Thursday, July 29, 2004

Feasts and Banquets, Part I

LUKE 14:15-24
Jesus tells the parable about the man who invited a lot of people to a banquet only to find that they all had lame excuses for not attending when his servants showed up to fetch them. The man then told the servants to go out and invite every downtrodden person they found. Obviously this is a parable about the nation of Israel declining God's invitation to Heaven. Therefore, God opens everything up to sinners, outcasts, and gentiles.

Why Jesus tells this parable is not obvious until we have a greater understanding of mindset of the Jews in Jesus' time. The parable is prompted by a statement made by another guest.
One of his fellow guests on hearing this said to him, "Blessed is the one who will dine in the kingdom of God."

William Barclay tells why this comment made Jesus start talking about the kingdom of Heaven.
The Jews had a series of ever-recurring conventional pictures of what would happen when God broke into history and when the golden days of the new age arrived. One of these was the picture of the Messianic banquet. On that day God would give a great feast to his own people ... It is of this banquet that the man who spoke to Jesus was thinking. When he spoke of the happiness of those who would be guests at that banquet he was thinking of Jews, and of Jews only, for the average, orthodox Jew would never have dreamed that gentiles and sinners would find a place at the feast of God. That is why Jesus spoke this parable.

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