03.18. THE GREAT SUPPER

THE GREAT SUPPER

Luke 14:16-24 The occasion of this Parable is carefully explained by Luke. One Sabbath-day, a leading Pharisee of the metropolis had invited a large and apparently distinguished company to dinner; possibly the guests were invited on the express understanding that they would have an opportunity of conversing with Jesus more freely than they could in a public place; possibly Jesus was a casual guest, asked at the moment. At all events the innate authority which shone through His bearing and conversation at once disarmed His intended critics, and instead of a spirited debate they found themselves forming an audience to this dangerous teacher. It was strictly tabletalk our Lord here indulged in. His remarks, though not calculated to make either host or guests feel quite at their ease, were seasonable. Perhaps His advice to guests that they should modestly take the lowest place is rendered less needful in our own society, in which any obtrusive assumption of precedence would be considered a breach of good manners. And yet there are still extant characters which by kindred vices become the bane of all genial and sociable intercourse. There is the man who uses every dinner table as an occasion for the exhibition of his own wit or knowledge or powers of conversation. .There is the man who is uncomfortable and unhappy all the evening if he does not meet with full recognition of his importance. There is the woman who is offended if you ask her to sit at the same table with those whom she considers much her inferiors in station. There is the person who is always thinking of what is due by others to himself, never or rarely of what is due by him to others. To His host, our Lord, as He looks round on the richly-clad and well-conditioned guests, remarks that his hospitality might be better expended on those who had more need of it. Our Lord does not mean to discountenance friendly gatherings, which are, have been, and always will be among the highest pleasures in life, but He means to warn against heartless and hollow civilities, — against asking people to your house whom you really don’t care to see, but to whom you must return the doubtful favor they have shown you in giving you a similar invitation. Our Lord, that is to say, complains of what society itself is continually complaining of, that so much time, means, thought, and energy are spent on the giving and returning of formal civilities which every one knows to be hollow. Where a real advantage can be conferred by your hospitality, where the comfort of a stranger can be secured, where innocent and exhilarating pleasure can be bestowed, where you can be the means of forming friendships useful and satisfactory to yourself and others, — in such cases be given to hospitality; but on every account emancipate yourself from the dreary, wasteful, resultless round of entertainments which are likely to be as distasteful and heartless to those who receive them as those of which they are the recompense were to yourself. But this kind of talk began to touch the company somewhat too nearly, and one of them makes an unsuccessful attempt to put an end to the conversation by a pious remark that no one will be irreverent enough to criticise or throw over. The remark is skilful — sufficiently in the line of what had previously been said to warrant him in making it, sufficiently off the line to change the subject, and sufficiently solemn to prevent any from violently returning to the old subject. “Blessed,” he says, “is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God” — a most undeniable and edifying assertion, and which, for the matter of it, might have fallen from the lips of our Lord Himself, but Pharisaic in this, that, under the guise of piety, it was intended to turn the conversation from what was personal and profitable to a vague generality which touched nobody. You can see the sanctimonious old hypocrite solemnly shaking his head, and letting the words fall unctuously from his tongue. But with all our Lord’s benignity and forbearance, there was one thing He could not stand, and that was cant. He therefore does not answer the man as if he had been a simple soul longing for communion with God, but utters a Parable to remind him and the rest that a verbal appreciation of the blessedness of the kingdom was often joined with an entire refusal to enter it. A person with less delicate edge on his teaching and less skill to manage a conversation, might have bluntly replied to the Pharisee, What avails it to extol with so much pious enthusiasm this blessedness, if all the while you yourself are rejecting it? The Parable illustrates the difficulty of finding any to accept what all acknowledge to be desirable: the lack of all obtrusive eagerness to take the place next the host, when the host happens to be Divine; and the wisdom of making a feast not for the well-to-do, who will rather excuse themselves, but for the needy, who will accept the invitation with glad surprise. Our Lord exposes the insincerity of the Messianic expectation which found utterance in such expressions as that of the sanctimonious guest, by exhibiting the actual treatment which was at the same time being given to God’s invitation to the Messianic feast. He utters a Parable which shows how hard God finds it to furnish with guests a table He has spread with the utmost bounty. He shows that notwithstanding first and second invitations proclamations of God’s friendship and bounty by the prophets and by the Baptist, the Jews were so immersed in political and commercial schemes that they despised and ignored the happiness God had so carefully prepared for them. They professed to be waiting for the Messiah, but when He actually came and offered them places in His kingdom, they contemptuously declined. Of all those who never broke bread without exclaiming, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God,” scarcely one was found to take his place at the table God actually spread before them. To furnish His table with guests God had to pass from the first invited and call in the outcasts among the Jews themselves, and after ransacking the lanes and slums of the city, had to go far afield among the highways and hedges of the outlying Gentiles that His bounty might not be wasted. The application of the Parable to our Lord’s contemporaries is sufficiently obvious. It has also obvious applications to ourselves which may be briefly indicated. And as it is to the manner in which men deal with God’s invitations that the Parable directs attention, rather than to the fact that the Messianic kingdom is suitably represented by a feast, it may be enough to say regarding this latter point, that those who actually enter God’s kingdom find all their cravings satisfied, all their necessities provided for; and that in the present person and work of Christ God’s kingdom was open to men, and remains open now to us. The feast being prepared, whom will God invite to partake of it? For admission to a feast is solely by invitation. You may have a strong desire to be at some entertainment which you know is to be given; you may have most urgent reasons for wishing to be there; your happiness for some time to come may, so far as you can judge, depend upon your presence; and yet you can do nothing but wait for an invitation. The idea of going unasked is not once thought of; your presence or absence depends entirely on the will of another person. If they wish your company, or think it advisable to ask you, that decides the matter. You may see invitations, which others have received, but you cannot beg, buy, or borrow these. Unless one comes to yourself, you remain outside, excluded from the company you crave, ignored by the set you long to be in, prevented from pursuing your most warmly cherished plan. The same rule applies to the feast of the Parable. There is a “not transferable” impressed on every invitation issued. It must come to yourself from God, or it is invalid and a forgery. If it were known that only three men in a generation were admitted to intimacy with God, and that all others were omitted, passed by, and left in exclusion, with what envy would these three men be looked upon. Or if it were known that a small, indefinite number were chosen in each generation, and that for each of them it was settled at the age of thirty by some distinguishing mark appearing on their person, we should then feel how completely we were dependent on the will of God in this matter. Yet we are as dependent on His invitation as this would imply. If God has prepared nothing for you, what can you do? If God does not desire that you be provided for, if no place is set apart for you at this feast, if He has not had you in view in making it, what can you do to mend matters? Do not think of salvation as a thing there, ready for you, whenever you choose to go and take it. It depends on God’s invitation whether any good awaits you. You have first to discover whether God in unmistakable words invites you or not.

