City Life Starter

Written by Scott Fiddler

The Word

^{12 Then He also said to him who invited Him, “When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor rich neighbors, lest they also invite you back, and you be repaid. 13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. 14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you shall be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”}

¹⁵ Now when one of those who sat at the table with Him heard these things, he said to Him, “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!”

Luke 14:12-15

Commentary

I have been an employment lawyer for most of my legal career. As such, I have spent much of my career attempting to prove or disprove motives for employment actions. To win a discrimination case a plaintiff must usually prove he was terminated because of an unlawful motive (race, age, gender, national origin, religion, disability, etc.). One of the nuances in employment law is what is called the “mixed motive” case, a case in which the employer’s lawful motive for termination (e.g. poor performance) is mixed with an unlawful motive (e.g. race). 

Our lives are a series of decisions compelled by mixed motives. Those decisions are often a mixture of good and bad, moral and amoral, and selfless and self-interested motives.  It is not something we think as much about as we should because, as I mentioned last week, God has chosen to create a world where others (with the exception of God) cannot read our thoughts. We know it is our actions by which we will usually be judged; bad motives are harder to see and consequently harder to scrutinize. As a result, we don’t scrutinize our motives much because so long as we can keep them hidden, they will not hamper us socially.

But once we become followers of Jesus, we are obliged to subject our thoughts and motives to the Lordship of Jesus. We are called to be like Him, to be transformed into the person God created us to be. What others can only speculate about in us is laid bare before Him with whom we have to do.  We have entered a new realm of reality. As my friend Dennis Peacocke says, “Welcome to the NFL.” 

Application

In his advice about throwing a dinner party, Jesus is encouraging His followers to do something purely good, and, in so doing, to imitate God. Inviting those to dinner who can never do anything for you is a form of pure goodness because the motive is free of any self-interest. It is being like God. The good God does for us is completely and purely altruistic. There is nothing we can give God in return that He needs or does not already have. Therefore, His good acts toward us, His love for us, is of the purest sort, undiluted by any self-interest. That is what Jesus is calling us to in this teaching.

Prayer

Lord, examine and purify my motives so I can become more like you. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.