Week 07–invitation

This Week’s Reading:

God’s invitation isn’t exclusive to the best and the brightest–no entrance exams to identify star pupils or selection camp to wash out the weak. He lovingly and fearlessly approaches the underestimated and overlooked to pick his team. It started with Israel, “the fewest of all peoples,” (Deut. 7:7), and Jesus continued the Father’s tradition by drafting twelve of the strangest picks a rabbi had ever selected. Several belligerent blue-collar college drop-outs, a federal tax collector, a couple radical insurgents, and a few hasty referrals from his cousin (who was assassinated by the state shortly thereafter) rounded out the new team of “apostles,” This symbolic reconstitution of the twelve tribes of Israel seems half-hazard, but couldn’t have been more deliberate–Jesus stayed up all night in prayer before carefully choosing his students. It seems God doesn’t see like man sees (1 Sam. 16:7). Amidst the head-scratching, one thing remains clear from God’s method: there is no room for favoritism, supremacy, or partiality. God is motivated by love and his promise to bless all the families of the earth (Deut. 7:8).

Like us, the professionals of Jesus’ day questioned his tactics. The invitation to the outsider and unqualified made the establishment uneasy, and Jesus knew he was stretching Israel dangerously close to the bursting point (Lk 4:37). His harvest demanded workers who could stretch with it. So Jesus sends out 72 students, nearly handicapped by their rabbi’s instructions. They would be humbly dependent on the hospitality of strangers for their “daily bread,” (Lk. 11:3). It would be a cross-group assessment–testing the faith of Jesus’ students and the generosity of greater Israel simultaneously. If Israel’s villages failed to hospitably welcome the weary, minimalist students, they would be considered no better than Sodom & Gomorrah, towns from a hellish story of hospitality (or lack thereof) in the ancient, patriarchal past (Gen. 18-19). 

The way we invite others into our own lives, resources, and story seems to be of paramount importance to Jesus–it’s a recognition of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. God is forming a people who can both receive and extend radical hospitality, the “Good Samaritan” being one of the most surprising protagonists in such a story (not least due to Samaria’s heretical worship practices). But lest we assume that welcoming God is of greatest importance, Mary and Martha remind us that God welcoming us is “the better part, and cannot be taken away,” (Lk. 10:42). Our invitation to others only means anything through Jesus’ invitation to us. Unfortunately, the prodigal nature of Jesus’ invitation to us is much easier to forget than the prodigal nature of the people Jesus sends us to. In order to not repeat the older brother’s mistake from Jesus’ story of two sons (Lk 15:11-32), we must be captured by the same obsessive, compulsive discontent of the “Good Shepherd With The Lost Sheep,” or the “Woman With The Missing Coin” (Lk. 15:1-10). Only by surrendering every part of our life and every desire of our heart to Jesus (Lk 14:33) can we become the kind of people who are content to sit in the lowest place of honor at any banquet. From such a place we can happily invite any and every lowborn, unqualified, disadvantaged, overlooked, or marginalized person to join us at Jesus’ table.