Bible Text: St Luke 14:15–24 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
The master of the feast says, Go out and compel them to come in. Those are striking words and if you understand them they are about as comforting as any words Jesus ever speaks. Because they speak to His overwhelming desire to bring you into His church, forgive your sins, make you and keep you a child of God and bring you to everlasting life. But at first they seem strange: compel them to come in. The Greek is just the word for “force,” the English softens it as it should, but that’s the word, “Force them to come in.” What is this force? How do you get compelled to become and to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ?
Well, first it’s obviously not physical force. This isn’t a command to parents of stubborn teenagers to force them out of bed and compel them into the car and tie them down in the pews. Though I personally agree with Luther’s advice that if they don’t want to be fed by God here at church maybe they shouldn’t be fed at home either. But really, that’s what you want to avoid, getting to the point where you are having to force kids or yourself to go to church. You want them and you want you to want it. And that takes a different kind of compelling, doesn’t it?
Now the Christian church did not grow by physical force. The Muslim cult did. They spread by violence, by the sword, by taking over Christian countries and burning down churches. And many Muslim countries continue to force converts: Iran being the worst of them. You confess Jesus in Iran and your life is in danger. They force people to be Muslim.
But no one has ever been forced to be a Christian. You know why? Because it’s impossible. You can force submission to Allah, because submission/obedience can be forced. But you can’t force love and trust in God. The Christian church spread and it continues to spread by winning hearts for the true God who loves the world so much that He became one of us and bore our sins and died our death, to give us the feast of eternal salvation.
But there is a compelling. There is a forcing. It’s just not of the physical variety. Jesus says, “Compel them to come in.” And if you are a Christian, you have been compelled to come into the church. It goes like this:
God’s Word, His law, shows you, very much against your will, that is, against your sinful, arrogant, flesh, His law shows you you are a sinner. You were born a sinner and every day of your life shows the proofs that you remain a sinner: selfish thoughts, unbelief, worry about things beyond your control, lack of trust in God that He will work all to good, envy, hatred, feeling sorry for yourself, lust for what God did not give you – and the Holy Spirit, working through God’s law shows you that you have deserved not life from God, not life with Him, but His punishment. I don’t want to believe any of these things about myself. But I am forced to believe it, compelled to believe the truth of it, when God shows it to me in His law: It is simply true! Love me above all things, God says, and I love myself more, even though I know I should love God above everything and everyone, because He has been so good to me and He is my source and my highest good. Love your neighbor as yourself, and I find myself pleasing myself instead of my neighbor. I’m forced to admit it.
And then the Holy Spirit forces me, compels me, to believe something else. And again, this isn’t a physical forcing. It’s the force of the truth. I can’t not believe it. Because it’s true. And this is the Gospel: God loves you. In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and gave His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The Son of God, the eternal, who dwells in unapproachable glory, a glory that should destroy us poor sinners, He hides it, clothes it in our human flesh and blood, binds us so closely to Himself that we become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, because He is now our Brother, born of the virgin Mary, and more, He empties Himself, takes every human misery, every anxiety, every pain that we’ve ever experienced, takes it on Himself, suffers the punishment for our sin, destroys our death by dying, and then rises again to give us His life, with God, forever.
And He invites us to the feast and we are compelled to come, because He has the words of eternal life, that’s what we feast on: He has forgiveness for every sin, and He has the strength and power to make us live as our Father’s children on this earth until we see His glory in heaven.
There are many who reject the invitation. Jesus gives examples. The one bought oxen, so he won’t go. The other bought a field, so he refuses the invitation. The other just got married, and he can’t come, he says. These are the three things we end up putting above the Kingdom of God. Oxen is our work, field is our property and enjoyment, wife is our family.
Now a couple things. First, the master doesn’t force these people to come. Doesn’t send out an army and make them leave the oxen and field and family and come to His feast. Obviously, that would make for a very unpleasant feast, with a bunch of people who don’t want to be there. In fact, the Lord says emphatically, they will NOT taste my feast. They can’t come. The church, the true church, is made up of people who love the Lord and want to be here. And heaven also is filled with people who want to be there. God doesn’t force anyone to be there who doesn’t want to be with Jesus. In the end, we’re compelled to come, but we come willingly, because the Truth compels us to believe there is nothing greater, nothing higher, nothing more needful for us, nothing that could give us more joy, than to be taught and forgiven and fed by our Lord and finally to see Him face to face.
Second, we do have jobs and enjoyments and family. And these are great gifts from God. Jesus isn’t downgrading them. But you do downgrade them, if you put them above the Kingdom of God. People think they’re loving their family more if they put their family above God. So the typical example today is of mom and dad changing their view on whether homosexuality is a sin, because their son or daughter comes out as gay. Do you think you’re loving your son and daughter by lying to them? Of course not. By encouraging them in a sin that angers their loving God? No. You love your family not by picking them above God, but by bringing God to them and them to God. There is no more loving thing I could do for my family than to bring them to church and then bring church to them, with prayers at home and the reading of the Bible and forgiveness and Christian encouragement.
And it’s the same with your job. When you know you’re working, whether that’s at home as a mother, or in the workplace, when you know you’re really working for the Lord, and your hard work is pleasing to Him, then even digging ditches and changing diapers is fulfilling.
And what about your enjoyments? I love my enjoyments (it would be less than human not to), I love hunting and hiking and even fishing, I guess, and sportsball, a lot, I love sportsball (nothing better than striking guys out in slowpitch softball), but they are enjoyments I simply couldn’t enjoy, not even close to fully, if I didn’t know God was smiling on me while I do them.
The statement that provoked Jesus’ parable of the master and the feast came from a Pharisee, who said, “Blessed is he who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” The thought here is that eating in the Kingdom of God is just a future event. That’s heaven. But now in the present we don’t. Now we do our work and raise our families and have our enjoyments. The Kingdom of God comes later. But Jesus says no. Now is the day of salvation. Now is the time to eat in the Kingdom of God. He will say later, the Kingdom of God is here, it’s among you, within you. You aren’t simply waiting for a future heaven. God brings you heaven. God came down from heaven. He became a man. And He joins you here. He feeds you now in His Kingdom. And unites you to Himself, gives you the righteousness of the Son of God, places His body and blood in your mouth. And this transfers to everything in life. Of course it does! You want your family involved in this, this is why you work, this is what gives your enjoyments an everlasting outlook. So don’t pit the one against the other. Bring the Kingdom into your home and your work and your fun, into everything.
Finally, the invitation goes out to the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame. That’s you. Don’t forget it. God is so insistent that you come, He compels you to come, not because He wants to burden you, but because He wants to take your burden off of you. He has put it on Himself. He knows everything you need, and He will provide, and He knows the greatest thing you need is to be relieved of sin and the fear of death and anxiety. So come to the feast and let Him give you Himself and all that He has, righteousness, eternal life, a good conscience, joy and peace, and the zeal to live as His children here in time and forever in eternity.