A few years ago I attended a “Word of Life” church, simply to experience it firsthand. It is far more charismatic than I’m comfortable with, and the preaching a bit more sensational than I’m used to, but I walked away with a new appreciation for my Baptist roots. Throughout the sermon people were yelling “Amen” and “preach it” and clapping for various points made by the pastor. At one point the preacher stopped, looked out over the audience and proclaimed, “I’m preaching a whole lot better than you’re applauding!” I’ve never heard a preacher self-aggrandize to such an extent.
This passage is the account of the last time Jesus will speak in a synagogue before his death and resurrection. From this point forward he is on a direct route to Jerusalem and the fulfillment of his mission. Luke doesn’t tell us what the sermon was about, but we might be able to guess based on the object lesson. At the end of his talk Jesus had a woman come forward who was suffering from what sounds like a spinal infirmity. Jesus tells us it was caused by an unclean spirit and that she had been under its oppression for 18 years.
As Jesus slowly made his way toward Jerusalem, teaching from town to town, an unnamed man in an unnamed village asked a startling question: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” I don’t know what prompted the question, but I remember hearing something similar a few months ago. A friend of mine observed, “It looks like Satan is winning; there are so many going to hell.” How many are going to heaven? 144,000? Everyone except the really bad – the Hitler’s of the world? Can anyone be certain of their own eternal fate, much less that of others?
Together these two stories are known as the Banquet Parables, though the first one isn’t technically a parable. Parables are stories with a moral teaching that use fictitious (and unnamed) characters. This first story is more of a hypothetical scene whereby those attending the dinner are asked to picture themselves as the characters in the tale. On the surface, it teaches a simple wisdom of etiquette, that one should not exalt himself in a public situation or risk being shamed. As is often the case with Jesus’ teachings, however, there is a second and more important lesson to be learned.
