Christ's Counsel to His Host.
Are ordinary dinner-parties wrong, then, in the eye of Christ, our Law-giver? Does He really condemn the custom of having our friends and social equals to dine with us, and really demand that we entertain instead, if we entertain at all, only those who are conventionally below us only the poor and destitute, the most melancholy objects, the most miserable creatures we can find?
I. With respect to the passage before us, the veiled message, the enfolded spirit of which I should like to penetrate and seize, there are those, doubtless, who will maintain that it needs no explanation, that what our Lord taught at the Pharisee's table was just this: that His host should give up entertaining his well-to-do relatives and friends, who were able to return the compliment, and should devote himself instead to the entertainment of the "poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind," by which he would secure a greater recompense. This, they would affirm, is what He called upon the man to do, as the best and blessedest thing; but it is not for usto do nowadays. With some other of His counsels and admonitions, it cannot be carried out by us; is not suitable or applicable to the present time. In reply to which I say, that it never was suitable or applicable, and hence could not have been intended by Christ. He never defied or contravened human nature: how could He? God created human nature, in all lands and ages, to go out after intercourse with kindred spirits, with persons of our own tastes and habits, of our own rank or order; and hence I know, and am sure, that Christ the Son of man never meant what, on a superficial glance, He seems to be meaning here. The question is one not at all of social fellowship, but of expenditure; and of the objects to which our great expenditure should be devoted. When you would lavish trouble and money, says Christ, let the lavishing be not for your own personal gratification, but for the blessing of others.
II. But the admonition of the text reaches beyond dining; it applies generally to the habit of laying out freely, profusely, unstintedly, in order to any comfort, profit, or enlargement for ourselves, and exhorts us instead to confine such laying out to generous and benevolent projects to the work of giving pleasure, of rendering service, of communicating good, which is the very principle and Spirit of Him who, when He poured out His soul unto death, did it to bring us to God. Now this has its own peculiar and very grand recompense, says Christ, from which they who are mainly intent on expending for themselves are shut out, in the blessedness of which they can have no share. It finds its recompense in the "resurrection of the just." Yes, in every resurrection out of evil into good condition, out of disorder and wrong into righteousness and order that is accomplished on earth, it is reward. But there is something besides, most present and near; for there is always a resurrection of the just within us, as often as we do anything with outlay, for love and goodness. It begets infallibly a revival, a fresh quickening and expansion of the spirit of love and goodness; and herein is the constantly-abiding, ever-returning recompense of those whose gracious habit it is to look not upon their own things, but upon the things of others. Their truest and best reward lies in the heavenly quality and capacity that is being daily fostered and deepened within them.
S. A. Tipple, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xii., p. 280.
References: Luke 14:12-24. T. T. Lynch, Three Months' Ministry,p. 145.Luke 14:14. Parker, Wednesday Evenings at Cavendish Chapel,p. 64.Luke 14:15-24. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 387. Luke 14:16. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons,p. 21.Luke 14:16; Luke 14:17. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 225; T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 16.