Tonight, I’m having people over for dinner, and I’m looking forward to it. In complete disregard for the last few sentences of this gospel, where the host of the dinner is advised not to invite his friends, in fact, I’m having dinner with very good friends. I couldn’t live without dinner with other people, people I love. That, really, is one of the points in this gospel reading— that none of us can live without meals, meals with others, meals where we are taken care of. They are the whole goal of life, really, they are why we are here around this table [tonight/today], for a meal like that.
In the gospel of Luke, meals are important. If you read it straight through during this year of the gospel of Luke you’ll find that Jesus’s life in that gospel is punctuated constantly with meals. People eat. People talk, often about important things. But these meals are more than that, since to Luke all these meals are an image of the future. Luke believes not only that the eucharist is a meal, but that our whole life, eternal life with God, is a meal. “People,” he says in the chapter just before this, “people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the Kingdom of God.” Every meal, for Luke, is measured against that meal, the meal that accomplishes what meals are really for. The meal that extends to everyone, without limit.
What do we learn today about what makes for a meal like that? Several things, one of them being, don’t invite Pharisees, who seems to ruin with their complaining about eight or nine dinners attended by Jesus. It’s even worse than inviting some of my cousins. But the real issue today is one we might overlook: This issue of repayment. The host of Luke’s ideal dinner isn’t holding it for any reason other than sheer generosity. He doesn’t want thanks, he doesn’t want to feel good having done it, he doesn’t want a return invitation to your dinner, and he won’t have his nose out of joint if he doesn’t get one. He’s doing it because that’s what he does.
This is very hard for us to grasp. First, we find it hard to grasp about God. Since God, in this gospel of Luke, is the ultimate dinner host, it’s hard for us to remember that the dinners we get from God, anything we get from God, comes without requirements. We don’t receive goodness from God for a job well done, it’s not a question of whether we are worthy, or have done enough, or are smart enough, or have prayed enough. The gifts of life and love that we experience, the individual attention that God offers to us, are not dependent on anything we did, or need to do. They are there because that is the way God is. That’s hard to accept, because lurking inside all of us is a nagging feeling that that’s simply too good to be true – sometimes it’s easier to believe there isn’t any God than to believe in one who loves us and embraces us unconditionally without regard to our deserving it. No one’s like that, we think. And yet God is.
Not only is God that way, loving us without regard to what comes back, that is the goal that is set for us, too. We are all hosts, not just guests, in this gospel today. We are called to do the things that we do without regard to our own rewards and feelings, but only by the standard of generosity that God has set. We are asked to make decisions in our lives not by the payback we’re going to get, not even by the warm feelings we’ll get by having done a good thing, but simply because God is unconditional love, and that unconditional love is ours to give away.
This level of selflessness is almost impossible to reach. But how could we try at least to bring this way of thinking into what we think and do? It could affect our big decisions, like where to turn next in our career — not thinking only about what will reward us, or what will make us happier, important and necessary as those are, but deciding what to do based on the needs of so many unknown and undeserving dinner guests at that dinner we always need to be seeing ourselves hosting. Even those little decisions we make about helping someone on the street, it’s hard not to wonder if the person we’re helping will do the right thing with our help, about whether we’ll feel good having helped them, all that wondering, instead of just doing it. This is all almost hard for us to do, especially in a culture where we’re trained to base all our decisions on what they will end up doing for us. Our faith does not call us to make choices that make ourselves miserable, but it does call us to make choices that make our love available. That love we want, unconditional, given away freely, that is the gift we give to others.
So today, instead of life as a battle, or a slog, see life as a dinner. First we are fed, and then we all in turn give to someone else everything that our talents and our friends and our meals give us. Otherwise our accomplishments, and our meals, will leave us hungry, and we’ll never know why.