Those to whom it was first intimated that the supper was ready, had previously been prepared for this announcement. They were the Jews the well-instructed, Messiah-expectant Jews. They were persons who might seem to be on friendly terms with the host, and had no appearance of destitution. We must look for their counterpart in men whose need of salvation does not lie on the surface, whose sins are not going before them to judgment, and crying out in the hearing of all, but who rather seem to be on terms of amity with God, and have no difficulty in believing that they are invited to His banquet. That which exhibits the true character of these men is their actual treatment of a present invitation; not what they said about it, not the flattering terms in which they replied to the host, but their conduct when summoned to come now to the feast. It is this which marks off the real friend of God from him whose spurious devotion enables him to ejaculate, as he thinks of a future and heavenly state, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” We are all prepared to utter such an otiosed sentiment; but the pious contemplation of heavenly blessedness is one thing, the entrance upon such friendships and habits as make us capable of it is quite another thing. The man who provoked the Parable was not saying what he did not feel: his feeling was present, but it was merely sentimental, with no result in action. The Parable gives three specimens of the grounds on which men refuse the invitation of God, and of the terms in which they couch their refusal. 1. The first says: “I have bought a piece of ground, and must needs go and see it. I pray thee have me excused.” No doubt he had seen the ground before he bought it, but it was a much more interesting sight now. A piece of ground, very poor-looking in itself, becomes attractive to a new purchaser. He can now mentally divide it out and plan its crops or its buildings. This man of the Parable had not been of so much consequence in the world when he first accepted the invitation. He still sees the desirableness of maintaining friendship with the host; but his invitation does not now seem so attractive as it did before he was a landowner. He endeavors, therefore, with a show of courtesy to set up an opposing necessity. It is not, he says, that he does not desire to accept the invitation, not at all; the host will quite misconceive him if he thinks he is not dying to come; but necessity compels him to look after his property. He must go and take it over, and make arrangements about its use. He is extremely sorry, but so it is. The invitation of God comes inopportunely to the man who is enjoying the first pleasures of proprietorship. He feels himself to be a solid part of this world, and is disposed to resent anything which reminds him that there are claims more pressing than even those of his recent investment. It will now appear which possession the owner thinks most substantial and finds most attractive, the bit of land or the friendship of God. He tries to persuade himself he has a regard for God too, and is compelled for a little to defer the manifestation of that regard. These are ominous necessities indeed which grow up between a man and God, and prevent him from enjoying God’s friendship. And yet do you not constantly find men speaking of the necessity of postponing God’s will and work to the world’s business? Do not . men on all hands betray that inwardly they put earthly possessions first, God second? They profess to be compelled to do so, and to be sorry they are compelled; and do not see that nothing compels them but their own likings and will.

