In the gospel of Luke, meals are important. In fact, Jesus’ life in that gospel is punctuated with at least ten different meals. But they are more than just scenes in a play, a good way to bring people together and have them interact. Because all these meals, to Luke, are also an image of the future. Here’s something important to take away from this gospel. Luke believes not only that the eucharist is a meal, but that our whole life, eternal life with God, is like a meal. It is his vision of the future that awaits us. Whatever heaven is, what it’s most going to be like is a meal. In last Sunday’s gospel, he wrote, “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.
So now let’s look at today’s meal, one of the meals in the gospel where something isn’t the way it is supposed to be. Today’s is the third of the three meals Jesus has with the Pharisees. When we hear the word “Pharisee” we think of people who are sticklers for the rules, always waiting to see if Jesus does something wrong. But what we really notice today is that maybe wasn’t even the root of their problem. What they also liked was their position of superiority and separateness. They took pride in being people who didn’t make mistakes and who knew all the rules, because it separated them from other people.
That is what Jesus saw at this dinner: Not their quibbling over religious rules, but who they invited and the way they seated themselves. That told him everything. He saw in something as simple as the seating arrangements a whole life that was built around making sure that they would never run into anyone who would challenge their identity, that they would never have look across the table and see someone who in their eyes was not their equal.
Now the Pharisees were successful and intelligent and educated. It was easy for them to find a lot of reasons to distance themselves from nearly everyone who wasn’t as together as they were. That suggests that it’s also easy for us. The question today is about who we are willing to sit down with as an equal, and for all of us, no matter who we are, that’s a bracing question that never gets old, and that we never finish working out for ourselves.
The gospel of Luke is fairly revolutionary about equality, and it’s based on Luke’s belief that God’s embrace is all encompassing, which is why he is so confident right from the beginning of this gospel that the poor need to be raised up even if that means the rich are sent away empty. Starting to work this equality out in our day to day lives is not easy. It means that our very human instincts to classify people as deserving and not deserving, those instincts are something that it can take us our whole lifetimes to get under control.
How do we take this gospel about how to hold a banquet and who to sit next to, how do we put it to work? It isn’t hard to see that every part of our lives are touched by questions of who makes our guest list and who does not. Just for one example, it’s hard not to notice that in such a pleasant suburban place to live as we all live in, separation from others is just part of our world here whether we planned it that way or not, and it’s a constant challenge to ask ourselves about how we feel about the people who are not here, who are not a visible part of this daily world of ours. They are all guests at the same banquet to which we are welcomed. And even inside the church, where you would think if there is any place people ought to eat together as equals it ought to be here, over the years clericalism and all other sorts of religious superiority complexes have set up walls between Catholics who think they’re operating on some different plane than the rest of us.
The challenge of today’s gospel is to look honestly at where we seat ourselves in all the settings of our life, and who is included when we look around to see who is with us, who we exclude from the circle of people we refer to when we use the word “us.” We’re building the kingdom heaven here, where we find ourselves, at least that is supposed to be our task, and the kingdom of heaven is a place where literally everyone is invited, equally entitled to be there. And Jesus doesn’t say this, but he implies it, apparently we’re going to be kind of shocked, when we get to that ultimate kingdom of heaven, and find we are reunited not only with those we love but also everyone we didn’t, seated together in a way that has burned away everything that once separated us.
In a way, of course, this is how we want the world to work, not off in the future but now, maybe especially at a time when we feel so much division and rancor everywhere. We want a way of life and a way of sharing the goods of this world that does not divide people into the worthy and the unworthy. It is time to reach out to those who we think can do absolutely nothing to repay us. There is enough to go around, and any gathering in this world is simply not complete until everyone has been brought in the door.