Could you imagine, having been invited to a swank soirée by a locally prominent citizen, telling the host what Jesus told the host of a party he was invited to? I reckon it would be a conversation-stopper and a sure-fire way of getting your name off the "A-List".
First of all Jesus draws attention to the way people were jostling their way to the positions of importance at the party. They were headed for possible humiliation according to Jesus - better to draw back and have the host invite you up to the place of honour.
The he says to the host that rather than inviting his friends and family and wealthy neighbours to a party, presumably with the understanding that they will reciprocate with an invitation of their own, he should invite all those who were outcasts, the ritually unclean and those who most certainly could not reciprocate the invitation.
Bruce Prewer, in his reflection on this story, coined the phrase "un-costed giving" as a way to describe what he thought Jesus was driving at. He reflected on the difficulty even we in the church have in living up to this calling, so pervasive is the cultural norm of quid pro quo in our society.
It made me think of some of the people mentioned by Philip Yancey in his book Soul Survivor, people he had met and interviewed in his journalistic career or whose lives, through the books they had written, had been an inspiration to him. He told the stories of people like Martin Luther King Jr, Dr Paul Brand who did some magical surgery for people with leprosy, Robert Coles, a social scientist who discovered that the children of the poorest of poor int he world had a lot to teach us in the west about life and the important things, and Mahatma Ghandi. All these people gave of their own lives unstintingly for the welfare of others, often ahead of their own welfare. Theirs are remarkable examples of un-costed giving.
On Monday evening last, the ABC showed a Talking Heads episode in which Fr Bob Maguire was interviwed. Father Bob has been involved in three different charities over the years that have sought to help out the homeless and mentally ill in and around Melbourne. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 1989 in recognition of his inability to put a cost limit on his giving - indeed his Bishop has had to step in and take over some aspects of his work be cause Father Bob is not good at the costings; and that is the way it should be.
Father Bob in Melbourne would rank alongside the late Father Brian Morrison in Perth and Father Ted Kennedy in Sydney as thorns in the flesh of the establishment of the church for two very significant reasons - firstly they never drew the line about who to help and how to help them; and secondly they had no fear of stepping outside the normal avenues to do what needed doing.
The Roman Catholic church makes a big thing of the processes they go through to formally declare someone to be a saint - and we will see the climax of that process soon in relation to the Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop - but these three guys are true saints who understood every word of Jesus advice about un-costed giving.
