THE BANQUET WE REJECT… #11

September 20, 2026

“A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” (Luke 14:16-24)

We are invited to a banquet. Jesus spells it out with remarkable clarity — and yet so many of us decline. What is it about God's invitation to abundance and celebration that we so readily trade for our own carefully constructed designs?

I find it easier, if I'm honest, to picture God as someone who rations and restricts rather than one who lavishes and restores. It’s like His idea of a good time is woefully short of what we might be able to put together ourselves. I’ve struggled with that image and still do. And yet Scripture tells a different story. There is as much — perhaps more — in the biblical record that speaks of God blessing and restoring to abundance than withholding in scarcity. He never promises it will be easy and perhaps thats the rub. In fact He guarantees the opposite. "In this world you will have trouble" — but then the pivot: "take heart, I have overcome the world." (John 16:33)

The question is what we do with that pivot.

St. Augustine observed that all sin is simply a disorder of our loves. Our plans, possessions and desires are not bad in themselves — it's the order of their importance in our lives that becomes the problem. When our treasure is buried in outcomes of our own design, happiness becomes a zero-sum game entirely dependent on those outcomes arriving as planned. Jesus commands us to love God first, then others. If we took that seriously — coupled with His assurance that He has overcome the world — it ought to change how we hold our plans. Loosely, as many faith traditions put it. Open-handed rather than clenched.

But the reality is that it rarely does. Distraction, control and the desire to manage outcomes sit at the heart of much of our dismay. This is particularly true in a consumer culture. So the honest question to ask is this — what is our immediate reaction when the careful construct of our wishes begins to unravel?

For perspective I turned to Elisabeth Elliot — writer, missionary, and one of the more remarkable figures of twentieth century faith. Her book Through Gates of Splendour tells the story of her husband Jim and four fellow missionaries who were speared to death by the Huaorani people in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956. The plan was not supposed to end this way. Elisabeth was left a widow with an eighteen-month-old child, facing grief, anger, confusion and a faith that had every reason to collapse under the weight of what had transpired

A complete rejection of her beliefs would have been understandable. Leaving Ecuador entirely, even more so.

Instead she doubled down. Retrenched, she gradually earned the trust and moved into the very village of the people who had killed her husband — bringing a message of hope, forgiveness and restoration. Members of the tribe, including the man who had killed Jim, eventually came to faith. It is well beyond the limits of what most of us could imagine choosing. And yet within that choice lies something worth pondering.

Years later Elliot wrote her only work of fiction — No Graven Image — and perhaps in it she revealed some insight into the code she had been living. The main character Margaret is a missionary working painstakingly to translate the Bible into a tribal language. Months of slow, careful progress. Then her translator— who in himself was a miraculous blessing to be there, falls ill; she administers medication, he reacts adversely and dies. The village turns against her. Everything she had built collapses.

In her devastation Margaret lashes out at God and screams in incredulous disbelief and dismay….then arrives at a moment of clarity: "If God is merely an accomplice, He had abandoned me... but if God is truly God, He had freed me." I’d never really thought of God as an “accomplice” but when I study my reactions and responses when things don’t go as I planned, I’m left to wonder. What is God to me? To any of us?

That is the challenge of faith in a single sentence. Do we trust, under any circumstance and see the banquet — even when the table looks nothing like we planned? I thrash and squirm too many times to count when I consider this prospect. That “abundance” is not just about quantity in God’s economy. Something I’ll likely struggle to accept wholeheartedly but with God’s help will learn to slowly embrace.