Second expanded edition: What Are They Saying About the Parables? (Chapter 6, Part 6): Willi Braun and Luke 14's Great Dinner

 

Willi Braun’s study of the parable of the Great Dinner in Luke 14:16–24 also exhibits the productive nature of Hellenistic-Roman comparative texts and demonstrates the multifaceted interaction it has with its social, cultural, and literary environments. The healing of the man with dropsy is the fourth and final Sabbath healing performed by Jesus in Luke, and it takes place during the third and final meal that Jesus shares in a Pharisee’s house. In Luke 14:1–14, Jesus chastises (again) the social elite for seeking after honor.  

Braun’s investigation of Hellenistic-Roman texts brings to light an element of the narrative that modern readers had previously not recognized. Dropsy is a metaphor used by the Cynics because of the paradoxical symptoms of dropsy: The person suffering from dropsy has an unquenchable craving for fluids, even though the body is already inflated with fluid, and when the person drinks more fluids, it serves not to ease but to advance the dropsy. The symbolism is clear to readers familiar with this first-century metaphor: At a meal scene with social elite, the man with dropsy symbolizes the rapacious and avaricious persons whom Jesus denounces in Braun’s words, “with a barrage of terms that reads like a Hellenistic thesaurus of slurs” (69). 

With his use of Hellenistic-Roman texts, Braun constructs an extremely plausible hypothesis: The parable is a rejection of all types of self-aggrandizement, love of money, love of honor and prestige, and a radical statement of a perspective that rejects the social and economic mores of the elite. 

Conclusion 

 

The early Christian era was an age of active polyglossia, that is, a time when different national languages were interacting within the same cultural systems. Scattered throughout the entire Mediterranean were cities, settlements, and other areas where several cultures and languages directly “cohabited,” and they interwove with each other in distinctive patterns. Parables thus germinated and flourished in these fields of active polyglossia because parables themselves are dialogues that actively engage a wide range of different cultures, societies, and peoples.