The Supper and the Two Masters

What sort of people does he tell us to invite to lunch or dinner? Exactly the ones he had already pointed out through Isaiah: “Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the beggars — the ones with no home of their own — into your house.” The reason, obviously, is that they “cannot pay you back” for your act of kindness. And since Christ forbids us to look for repayment now and promises it instead “at the resurrection,” this is the Creator’s own design — the God who has no use for people who love presents and chase after rewards. [a]

Now consider which of the two gods the parable of the man who sent out invitations suits better: “A man gave a great dinner and invited many guests.” The dinner being made ready is surely a picture of the full provision of eternal life. My first point is this: strangers, and people with no family tie to you, are not usually the ones asked to dinner; the guests are more often members of the household and the family. So the invitation belonged to the Creator, since the people to be invited belonged to him as well — as human beings, by their descent from Adam, and as Jews, by their fathers. It did not belong to a god who had no claim on them at all, either by nature or by right.

My second point: if the one who sends out the invitations is the one who prepared the dinner, then on that reckoning the dinner is the Creator’s, since it was he who sent word to remind the guests. They had been invited long before through the fathers, and were now to be reminded through the prophets. It is certainly not the banquet of a god who never sent anyone ahead to remind them — who did nothing whatever beforehand about inviting anyone, but came down all at once; who first became known at the moment he was already inviting, and first invited at the moment he was already pressing people in; who fixed one and the same hour for the dinner and for the invitation to it.

But when they are invited, they make their excuses. Fair enough, if the invitation came from the other god, since it was so sudden. If, on the other hand, the excuse was not a fair one, then the invitation was not a sudden one. And if the invitation was not sudden, it must have come from the Creator — from the God of long ago, whose call they refused at the last. Their first refusal was when they said to Aaron, “Make us gods to go ahead of us.” Their second came later, when they “heard with their ears and did not understand” that God was calling them.

In words that fit this parable exactly, he said through Jeremiah: “Obey my voice, and I will be your God and you will be my people, and you will walk in all the ways I have commanded you.” That is God’s invitation. But, he says: “They did not listen; they did not turn an ear.” That is the people’s refusal. “They went off, every one of them, after the imagination of his own evil heart.” “I have bought a field.” “I have bought some oxen.” “I have married a wife.” And still he presses them: “I have sent you all my servants the prophets, rising early, before daylight.” The Holy Spirit is meant here — the one who reminds the guests. “Yet my people did not listen to me; they did not turn an ear, but stiffened their necks.” And this was reported back to the master of the house.

Then he was moved to anger — and he did well to be moved; since Marcion allows his god no feeling at all, the God who feels must therefore be mine — and he ordered them to bring people in from “the streets and alleys of the city.” See whether this does not come to the same thing as what he says through Jeremiah: “Have I been a desert to the house of Israel, or a land left unfarmed?” That is to say: have I nobody left to call to myself? have I nowhere to bring them from? “Since my people have said, We will not come to you any more.” So he sent out to call others — but still from the same city.

My third point: although the city was full of people, he still gave orders to gather men in from the roads and the hedges. That is, we ourselves are now being gathered in, out of the nations that stood outside — and with exactly that jealous resentment he put into words in Deuteronomy: “I will hide my face from them, and I will show them what will happen in the last days” (how others will take their place), “for they are a stubborn generation, children with no faithfulness in them. They made me jealous with what is no god, and they provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will make them jealous with those who are no people, I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation” — and that foolish nation is us, whose hope the Jews go on carrying to this day. But the Lord says they will get no taste of it: “Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a watchman’s hut in a field of cucumbers” — because the nation refused the last invitation of all, the invitation to Christ.

Now I ask: when you have gone through this whole course of the Creator’s arrangements and announcements, what part of it can be assigned to a god who does his entire work at one stroke, and who has neither the Creator’s course nor his arrangement to fit the parable with? Or, again: what is that god’s first invitation, and what is his reminder at the second stage? First some have to make their excuses; afterwards others have to have come in. But as it is, he comes to invite both parties at once and indiscriminately, those out of the city and those out of the hedges together, against the mirror the parable holds up. He cannot possibly condemn as men who turned up their noses at his invitation people he has never yet invited, and whom he is approaching with so much eagerness. And if he condemns them in advance as men who are going to refuse, then he is also foretelling in advance that the nations will be chosen in their place.

Naturally he means to come a second time for the very purpose of preaching to the nations. But even if he does mean to come again, I take it he will not still be inviting guests then; he will be showing them to their places. In the meantime, you who read the call to this dinner as an invitation to a heavenly banquet of spiritual fullness and delight should remember that the Creator’s earthly promises too — wine and oil and grain, and the city itself — are used by him just as much as pictures of spiritual things.

Who went looking for the lost sheep and the lost drachma? Was it not the one who had lost them? And who had lost them? Was it not the one who had them before? And who was that? Was it not the one they belonged to? Since, then, man belongs to nobody but the Creator: the one who owned man is the one who had him; the one who had him is the one who lost him; the one who lost him is the one who went looking; the one who went looking is the one who found him; and the one who found him is the one who was glad. [p]

So neither parable has anything whatever to do with a god to whom neither the sheep nor the drachma — that is, man — belongs. He did not lose him, because he never had him. He did not look for him, because he never lost him. He did not find him, because he never looked. And he was not glad, because he never found him. Being glad over a sinner’s repentance — that is, over the recovery of lost man — belongs to the God who declared long ago that he would rather have the sinner repent than die.

