As the meal of Luke fourteen commences, Jesus is being watched closely by the Pharisees (14:1b). This, no doubt, stems from the fact that He has humiliated them, upbraided them, announced a number of woes upon them, and generally caused them to line up against Him. Additionally, with this presentation, Luke introduces a sense of hostility that must be kept in mind throughout the entire presentation of this meal into this particular narrative, while also linking it directly with the most recent meal at the house of a Pharisee (from chapter eleven). As has been stated several times, that meal closed with “When He went out from there, the experts in the law and the Pharisees began to oppose Him bitterly” (11:53a).
In spite of that bitter opposition, Jesus continued to accept their invitations, as disingenuous and far from hospitable as those invitations may have been. Though “they began to ask Him hostile questions about many things, plotting against Him, to catch Him in something He might say” (11:53b-54), we are presented with a Jesus that keeps right on talking, and who even seems to accelerate His criticisms, as seen in the intervening chapters.
So, picking up from where he left off in what we might term the “meal narrative,” that runs through this Gospel, Luke begins the next meal, which occurs on a Sabbath (14:1), with a reference to the Pharisees “watching Him closely” (14:1b). This, quite obviously, was part of the ongoing plot “to catch Him in something He might say.” Jesus, as Luke’s readers would have now come to expect, is undeterred, being confident in His messianic kingdom-bringing program and quite aware that He is on a march to Jerusalem where He is going to die upon the Roman cross. With the larger picture in mind, which we can have and which Luke would expect us to have because we are coming to his text with the basic pre-supposition of a resurrected Jesus, the challenges from the Pharisees, and their attempts to discredit Him, would have taken on a growing insignificance, though He would seize on them as teachable moments by which He would continue to reveal His thoughts and practices regarding the kingdom of God that He knew Himself to be bringing to bear.
Because He is undeterred, the oft-repeated charge of hypocrisy is once again brought to the fore when we find that “right in front of Him was a man suffering from dropsy” (14:2). This is not unlike what we have just seen in chapter thirteen. We are reminded that Jesus “was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and a woman was there who had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten herself up completely” (13:10-11). Jesus, as we know, “placed His hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God” (13:13), producing indignation and an insistence from the head of the synagogue that the Sabbath was most certainly not the day to come for healing (13:14). We are most assuredly supposed to have this event in mind, along with the kingdom implications it presents, when we read that “Jesus asked the experts in religious law and the Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?’” (14:3) Jesus’ experience at the synagogue has clearly weighed heavily on Him, which is evident in the explicit recollection that this new scenario presents.
Jesus’ curiosity goes unsatisfied and His question goes unanswered, as “they remained silent” (14:4a). They wanted to trap Him, not the other way around; and even though He has to know that they are attempting to enclose Him within His words and actions, He forges ahead. Just as He had done in the synagogue where He had been teaching, “Jesus took hold of the man, healed him, and sent him away” (14:4b). Having done that, He returned to those that had received His question, so as to remind them of their hypocrisy, and by extension the woes that He had pronounced against them, and said “Which of you, if you have a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out” (14:5). This sends us right back to the synagogue, and Jesus’ statement of “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from its stall, and lead it to water?” (13:15b) There, on the Sabbath in the synagogue, “His adversaries,” we remember, “were humiliated” (13:17a). Here, on the Sabbath at the meal in the house of the Pharisee, His adversaries “could not reply to this” (14:6), so extending their humiliation. It seems that Jesus enjoys the idea of crystallizing His teaching while at meals, giving His time, His teaching, and His actions at meals a greater weight than we might have come to imagine. This weight is certainly on Jesus’ mind when He speaks to the church at Laodicea.
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