Entitlement

The master said, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.” (Luke 14, 23-4).

When Hillary Clinton finally conceded that she had failed to gain the Democratic nomination for the presidential election, some commentators explained her failure by saying that she had conveyed an air of entitlement. It seemed to some that she presented herself as the rightful inheritor; if not crown prince to her husband, then crown wife.

The assumption of entitlement annoys people, and not just in politics. In the middle chapters of Luke’s gospel there are a number of stories that have to do with entitlement. Most are centred on feasts, real or fictional. There is an actual feast to which Jesus has been invited by one of the leaders of the Pharisees. He notices how people jockey for the best places at table, places to which they presume they are entitled. He tells a story against this kind of presumption: don’t sit too high up, in case your host has to move you down. Forget entitlement; take the lowest place, and then you might—as we would say—be upgraded. Then he gives hosts some advice about inviting guests. Don’t invite the people who feel entitled to an invitation, but rather the ones who don’t, the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Finally comes the parable of the great feast, where the ones entitled to be there send their excuses, and the master has to send his servants out to compel every Tom, Dick and Harry to come in.

Like many of the parables, this has an off-the-shelf interpretation that we are likely to reach for rather too quickly. Jesus is saying that the kingdom is open to everyone; that the Jews have failed to respond, and that the doors are now open to the gentiles. Certainly when Luke wrote his gospel around 80AD, that interpretation would have appealed to his gentile readers. For decades the argument had run on, as to whether the church should move beyond the limits of the Jewish community. Now gentiles were the majority, and here is Jesus stating that this was what was always intended.

That is certainly one of the readings of this parable. But let’s go back to the idea of entitlement. The invited guests, who fail to turn up for the feast, are, no doubt, the people who would have felt most entitled to be there. The feast, Luke tells us, is the Kingdom of God. Who would have felt entitled to be part of that Kingdom? People like Jesus’ host on this occasion, the leader of the Pharisees who had invited Jesus to a meal at his house. If anyone felt in line for the Kingdom as of right, it was the Pharisees (and Jesus would have known that because he was probably one of them). They had held most closely to the covenant. If any should have a place at the feast, it would be them.

But Jesus says to them, you had your invitation and you didn’t turn up. There was always something more important going on. So, Jesus goes on to say, the invitation will be extended to those you don’t approve of. But his point is less to do with the gentiles than with the mindset that presumes entitlement to God’s favour.

Think, for a moment, what entitlement is. It is a right or a claim established by law or by something that we have done. I am entitled by law to my pension. I am entitled to be seen by a doctor within 48 hours. I am entitled to my family’s loyalty because I have been a good husband and father. Entitlement arises out of a transactional relationship when the rules are kept on both sides.

Most religion works in these transactional terms. In Greek religion, you established a claim on the favour of a god by regular sacrifice. Within Judaism, covenant was in part a transaction: if you observed God’s law, he could be expected to keep his side of the bargain and deal with you favourably. Much pious behaviour in Christianity is like that; the unspoken assumption is that if I do this for God, he will do something for me.

In the feast-stories in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is rejecting this transactional model. Our relationship with God is never a deal. And with that model goes the idea of entitlement. He is saying that we never, in any way, by anything we do, establish rights toward or claims against God. Neither by being Jewish, nor by being a Pharisee, nor by going to church, nor even by being a believer, and certainly not by virtuous behaviour, do we acquire entitlement. God is not bound by any of that. If he wants to open his doors to someone who is not Jewish, not a churchgoer, not a believer, not virtuous, he will go ahead and do it. The God that Jesus evokes in these stories is anarchic, beyond our prediction; as St Paul might have said, a law unto himself.

Well, that is bad enough for those of us who—like me—believe that we are entitled to what we have worked for. But there is worse to come. Go back to the parable. The invitation is to the feast of the Kingdom of God. But those first invited don’t recognise that. They don’t see what they are missing. Instead they go off buying land and testing oxen. The problem with the transactional model of religion is that it blinds you to the Kingdom even when it is offered literally (as here) on a plate. You don’t see it. You don’t see it because your whole sense of your relation to God is some kind of bargain. Something that forms no part of a deal is beyond your power to recognise.

The last of Luke’s feast-stories is one that we don’t normally think of as a feast-story: the story of the prodigal son. But that parable ends, of course, with a feast; and again, entitlement is central. The younger son asks for what he is entitled to, and goes into foreign parts. There he has no rights, no entitlement; and when he starts to starve, he turns back to the place where he has some claim, if not as a son, then as a servant. When he gets home, he provokes a crisis of entitlement: the elder son questions his brother’s claim to anything, and grumbles that his own claims have been overlooked.

But when the father kills the fatted calf to celebrate his son’s return, he is laying aside all principles of entitlement, all rules of transaction. By strict justice and prudence he is behaving unreasonably and even foolishly: what if the younger son concludes that he can touch his father for another jaunt into the big wide world? Once again we detect that whiff of anarchy, of unpredictability, which Jesus gives to the master of the feast when he hauls in the riff-raff off the street.

This, Jesus suggests, is how God is. He is a very different God from the covenant God of Israel, who sets out the terms of the deal and works within them. Instead of a legal partner, Jesus’ God is hard to pin down, mobile, outside our categories; he turns up in odd ways and does strange things, he surprises and disturbs us by his unpredictable immediacy. And what if, as he told these stories, Jesus were talking about himself? Amen.