Who the two masters are that he says cannot both be served — on the ground that supporting the one means offending the other — he makes clear himself when he names God and mammon. And if you have no interpreter at hand, you can learn from him too what he wants understood by mammon. When he was advising us to secure ourselves the help of friends in the affairs of this life, on the pattern of the manager who, once he had been put out of his post, went easy on his master’s debtors by cutting their debts down, so that they would repay him later with help of their own, he said: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves out of the mammon of unrighteousness” That is, out of money, exactly as the manager had done. And we all know that money is the instigator of unrighteousness and the lord of the whole world. So when he saw the greed of the Pharisees enslaved to it, he flung this sentence at them: “You cannot serve God and mammon.” At that the Pharisees, who were greedy for riches, sneered at him, because they understood that by mammon he meant money. [r]

Let nobody suppose that mammon stood for the Creator, and that Christ was calling them off from serving the Creator. What nonsense! Learn from the saying instead that Christ pointed to one God. The two masters he named were God and mammon — the Creator and money. You cannot serve God (the God, obviously, whom they appeared to be serving) and mammon, which is what they had really given themselves to. If he had been putting himself forward as another god, he would have been pointing not to two masters but to three. For the Creator was a master too, and much more of a master than mammon, and much more to be worshipped, being our Master in the truest sense.

How was it likely that a man who had called mammon a master, and set it alongside God, would say nothing about the one who was really master even of these — the Creator? Or else, by his silence about him, was he granting that the Creator might be served after all, since the only two he said could not be served together were himself and mammon? So when he lays it down that God is one — and he would certainly have named the Creator if he were himself a rival to him — he did in effect name the Creator, in that he never insisted that he alone was Master, with no rival god beside him.

This also throws light on the sense in which it was said, “If you have not been faithful with the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust the true riches to you?” “The unrighteous mammon” means unrighteous riches, not the Creator — for even Marcion allows that the Creator is righteous. “And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is mine?” Whatever is unrighteous ought to be foreign to God’s servants. But in what way was the Creator foreign to the Pharisees, when he was the Jewish nation’s own God? Since the words “Who will entrust the truer riches to you?” and “Who will give you what is mine?” fit the Creator and not mammon, he cannot have spoken them as a stranger to the Creator, in the rival god’s interest. He could only look as though he had if — while noting that they were unfaithful to the Creator and not to mammon — he had drawn some distinction, in the way he mentioned him, between the Creator and the rival god: that this other god would not entrust his own truth to men who had been unfaithful to the Creator. How, then, can he possibly be taken to belong to another god, when he is never set out in a way meant to separate him from the very thing under discussion?

But when the Pharisees “made themselves out to be righteous in front of men” and put their hope of reward in men, he blamed them in the same sense in which the prophet Jeremiah said, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man.” And since the prophet went on, “But the Lord knows your hearts,” he was magnifying the power of the God who declared himself to be like a lamp, “searching mind and heart.” When he strikes at pride — “What is prized highly among men is detestable in God’s sight” — he is recalling Isaiah: “For the day of the Lord of hosts will come upon everyone who is proud and lofty, and upon everyone who is arrogant and lifted up, and they will be brought low.”

I can make out now why Marcion’s god stayed hidden for so long an age. He was waiting, I suppose, until he had learned all this from the Creator. He kept at his lessons right up to John’s time, and then went straight on to announce the kingdom of God: “The law and the prophets were until John; from that time the kingdom of God is proclaimed.” As if we too did not recognize in John a kind of boundary set between the old order and the new, where Judaism left off and Christianity began — without supposing, however, that it took another god’s power to bring the law and the prophets to rest and to begin the good news in which the kingdom of God, Christ himself, is found.

For although, as we have shown, the Creator foretold that the old state of things would pass away and a new one succeed it, still, since John is shown to be both the forerunner and the road-maker for that Lord who was to bring in the good news and publish the kingdom of God, it follows from the mere fact that John has come that Christ must be the very one who was to follow his herald John. So if the old course has stopped and the new begun, with John standing between them, there is nothing to wonder at: it happens according to the Creator’s own purpose. Take your proof of the kingdom of God from anywhere at all, however far-fetched, sooner than from the notion that the law and the prophets ended in John and a new state of things began after him.

“Heaven and earth, then, may pass away more easily — and the law and the prophets with them — than that one stroke of the Lord’s words should fail.” For, as Isaiah says, “the word of our God stands forever.” It was Christ, the Word and Spirit of the Creator, who even then, through Isaiah, described John beforehand as “a voice crying in the wilderness, to prepare the way of the Lord,” and said he would come to bring the course of the law and the prophets to an end from that point on — by fulfilling them, not by wiping them out — so that the kingdom of God might be announced by Christ. That is why he deliberately added the assurance that the elements would pass away sooner than his words could fail, affirming this further point as he did so: that what he had said about John had not fallen to the ground.