One Sabbath, Jesus went to eat at the home of a leading Pharisee, and they were watching him closely. 2 Right there in front of him was a man suffering from dropsy.[1] 3 Jesus spoke up and said to the legal experts and Pharisees, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”
4 They kept silent.
So he took hold of the man, healed him, and sent him away. 5 Then he said to them, “If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well, won’t you pull him out at once, even on the Sabbath day?”[2] 6 And they could not answer him about this.
7 He noticed how the guests were picking the best seats at the table, so he told them a parable: 8 “When someone invites you to a wedding, don’t take the seat of honor. Someone more important than you may have been invited,[3] 9 and the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, embarrassed, you’ll have to take whatever spot is left at the end of the table.
10 “Instead, when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place. Then when your host comes, he’ll say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ That will bring you honor in front of everyone at the table with you. 11 For everyone who lifts himself up will be brought low, and the one who lowers himself will be lifted up.”
12 Then Jesus said to the man who had invited him, “When you give a lunch or a dinner, don’t invite your friends, your brothers, your relatives, or your rich neighbors. They might invite you back, and that would be your repayment. 13 But when you throw a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind — 14 and you will be fortunate. They can’t pay you back, so you will be repaid at the resurrection of those who did right.”
15 One of the guests heard this and said to him, “Fortunate is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.”
16 Jesus replied, “A man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. 17 When the meal was ready, he sent his slave to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come — everything is ready now.’
18 “But one after another, they all began to make excuses. The first one said, ‘I just bought a field, and I have to go see it. Please excuse me.’ 19 Another said, ‘I just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’[4] 20 Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’
21 “The slave returned and reported all this to his master. The master of the house was furious and said to his slave, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’
22 “The slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’
23 “So the master told the slave, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and urge people to come in, so that my house will be full. 24 I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will taste my banquet.’”
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus. He turned and said to them, 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple.[5] 27 Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and figure out the cost, to see if you have enough to finish it? 29 Otherwise, you might lay the foundation and then not be able to complete it. Everyone who sees it will start making fun of you, 30 saying, ‘This man started to build and couldn’t finish.’
31 “Or what king, marching out to war against another king, won’t first sit down and consider whether he can face with ten thousand men the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he can’t, then while the other is still far off, he’ll send a delegation and ask for terms of peace.
33 “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.
34 “Salt is good. But if the salt loses its taste, how can it be made salty again? 35 It’s no good for the soil or the manure pile. People just throw it out. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”[6]
Notes
Note 1. “Dropsy” (Greek hydrōpikos) was the old name for a painful swelling caused by the body retaining fluid — a symptom of heart, kidney, or liver failure. It was understood as a physical ailment, not a spiritual curse. ↩
Note 2. Rescuing a person or valuable animal in distress on the Sabbath was widely treated as permissible. ↩
Note 3. Guests reclined on couches arranged around the table, and the places were ranked, so where you settled announced your standing to the whole room. Grabbing the top spot only to be publicly demoted was a real social humiliation. ↩
Note 4. A yoke is a pair of oxen, so five yoke means ten plow animals — the working stock of a large farm rather than a smallholding. ↩
Note 5. The Greek verb is miseo, the ordinary word for hate, and the translation prints it plainly. Some read it against a Semitic idiom in which “hate” can mark the lesser of two loyalties — the comparative sense behind “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated” (Malachi 1:2-3). Others take Luke’s Greek at full strength, noting that Matthew’s parallel saying reads “loves father or mother more than me” (10:37) where Luke has this. Which is meant here is not settled. ↩
Note 6. Salt wasn’t only for food — it was worked into the soil and the dung heap to make fertilizer more effective. ↩