When you hold a lunch or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Is Jesus in fact discouraging dinner parties with family and friends? Not exactly. He is trying to teach us how to give unselfishly, to uproot and unsettle even the hidden selfishness that mars our relationship with family and friends. Is it in fact their enjoyment that is our goal, or is it rather our own? Are we setting table in order to indulge in living out some ideal image that might be ours and not another's? Or are we hoping that by this meal others might feel obligated or indebted to us in some way, even if it doesn't result in an invitation in return. Are we in fact seeking primarily to validate ourselves and to indulge in our own wish fulfillment?
One way to test the sincerity of our normal meals is by attempting at least to imagine what Jesus suggests:
When you hold a lunch or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
How would it be for us if the meal didn't match with our images and when nothing about it felt particularly validating for us? Could we enjoy the enjoyment of the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind even without the normal pleasant self gratification that a good meal for family and friends well executed might entail? Of course this applies not only to meals but all that we do, especially those things that we do to build relationships with others. Much of what we do does is in fact motivated by this hidden desire for repayment. And the best way to overcome such selfishness is to give to those who cannot repay, and to ask God to help us delight in doing so, for he loves a cheerful giver.
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory;
rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves,
each looking out not for his own interests,
but also everyone for those of others.
We are told by Paul to be of the same mind, acting with the same love. But this mind can be ours because it was first in Christ Jesus. He himself was the one who spread the table of his own body and blood for a world of sinners who had nothing to give him in repayment. He was the one who first invited the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to dine in the Kingdom of God, and only then invited us to help issue the same invitations. To be like Jesus means we need the compassion and mercy that can only come from the encouragement in Christ and participation in the Spirit. Let us ask God to help us learn to share this same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.
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