Intro
Making Space series has been an invitation to become a people who notice, welcome, and include. We have talked about seeing the overlooked, building biblical community, bearing one another’s burdens, and collectively carrying the weight of ministry.

As we close this series, we turn our eyes and hearts to a group that is close to Jesus’ own heart: the stranger, the outsider, the one on the margins.

Setting the Table
Luke 14 is a banquet chapter. Jesus is eating at the house of a leading Pharisee, surrounded by religious elites. The meal is filled with tension and questions about healing on the Sabbath, about honor, and about who sits where. In this context, Jesus tells a series of parables about feasts and invitations.

Earlier, He noticed the social games being played at the table. The jockeying for the best seats, the calculated invitations. In this culture, meals were about status. Who you ate with determined your standing. You invited those who could return the favor, who could boost your reputation.

Jesus disrupts all of this. He says, When you give a banquet, invite those who cannot repay. Invite the poor, crippled, lame, blind. Invite those who have nothing to give you in return. Welcome those who are easy to overlook. Make space for the stranger.

He, first, tells a parable encouraging the disciples not to chase the place of honor, but to invite people to a higher place of honor. He then tells what is considered The Parable of the Great Banquet.

Jesus’ words are startling, countercultural, and deeply challenging. He calls us to a hospitality that isn’t transactional or comfortable, but sacrificial and kingdom-shaped.

Do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors...
Jesus is not forbidding meals with loved ones. He’s confronting a limited, self-serving vision of hospitality. One that revolves around comfort, reciprocity, and likeness. He’s exposing our tendency to only make space for those who look like us, think like us, or benefit us.

It is easy to settle into holy huddles, to spend Sunday mornings and free time with our people. But what if the truest test of gospel community is not how we treat our friends, but how we treat the stranger? Who are you inviting to your table, your group, your life?

But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind...
These are not hypothetical categories. In Jesus’ day, these were the very people excluded from polite society—those who could not reciprocate, whose presence might even be seen as shameful. And Jesus says: They are the ones you should invite.

To invite the stranger is to reflect God’s heart.

Hospitality is not a side project of the Christian life. It is the work of redemption itself.

Hospitality to the stranger is an act of faith. It trusts that God Himself will reward what others cannot repay. It is a participation in the generosity of God, who prepares a table for us and invites us in when we were strangers.

Here, Jesus identifies Himself with the stranger, the hungry, the imprisoned. Our welcome to the outsider is, in a mysterious way, a welcome to Christ Himself. Hospitality is not just a duty; it is a doorway for divine encounter. Let’s be honest. This kind of hospitality is hard. It’s costly. It’s uncomfortable.

The Ultimate Banquet: The Kingdom to Come
Finally, let’s remember what all of this points to. The story of Scripture ends at a table, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Every tribe, tongue, and nation will gather. Every outsider made an insider. Every stranger welcomed home. Our hospitality now is a rehearsal for eternity. Every time we make space at our table, we point to the great feast to come, and to the love we have so graciously, yet undeservingly, received. Jesus invites us to make space for the stranger, to extend hospitality that reflects His kingdom.

Let the strangers at your table become neighbors and let those neighbors become part of the family of God.
Rosaria Butterfield – The Gospel Comes With a House Key