economics of compassion

But in the second part of the story, the ground shifts, the earth moves, and we find ourselves in an entirely different orbit. Jesus now turns to the one who is giving the banquet, the one who functions as Jesus’ patron, and pulls the rug out from under his entire enterprise. ‘You ought not invite people to banquets in order to seek their favour’, he says. One ought not invite one’s patrons. ‘Indeed’, says Jesus, ‘you should not even invite potential clients, those from whom goods and services might be extracted in return for one’s own favour’. ‘When you are preparing a banquet,’ he says to this fellow (and I can see his jaw drop even now), ‘invite only the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’ In other words, invite only the ‘untouchables’, the very lowest echelon of society, those who are neither patrons nor clients, those for whom there is no economic status at all. Why? Because they could never repay you in a million years. They could never repay you in a million years . . . Can you feel the ground shift? Can you see the tear in those old wineskins? Here Jesus calls the whole system of patron and client into question. He rejects, utterly, the morality of a system whereby people are valued only insofar as they have something to exchange. Only insofar as they are willing to exploit and be exploited. Only insofar as they are able to reduce themselves to relations of usefulness. And he does so on the basis of what can only be called a vision of messianic justice: a strong belief in the patronage of God for all people, a radically different kind of patronage which is given freely and without condition of response. A patronage which gives even the ‘untouchable’ ones a sacred status as children of the Most High God.
Garry Deverell from http://laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html