Daily Devotion for Lent - Day 23

Scripture Reading: Luke 14:1-24

We would like to come but we have some very good excuses...

What does it mean to miss out on the banquet?  I feel like Jesus was telling this from a 21st century rather than a 1st century perspective.  As I think about worship attendance, we've got a lot of excuses going on and this was prior to the pandemic!

So, the good news for us is that this has been happening for a long time.  The bad news is that it seems to be a chronic issue for us.

What is the consequence of missing out on the invitation?  While we could say, "Well, you don't make it into heaven", I think the less obvious conclusion is that we miss out on relationships.  Before you say that you have more relationships than you can handle, it also means that we are likely to be less healthy in the relationships that we do have.

Take the previous story of Jesus telling us to sit in the lowest place.  When we don't access what Jesus is telling us on a regular basis, we may be more likely to sit where we want.

Jesus emphasizes those who are not normally thought of in today's reading.  We start with a reminder that a man in need of healing should be thought of in the same priority as your own child or animal in need.  Then he goes on to lift up the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind in the next two passages.  

The difficulty of this is that we can probably think of reasons we don't have time to include them in our lives.  Maybe this gets back to the reasons the Pharisees didn't want the man healed on the Sabbath.  Maybe this gets to the idea of why people made excuses to come to the banquet.  

All of a sudden, this hits painfully close to home.

Prayer for the day:

God, we must confess that we often let our own interests hold sway in our lives.  And when other things begin to interfere with our time, we quickly put them in their place.  Help us to see beyond our selves.  Let us begin to understand your invitation and what it means for our lives.  Amen.

Photo by Tor Andreas Torhaug via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons License.