2. The second refusal was worded: “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them. I pray thee have me excused.” This man merely announces his intention, assuming that there can be no doubt of its propriety. However disappointed the host is, he must see that the guest’s conduct is justifiable. This guest does not stay to explain the urgency; he does not even condescend to say that there is a necessity; simply states that he goes, as if every one must at once recognize the reasonableness of his conduct. He is so absorbed that he does not even perceive the claims the host has upon him. Of how many men in their prime does this man stand as the representative; men so engrossed in the business or pursuits of the world that they positively do not know that God has any claims upon their time, — so busy in pushing ] forward mercantile or scientific or literary or political or military affairs, that it never once occurs to them that there are other objects for the sake of which these affairs should be for a time suspended. All men appreciate what contributes to bodily comfort, to convenience of moving from place to place, to rapidity in attaining a competence; and those arts and skilful applications of science which are daily with increasing success contributing to these ends, come to be almost worshiped by us. There is a palpable utility which imparts a dignity to the cultivation of the arts which enlarge and beautify life, and few escape the temptation to ascribe to them even greater power than they possess. When we do choose them as our pursuit in life, and discover the real wonders they work, and the mysterious and apparently limitless powers that lie in them, we are fascinated. To check a man in the launching of some great undertaking which is to bring material advantage to a city or country, to recall him from the abstraction of deep research, or the anxiety of fine and prolonged experiment, to interrupt him in a calculation of some large financial scheme, to invite him to curtail the time he gives to business for the sake of entering more fully into the enjoyment of fellowship with God — this seems to many a man a mere impertinence, an absurdity bordering on madness. The objects for which men labor are to them so real and commanding that they do not see that they are required to justify an entire devotion of themselves to these objects. A man’s life seems to be nobly spent in subduing the powers of nature to the use of his fellow-men; but these powers, how mysterious and beautiful soever they be, are but as the five yoke of oxen when compared with that closest intercourse with the God of nature to which we are invited. And as this man would have had more temper to manage his young oxen in the morning had he treated his host with proper respect, and put friendship before self-interest, so there is no one of us who will not make a better use of the powers of this world if he himself is inspired with the thoughts and purposes which spring from fellowship with God.

3. The third who refuses to go to the supper gives as his reason: “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” These several grounds of refusal are instanced as illustrating that anything is considered sufficient ground, and as showing also the various engagements which occupy men to the exclusion of fellowship with God, rather than because each has some distinctive and significant feature. If it be supposed that this refusal is distinctive, then it may be said that it reminds us that pleasure as well as business prevents us from paying due regard to the appeals of God. Marriage, if not always really so, is at least symbolically joyful; and it seems to this man that the host takes quite the wrong time to invite him. So, with a greater harshness than the former decliners, he almost rudely refuses the invitation. Many feel as if God’s invitations came at the wrong time. They think God might stand aside for a little. The thought of perfect purity, of a life of consecration, of devotedness to the highest aims, of renunciation of all that is paltry and self-pleasing, comes inopportunely when they have just launched on a current that promises quiet domestic pleasure, and a happiness that tempts to forgetfulness of others’ woes and wants. The three refusals have this in common, that under a very thin disguise there lies a real indifference to the feast. They had better engagements elsewhere — more exciting, profitable, and pleasant than conversation with their professed friend. His kind intentions are nothing to them: whatever he can have provided for their entertainment is beneath their notice. They can apologize afterwards, but meanwhile they must attend to more important matters. Had they really liked his society and heartily honored him, they would have found it easy to go. The land would not have vanished before next day; the cattle would have been proved in time to get to the feast; and even the wife would not have been an insuperable difficulty. But any engagement was enough to compete with one they wished to decline. And the Parable is spoken that men may be warned and may see clearly how amidst considerable profession of friendship with God there may exist a real distaste for His society and His pleasures. If there is anything else to attend to, it will receive our first attention. God is postponed to everything else. This fact, so obvious in the life of many of us, should let light in upon our true I state of heart; and it will let light in where such; light is honestly desired. It is a severe Parable, saying very pointedly to many now as to this sanctimonious person who provoked it, That is your real estimate of communion with God: you talk a great deal about it, you extol spiritual pleasures, so that, to hear you, one would suppose you scarcely belonged to earth, but your life reveals a very different state of matters. Judging by your verbal acknowledgments of the excellence and infinite superiority of spiritual to worldly things one would expect to find you absorbed in the work of Christ, but your actions give the lie to your words, and prove them to be pitiful cant — phrases with which you unintentionally blind yourself to your real likings.

