Luke 14:1, 7-14 2025 Commentary

I love how this scene opens with a note about how closely Jesus was being watched. When you’re watching someone else very closely, you can miss the thing right under your nose: that they are closely observing you as well.

But the dinner guests and hosts probably thought nothing of the way they were acting while they judged Jesus’s every move anyway—they were doing what they always did. Having a dinner with your equals, getting repaid for a dinner party you hosted last time around, being surrounded by people you like to be compared to… Nothing suspicious here!

I can’t help but wonder, was Jesus invited because he was proving to be an influential “man about town”? Perhaps the host had a double motive: he didn’t mind being associated with this person making a splash, and he thought it would be something memorable for his own notoriety as a host.

But Jesus is no puppet show or here for anyone’s amusement. Jesus is here to free us by his grace, to give us unmerited favor and whatever healing is needed. On the way to this dinner party, even while being closely watched—lurked upon—Jesus healed a man with dropsy even though it was the Sabbath. Now, he comes into the home for dinner, he does his own observing and sees that these people also need to be healed and freed.

Pride is a debilitating spiritual sickness. It makes us only able to see through one lens, through that of the self, “me, myself, and I.” Like a balloon with a hole in it, pride momentarily puffs up what is destined to be empty, a damaged existence that needs to be hidden behind vigilant maintenance—constantly reinflating—to keep the façade going.

With all the work that goes into keeping up appearances, everything else and everyone else gets less attention because it all gets funneled into how it can support the image of self you are cultivating. This is too important work to leave to someone else to do—it must be grabbed and held onto. And when others don’t provide it as you think they should, at least the feeling of injustice will internally reinforce your pride. Then we play off each other, hoping to be associated with people who can build up our own sense of importance and pride

All of this is in our internal world as we look at an empty dinner table and wonder which seat we should presume is worthy of our presence. Jesus tells the story about the wedding banquet and all of the guests who presume they are the most important person there in order to drive home his point. We can play this game and stay soul-sick, or we can be freed from it. We can keep meeting everyone’s expectations of what is appropriate, or we can live the Jesus way, which is to be content at the end of the table where the food plates might get to us empty and there might be a draft from the doorway.

Our worth will be made known when our God comes and finds us there and invites us to follow him to a better condition—a heavenly banquet where we’ll recognize our fellow guests from the outcasts and the undesired company that we used to sit and dine with—the ones we invited because it was what God would do if God were us, not because it would help our image or move us up on the social ladder or even puff up our pride by being thanked or recognized for doing something good.

Call it a waste. Call it naïve and foolish. Or call it the Jesus way.

Textual Point

The lectionary sets the context with verse 1, then skips over a healing story to Jesus’s biting indictment of his fellow dinner guests and host. The healing that takes place in verses 2-6 is very similar to the one from last week, as both take place on the Sabbath and Jesus refers to the same hypocrisy of taking better care of one’s livestock better than people in need. This attitude towards others comes from the same lack of humility that Jesus will soon harp upon.

Illustration Ideas

In his commentary on this passage in the Belief Series, Justo González writes, “In Spanish-speaking lands it is customary, when someone does you a great and unmerited favor, and particularly when a beggar receives alms, to say, “Dios se lo pague” (may God repay you). The implication is that the favor received is unpayable, and therefore much more meritorious. Here again one hears echoes of Proverbs 19:17: “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and will be repaid in full.” We might add Jesus’s own words about the last judgment, when some ask him when they served him with food, drink, clothing and visitation in a time of need. Jesus replied, “Whatever you did for one of… these, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

There’s a scene in the AppleTV show The Studio where the studio head, Matt Remick gets more and more worked up as he realizes that Zoë Kravitz isn’t going to thank him in her speech when she wins an Oscar. It gets even more under his skin as the Netflix studio head is thanked every time someone from a Netflix show wins. In the bathroom, the two studio heads run into each other and Matt asks the guy from Netflix how he gets all of the talent to thank him: it’s simple, the Netflix studio head explains, he forces them to by writing it into their contract. We can force others to build our pride for us, or we can find freedom to live a beautiful life that we can make God proud of…