The Context of the Parable
of the Great Banquet
All you had to do was stick close to Jesus Christ and you were sure to hear a provocative zinger fly out of Him! Various accounts within the Gospels place the Lord in a scrum-like setting where fans and haters alike—as if holding a recording device in front of Him—ask Him to comment on the latest religiopolitical firestorm.
Israel’s religious leaders likely spent many a day and night being royally miffed at the Saviour for something He said about them. The Pharisees were often the bullseye Jesus was aiming at with His teaching; and the truth He communicated was often too inconvenient for them to handle! While some religious leaders were either convicted or left standing amid a fog of misunderstanding, it is clear that others were not impressed and compensated for it.
A rather fascinating dimension to Jesus’s ministry was His reading of and response to people, situations, and environments. Often when the Saviour was asked a question or when someone made a comment in regard to His teaching, Jesus responded by taking into consideration the immediate physical surroundings from which the inquiry or statement sprung (for example, see Matthew 24:1–2). Whether the Lord was standing amid the farmlands or walking on the surface of seawater, whether He was casting lines with fishermen or attending a tax collector’s (or even a Pharisee’s) soiree, Jesus could potter a spiritual lesson from the clay of any context He was situated in.
When the context of their conversation with Him featured the religious leaders’ insistence that they were wholly capable of leading God’s people, Jesus responded by upending their cart of self-accreditation—and then some. The Lord used such incendiary and even ghastly terms as “blind,” “child of hell,” “whitewashed tombs,” and “brood of vipers” to describe members of the Pharisees and the other religious leaders (see Matthew 15:14, 23:15, 27, 33). Talk about provocative quotes!
When the conversation’s context surrounded the Pharisees’ criticisms of His disciples’ “unlawful” actions on the Sabbath, Jesus retorted by calling Himself “Lord of the Sabbath,” while educating the Pharisees that on the holiest of days, God wills that “good” deeds trump “sacrifice”—in short, that the Sabbath day was made for the people, not the other way around. When the context revolved around the Pharisees’ convenient exaltation of Abraham, Jesus’s newsflash to members of the sect was that He (the Lord) actually predates the patriarch by an eternal margin (see John 8:58)! No wonder the religious leaders scurried to intentionally misquote Jesus, to take His statements so grossly out of their context. The realization that they were losing badly to Him in the coveted polls of propaganda and popularity was setting in. They played chicken with the Almighty and predictably blinked!
Jesus: Popular and Controversial
It is human nature to want to see people who we believe are breaking the law be caught and convicted. It’s quite acceptable to feel upset, even righteously angry, when we feel justice is not being served and when we perceive that someone is getting away with lawlessness. I imagine that’s how the Pharisees must have felt whenever they witnessed Jesus do or say something that didn’t follow their interpretation of the Mosaic Law or when Jesus’s claims to divinity crossed over into the realm of blasphemy. One way the frustrated leaders of Israel’s religious establishment sought to remedy the problem was to corner Jesus in the hope that He might mess up and prove Himself to be the phony hero and lawbreaker they believed Him to be.
The Gospels impress upon us that Jesus was both widely and wildly popular in His day. In fact, some twenty-one centuries after the Lord took His first earthly breath as a heaven-come-down newborn and then grew to eventually blow away the collective mind of humanity, He is more popular than ever. His divine highlight reel of signs and wonders has been preached everywhere from the pulpits of grand cathedrals to the most cramped of underground churches. Even those who reviled the Lord were largely motivated by His popularity.
The term popularity, when applied to a person, can take on varying shades of meaning and consequence depending on who you talk to. Case in point, all one had to do was say the names Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during their respective runs for the White House and, immediately, a can of ultra-opinionated and colourful worms would be opened.
The same could be said of the Son of God during His earthly ministry years.
Jesus Christ will always be one of the most polarizing figures to walk our planet. Despite being the people’s rabbi, the Lord received mixed reviews within the court of Israel’s religious leaders’ opinions. Depending on who was chiming in, the Saviour was thought to be “a good man,” “the Prophet,” “the Messiah,” one who “deceives,” and even “demon-possessed” (John 7:12–41). Even the temple guards who were sent by the religious leaders to arrest Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles were mesmerized by Him and declined to seize the Lord. The guards went one step further by declaring in the presence of the chief priests and Pharisees, “No one ever spoke the way this man does” (John 7:45–46).
Jesus was the proverbial “toast of the town” almost as much as He was alleged to have made the most-wanted list for crimes committed against the Mosaic Law. The Lord was as favoured as He was doubted and was followed almost as much as He was overlooked and discarded. Oppositional forces of confrontation and indignation slammed Him even as open acts of adoration and celebration from supporters exalted Him.
The Son of God was always in demand, always under the lights of His culture’s insatiable hounding and stake in Him. John’s Gospel records how an inquisitive Pharisee named Nicodemus amiably approached Jesus at night, likely out of a fear of being criticized by fellow members of the sect. The high-ranking and high-road-taking Nicodemus seemed to intimate that at least some of those among the Pharisees actually believed Jesus was sent of God (John 3:2). Joseph of Arimathea, another individual associated with the leadership of Israel (a member of the Sanhedrin and likely a Pharisee as well), became a follower of Jesus and claimed His body after the crucifixion in order to bury it in his tomb. And how could we overlook the moderate Pharisee named Gamaliel who during the early stages of the church’s expansion also kept an open mind to Jesus and His gospel (see Acts 5:33–39)? These heartening realities aside, the Gospel writers communicate that the majority of the religious elite within Israel refused to follow Jesus.
The one thing that was synonymous with Jesus’s popularity was controversy, and controversy always attracts attention and speculation. In Jesus’s case, His controversial ministry attracted, among other things, the worst slander, surreptitious activity, and covert enemies.
As author W. Phillip Keller described,
Wherever [Jesus] went He was followed. If not by the general masses, then by the persistent Pharisees and Sadducees: Veritable bloodhounds that would not relent, they trailed and tracked Him everywhere with cruel, crafty cunning. These deadly intelligentsia were forever demanding, insisting that somehow Jesus should supply them with some “sign” that He was in truth the Son of God … they wanted empirical proof that He was deity.7
Every authoritative stripe among Israel’s religious superintendency worked overtime to get Jesus to submit to their investigations concerning His claims to divinity. Luke 14 records Jesus sidestepping one of their clandestinely conceived landmines embedded by a batch of His antagonizing rivals. Luke tells us that the meal hosted by the prominent Pharisee was held on the Sabbath day (Luke 14:1). The Sabbath was sacrosanct in that it was a day the Law stipulated was to be set aside for reflecting on the glory of God (see Deuteronomy 5:12–15). It also happened to be the one day of the week when Jesus seemed to ruffle the holier-than-thou feathers of the Pharisees the most. Simply put, the Sabbath was a time when Jesus’s interactions with His detractors were at their most tempestuous.
It’s a Set-up: Rescuing and Healing on the Sabbath
In Luke 14:2, the Lord is seated within intimate proximity of a man who’s been suffering from a painful physical condition that is likely dropsy (the retention of fluid affecting parts of the body). That this infirm person is even at the meal and then placed in front of Jesus in the seating arrangement suggests that something