Judging, then, not from our words, not from the easy phrases that drop from our lips as readily as remarks about the weather, but judging from our life and actions, where are we to say that our real pleasures lie? What is it for which we will defer any engagement? what is it we never forget, never neglect, never find tedious and an unwelcome interruption? Let us know this; for it is not our profession that we ought to be spiritual, nor our acknowledgment that we ought to love God that avails; but what avails is our being Spiritual and our actually loving God above all. When we think of the kingdom of God as a future state in which all shall be assembled as to a family gathering in the quiet and cool of evening, it is easy to express desire to be present there. Who does not feel some desire to see face-to-face the real person of the Lord, and have leisure to scan the features of this Host to whom he is so intimately linked? Who does not desire to exchange thoughts with Him, and so to learn how personal and searching is the interest the Lord has taken in him? But these desires are apt to be merely sentimental, and before we trust them they must be tested by the actual use we now make of the access to Christ we already have. The doom of those who reject God’s invitation is plainly pronounced. They are passed by, and the offer is made to others. Paul, seeing this doom accomplished, said, “Through their fall — the fall of the Jews — salvation is come to the Gentiles.” Does the threat that none of those who were bidden should taste of His supper seem by no means very terrible? Does it strike you as extravagant and grandiloquent to put such a threat in the form of a threat at all? And yet I suppose there are persons you so esteem that, if such a message came from them, you would feel that disgrace had fallen upon you, and that until you were justly reinstated in the goodwill and friendship of those persons, your life must be clouded and full of bitterness. Is it less ignominious to treat God with disrespect, and less disastrous to be excluded from His favor? Suppose you were sure that this doom had been pronounced upon you, and that therefore it was quite vain for you to expect God’s help or blessing in any matter you have to do with, — suppose you had the prospect of entering the world of spirits unaided and uncared for, and that while others were seen to and provided for by God, you were left to yourself, — suppose you had reason to know that God, who is slowest to take offense and never unjust, is offended with you, and henceforth renounces you, deleting your name from among His friends, — would this not affect you with shame? would it not at least move you to consider what just cause of offense you have given, and would it excite no anxiety; or is it all one to you whether there opens up before you an eternity full of brightness and hope, calculated to call out every high sentiment and all worthy activity in you, or one that is full of gloom, disappointment, and misery, the lot of lost, defeated, sunken, degraded souls? The invitation, when despised by those to whom it was originally addressed, was conveyed to those who could least of all anticipate any such communication. The class of outcasts described in the Parable is recognizable at all times. They are those who seem to be beyond help and hope — the maimed, the blind, the vagrant, the destitute, the criminal Such descriptions are self-interpreting. Whoever finds himself in a wretched and abandoned condition is taught here that God invites him to His table. He who cannot discover in his condition one hopeful symptom; he who is crushed and defeated; he who has been maimed in the service of sin, and has laid himself down by the hedge-side, to let the busy stream of life run past without noticing him; he who is utterly weary and heart-broken, and knows not how he can ever be restored to virtuous and serviceable living — to him comes God’s invitation to the utmost of His bounty. The servants were sent to invite promiscuously every one they found: bold sinners in the streets, secret and shamefaced sinners in the lanes, proud sinners in the highways, and woebegone sinners by the hedges; wherever they found a man, wherever human life yet stirred the mass of filthy rags, that they were to bring to the feast.

Such persons were to be compelled to come in. The servants were not to let them away to dress themselves under promise of coming in an hour. They were to bring them as they stood or as they lay. They were to take no excuse, but were to “compel” them to come. They were to use the strongest persuasion in their power; to allow no shame, no sense of unworthiness, no fear of offending the host, no remembrance of wrongs done to the host, to deter them; but they were to use authority, argument, entreaty, everything to move them; or doing less, they did less than their master’s pleasure. They were not merely to walk along the highways with a placard, or to proclaim as they passed by that any who chose might go. They were to lay their hands on the men, and compel them to listen. They were to represent their master’s cordiality and urgency. They were not to leave any in doubt as to how they would be received, and they were not to let any away with a mere promise to come. They were to bring them. And if the lame gave as an excuse that they could not go, or if the blind said they would have been glad to go had they been able to find their way, the servant was to become eyes to the blind and feet to the lame; he was not to think he had cleared his conscience by giving them the invitation, but was to see them inside the guest-chamber. Such is the freedom and such the urgency of the Gospel of Christ.