All Are Invited

Hospitality is not simply hosting people, but the act of making people feel welcomed and included. Jesus extends his presence and status as a respected religious leader and teacher to a gathering of those who had been excluded and removed from acceptable society. This was the crafty nature of Roman occupation - to cause rifts among the indigenous people by recruiting locals to do the dirty work of collecting taxes. In Jewish circles, this was not only seen as a betrayal of their people, but a disloyalty to God. They were made social outcasts—and Jesus chose to party with them. Jesus-like hospitality will sometimes include the “wrong people” and offend the “right people.”