Luke 14:8-14 - How to be a good guest

14:8-11

Jesus instructs us to show some humility, otherwise we may well end up being humiliated. If instead we humble ourselves, then we may well end up being exalted! This is the complete opposite of the approach the world urges us to take, which usually means pushing ourselves forward. As it says elsewhere, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (Prov 3:34; James 4:6, 1 Pet 5:5). So we need to ask ourselves, do we want to exalt ourselves, or do we want to be exalted by God?

14:12-14

So far Jesus has dealt with the Pharisees and teachers of the law, and the guests. Now He turns to the hosts. We might be tempted to say the lesson to be learnt from all this is never invite Jesus to dinner! He tells them that they should not invite friends, relatives or influential people, but the poor, crippled, lame and blind. Ie those who offer no financial or social advantage and cannot repay. Now Jesus here does not literally mean we never invite friends etc round, but maybe the hosts thought they were going up in the world because of the people they were having round. Well they might have been going up in the world, but they were not going up in the Kingdom. If they wanted to advance in the kingdom of God then devoting effort to the needy was the way to go. Now we all like being popular, and our modern society with social media etc has an increasing emphasis on us being popular, and we can so easily measure our self-esteem by how many “likes” we have that day. We need to make God our reference point, not the opinion of others (nor even of ourselves), and God’s standards are so radically different from those of the world.