Jesus is antisocial, so he parties
like the Romans aren't. even. there.
Why does Jesus party? His contemporaries seem to ask the same question. Jesus admits that he comes “eating and drinking,” and he does it with some sketchy friends. He summarizes the accusations against him: “Behold, a gluttonous man and a heavy drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”1
In the middle half of Luke, particularly, Jesus seems never to be too far from eating at someone’s table, from giving advice on hosting or attending a feast, or from telling a parable about a feast. This emphasis on banqueting, according to theologian David P. Moessner, provides Luke’s eleven-chapter account of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem with much of its structure. Banqueting, Moessner says, also gives much of the context for Luke’s message: Jesus, though always a guest, is “the Lord of the Banquet in their midst”; he is “Lord and host of the Banquet of the Kingdom of God.”2
He’s the Lord of the Banquet both now and later, celebrating God’s reign on earth that has come and is always coming.3 In this way, as Moessner explains with scrupulous detail in his book Lord of the Banquet, Jesus fulfills Deuteronomy’s promise of a New Exodus from Israel’s anticipated exile. In sum, Jesus parties because Deuteronomy commands Israel, once in the promised land, “to enjoy the blessings of the covenant life by eating ‘meat’ and ‘fruit’ according to ‘all their desire.’”4 He parties because Deuteronomy promises Israel that, after returning from exile, it can have this life again.5
Jesus’s fellow partiers are important in this eschatological regard. Jesus mixes with tax collectors (political and economic oppressors) and sinners (generally, fornicators, criminals, and people who ignore purity codes) just as Israel is commanded to “share their firstlings and first fruits with the poor—the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—as well as the Levite in their city.”6 Adulterers and criminals, as kinds of categories, seem pretty distant from widows and orphans, but Jesus sups with them all. In fact, as Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, Jesus both echoes and adds to Deuteronomy when he tells his hosts that “. . . when you give a party, ask the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” His Pharisee hosts, in theory, would be fine with hosting the poor, but hosting the crippled would cause these hosts to violate their own purity codes.7
Jesus asks his hosts, in essence, to make their banquets public. Deuteronomy’s anticipated celebrations, after all, aren’t private but public. They’re organized around Israel’s households, Moessner points out, but the households must subordinate their own domestic felicity to the public good. The households’ celebrations, for instance, often include those outside the home. In fact, the celebrations themselves often occur outside the home “at the one place which the Lord shall choose,” which, of course, became Jerusalem.8 These pilgrimages put the various strata of Israelite society—the rich and the poor, the blue bloods and the foreigners, the upright and the “sinners”—on a literally equal footing, as Chaucer’s account of a pilgrimage to Canterbury also puts his characters.
These values permeate Jesus’s own long pilgrimage to Jerusalem that constitutes the middle half of Luke. New Exodus feasting involves everyone—everyone, that is, who will accept invitations to these public and inclusive feasts. Jesus’s Parable of the Great Feast, told in the middle of Jesus’s pilgrimage, suggests that many won’t accept these invitations.
This caveat of acceptance is what makes Jesus, in a political sense, antisocial.
“Society,” in Hannah Arendt’s political sense of the term, isn’t just any large community. Society involves the mindset and means of relating to one another in polities where private concerns—concerns about our physical survival, comfort, and propagation—have, in Arendt’s words, “conquered the public realm.”9 In society’s victory over public life, the public realm is made to serve the household and the workplace, the home and the economy.
Arendt points out that many of our widely accepted economic and political concepts, such as capitalism’s “invisible hand,” our selective forms of enlightened self-interest, and the dogma of inevitable progress, have, in recent times, aided society’s takeover of politics in liberal societies:
All the so-called liberal concepts of politics . . .—such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events—have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics.10
In societies, people’s private wants, needs, and actions add up to what society is pleased to call public life. Arendt acknowledges that ant colonies and beehives exemplify this scaling from individual, private concerns to societies. But, she says, since people “are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion.”11
To those with eyes to see, national elections expose this delusion. Though many believe that a particular candidate would, if elected, substantially reduce the polity’s political freedom, those people—along with everyone else—realize that the election’s outcome is most closely tied to whom the electorate believes would best handle the economy. In a society, then, private matters trump public freedom even in what’s considered our most important expression of public freedom—elections.
Our family life and our private needs, of course, are vital, but they cannot substitute for our public lives. When our private matters displace public matters, God’s kingdom and its justice become solely religious practices or tenets or cease to be practiced at all. Notice the private preoccupations of the invited guests in Jesus’s Parable of the Great Feast and how these preoccupations prevent the guests from accepting their public callings (their “invitations”):
One after another they all sent excuses. The first said, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go and inspect it; please accept my apologies.” The second said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies.” The next said, “I cannot come; I have just got married.”12
None of these excuses involves the invitees in inherently bad pursuits. Instead, their excuses privilege private matters—marketplace and work, marriage and family—over the public feast.
So the master of the feast ends up filling his banquet with “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame”—the very people Jesus tells his host to invite, those excluded from Israel’s society. In this way, the Lord of the Banquet, mirroring Deuteronomy’s New Exodus and God’s now and not-yet kingdom, creates public life.
The master of the feast, then, is antisocial. That is, he’s against what Arendt is against—the social realm’s takeover of the political. He grows angry when private matters assert themselves against participation in the public realm.
