NOTES for Luk 14:1-11

It is striking that the Pharisees are silent in response to Christ's question whether it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. In fact, deep down they thought that doing this was not lawful. Whether healing is work, "doing one's own work," forbidden on the Sabbath, is a big question. The Pharisees thought that it was work, but their opinion was far from obvious. More importantly, the Pharisees believed that a person who had been sick for a long time could wait until the next day, so that no troubling situation would arise. After all, perhaps the Almighty would still consider healing to be work and, consequently, a violation of the commandment.

The Lord does not agree with this point of view. He compares the sick man who at last, at the cost of tremendous effort, has reached Him with an ox fallen into a pit, which must be pulled out immediately so that it does not die. Theological doubts and ritual recede into the background before the suffering of a person who has finally come before the face of God. This is exactly what makes Christian faith for us an answer to the question of life and death, not to the question of more or less sinful behavior.

The meal in the house of one of the Pharisees, because of its rich symbolic meaning--a feast as the Messianic Kingdom--immediately gives Jesus material for new parables about the Kingdom He came to proclaim to people.

Fish, as the saying goes, look for deeper water, and people look for a better place. None of the invited guests wants to sit with a man disfigured by dropsy; let him come another day, since seeking healing on the Sabbath is a sin. Feasting is best with friends and neighbors whom you know, who smell pleasant, and who will not let your rich dishes disappear without return; they too will invite you to a "return dinner." And if you are a guest, it would also be good to sit at the head of the table, closer to the generous host.

This is ordinary human life, but for every situation Jesus finds the apt word, without moralizing or angry denunciations. He simply, as if joking, shows us, sitting with Him at table in the Pharisee's house, the whole absurdity of our normal life when one looks at it "from the point of view" of God's Kingdom.

Speaking about the Kingdom, Jesus never tires of reminding His listeners that one still has to enter it, and that this will not happen by itself. For the sake of the Kingdom one must leave everything. One must be ready to take up the cross. These words of the Savior were quite understandable: His listeners still remembered how, a little more than a hundred years before the Gospel events, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus in then-independent Judea, the participants in an anti-government uprising were crucified, people who demanded that the authorities strictly observe the norms of the Torah in the country. The participants in that uprising wanted one thing: the Kingdom. Of course, the Kingdom as they knew it. And for that Kingdom they gave everything. Their ideas about the Kingdom were little like what Jesus speaks of. But He sets their resolve as an example for His listeners. They really did leave everything.

Not like the characters in Jesus' parable, who refuse to come to the feast. They refuse under pretexts that may seem quite reasonable, but still they refuse. And they lose the main thing. Their place is taken by those who have nothing in this world. And no reasons to refuse. Is it a question of priorities? Yes, of course, of priorities too. But not only of priorities. Jesus does not speak by chance about a feast, about the first and the last, about those places where many strive to sit even under threat of being driven from them.

The Kingdom is not a place. It is not a structure. It is not a hierarchy. The Kingdom is a state. It is a state in which one can abide, but which cannot at all, so to speak, be fixed in place. And people very much want to fix it in place. That is where the better and worse places come from. In reality there are no good or bad places in the Kingdom. There is only one criterion there: whether a person is in his own place. Whether he is in the very place God appointed for him, or in the place he chose for himself because he considered it more suitable for himself.

From this comes the question: should one go to the feast or to the field just bought? The wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom. And if a person does not know what to choose, then he does not know what the Kingdom is. If he knew, it would not enter his mind to compare the significance of the life he lives with anything belonging to him. Life is fullness, while the field bought, property, even family, are only derivatives of that fullness. Here it is important not to confuse the part with the whole, the main thing with the secondary. And only one thing can help in this: the experience of the genuine life of the Kingdom, that very life which is salvation.

The Gospel of Luke gives us a lesson in humility. Humility is the opposite of pride: it is not fixation on ourselves, but attentiveness to others simply because they are more important. But it is not deliberate self-abasement either, which is also, at its core, turned toward one's beloved self. True humility is one expression of love, and how hard it is for us to receive it. That is, it is given easily, since it is one of the chief gifts of the Holy Spirit, but we accept it with enormous difficulty.