by leaps and bounds. When our statesmen and economists have found out for us how to lay hold of and enjoy the riches that the earth is ready to pour into our lap, then there is good reason to hope that we shall at last enter our inheritance. Then shall all men be able to look up, not only at the close of the day as the darkness falls, but oftentimes when the sun is yet shining, look up from their fields and their bullocks, hearken and respond to the invitation from the great Lord of all to come to the feast, the feast of intellectual and artistic and spiritual treasures to which he daily invites us, in the palace which it is his joy to see filled with guests. In both accounts of the parable the feast was in celebration of some joyous event in the life of one whom the guests should have delighted to honour. So obsessed were they with the claims of their own self-advancement that they had no sympathy with their friend’s joy. There is a time to do our own work and there is a time to think of others. There is a time to work, and there is a time to see our work in its relative unimportance, to ask ourselves whether our work is our servant or our master. The invited guests did not attend the banquet, because they had no sense of need; they were not hungry, whether for food or for fellowship.
They felt no need of anyone, and had no idea that anyone, least of all their king, could feel need of them. So the invitation went to those who would appreciate it, to the hungry and the lonely, to those who knew that they were poor and naked and had need of all things. In this parable, as elsewhere, Jesus speaks of the hunger in the heart of God, hunger for his children, for their loyalty, for their devotion and their love. It is his will, his fixed determination, that his house shall be filled. The invited guests would not come; the punishment was that they were not allowed to come; they were held to their choice. ’ This is the judgment: that the Light has come into the world and men have loved the darkness rather than the light “ (John 3:19). The door into the festal chamber was shut; thev had shut it with their own hands.
It seems clear that for Luke the guests first invited were the Jews, who tried more or less successfully to keep the Law; that the city outcasts next invited were the tax-collectors and “ sinners; ’ and that the offscourings of the country lanes invited last were the Gentiles.
(In the Wicked Vinedressers also, the Vineyard was given to others only when the first Vinedressers, the Jewish leaders, proved unworthy.) Can we believe that this conception of the Gentile mission as an after-thought, of the Gentiles as being brought into the Kingdom as poor substitutes only when the Jews declined to enter, represented the mind of Jesus?
Doubtless this was a common enough view among the first Christian preachers. It is a conception we get in the Acts. “ Since you (Jews) thrust the word of God from you... lo! we turn to the Gentiles ’ (Acts 13:46). But Jesus’ tribute to the men of Nineveh, to Naaman, the Queen of Sheba, to the Roman centurion and the Syrophenician woman, forbid us to think that in his scheme of things the whole Gentile world held this insignificant place. To the last the Temple was for him a house of prayer “ for all nations.” In his account of Peter’s vision at Joppa, Luke himself (Acts 10:1-48) gives us the true mind of Christ. The same Lord who had made all foods clean and made all peoples clean, had declared that the whole distinction between clean and unclean was a tragic misunderstanding of the mind of God.