In this political sense, Jesus is equally antisocial in the only two Gospel passages where he warns against adopting Gentile practices. The first practice involves putting our private needs ahead of a just polity, which Jesus calls the kingdom of God:
Do not ask anxiously, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?” These are the things that occupy the minds of the heathen, but your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.13
The second Gentile practice—ruling over people—may at first seem unrelated to the first practice:
. . . Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that, among the Gentiles, rulers lord it over their subjects, and the great make their authority felt. It shall not be so with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all . . .”14
These two Gentile practices Jesus identifies—authoritarian rule and the public’s abandonment of public space—do, in fact, support each other. Arendt finds the concepts’ connection in the thought of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. A society—a collective of people focused solely on family, career, and the market—may eventually attract a “Leviathan,” an authoritarian ruler, to dominate its public life. And that domination, in turn, will further drive people into their private lives, Arendt says:
Deprived of political rights, the individual, to whom public and official life manifests itself in the guise of necessity, acquires a new and increased interest in his private life and his personal fate. Excluded from participation in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the individual loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow-men.15
In a vicious cycle, then, the loss of people’s natural political connection with others drives people into private relations of pure competition, causing people to need an authoritarian’s protection even more.
Unlike many political thinkers, Arendt doesn’t attribute Hobbes’s ideas about a protection-racket government to Hobbes’s supposed pessimistic view of human nature. Instead, she understands Hobbes as a prophet of today’s private, bourgeois society in which people focus on their private lives and fortunes and, therefore, need protection from their fellow societal members above everything else:
[Hobbes’s] new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it. The Commonwealth is based on the delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed.16
In society, the state enforces its role of protecting us from our neighbors with death, if necessary. Indeed, as theologian William T. Cavanaugh points out, “the foundation of the state in Hobbes is not a common good but rather a shared evil: the fear of death.”17 This fear of death alienates people from pursuing the common good, such as participating in charity, and Hobbes’s Leviathan obliges. Leviathan, for instance, doesn’t require anyone to give to the poor. His state simply excludes the poor from society, as Arendt points out:
By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears—both stand outside society. . . .18
Society, then, excludes its economic losers as it does its criminals.
Society’s list of excluded people, including the poor and the criminals, soon begins to resemble the list Jesus makes of those who are—shockingly, from his society’s standpoint—invited into the Kingdom of God. Jesus welcomes into the public sphere those excluded from society.
Hobbes’s remedy for society’s excluded people, though, isn’t acceptance into the public realm but violence:
Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society—the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, the criminal—from every obligation toward society and state if the state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their desire for power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to kill, thus restoring that natural equality which society conceals only for the sake of expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts’ organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie’s moral philosophy.19
Under Hobbes, society’s losers are tacitly encouraged to take up arms and rebel. Society thereby approximates the political situation at the time of Jesus’s birth caused by acts of exclusion that lead to armed resistance. The tax census that leads Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem also leads a would-be messiah to start an unsuccessful armed rebellion against Rome.20
Jesus, of course, is one of many Roman-era Jewish messiahs. But unlike the others we know of, Jesus doesn’t take up arms.21 Instead, by fulfilling Israel’s long-promised New Exodus, he affirms and practices the public calling of Israel’s covenant-based communities. He extends this New Exodus even to the Gentiles who, like Israel, suffer under the Roman Empire’s fear and oppression.
Hobbes may have been a prophet, but the social, wholly private mindset his proposed commonwealth addresses has been fostered by rulers for centuries, including the Roman Empire during our era’s first century.
Jesus offers a different model of living together as both a present alternative to society and a promised future of a just polity. By walking out Deuteronomy’s long-awaited New Exodus to Jerusalem, Jesus points back to Deuteronomy’s balanced constitution based on federal, theocratic, and republican principles. He points back also to the Torah’s economic justice based in part on its sabbatical years and its years of jubilee.
Jesus’s partying with society’s poor and its outcasts is one way Jesus announces that God’s kingdom, despite the social and political injustice experienced by his listeners, has come.
The above illustrations are generated from Bing Image Creator. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Luke 7:34 NNAS.
David P. Moessner, Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative (Trinity Press International, 1998). 157-58.
Theologian William T. Cavanaugh points out that “. . . Jesus’ meals are understood by his followers as signs which indicate that the Kingdom is now present under signs.” William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, Repr, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 225 (italics in the original).
Moessner, 266.
Deuteronomy 30:1-14.
Moessner, 267. Deuteronomy 14:28-29; 26:12.
Luke 14:13 REB; Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, 124-25.
Moessner, 265-67.
Arendt, Human Condition, 38-41.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 145-46.
Arendt, 145. Western Christianity asserts a similar scale from the individual to society as a collective of individuals. William Stringfellow finds that both the “social gospel” and “evangelical pietism” hold that “society is transformed by means of the persuasion or conversion of individuals and by the accumulative impact of geometric progression of the commitment and involvement of individuals.” Stringfellow’s assessment of this math-oriented argument is similar to Arendt’s “delusion” conclusion: “This is really a social ethic of osmosis.” William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 2004 ed (Wipf & Stock, 2004), 17.
Luke 14:18-20 REB.
Matthew 6:31-33 REB.
Matthew 20:25-28 REB.
Arendt, 141.
Arendt, 141.
William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Eerdmans, 2011), 20.
Arendt, 141-42.
Arendt, 142.
Luke 2:1-3; Acts 5:37.
Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 316.
Well said, again. !
You make clear that Jesus’s feasting is not frivolity but theology in action—the banquet as revelation. His table dissolves the social into the political, the private into the public, the exclusive into the inclusive. He parties, as you show, because celebration itself is covenantal: an enacted critique of Hobbes’s fear and Arendt’s privatized society, and a foretaste of the Kingdom where no one dines alone. - Thanks, as always, Bryce.