The chapter
Simply The whole chapter happens around a meal. Jesus is invited to a Pharisee's house on a Sabbath and is being watched. He heals a man in front of them, then tells the guests to stop taking the best seats, tells the host to invite people who cannot pay him back, and answers a pious remark with a story about a dinner nobody comes to. Outside, to the crowd following him, he says what it costs to come with him, twice, and tells two short stories about counting first.
Context The chapter moves outward one ring at a time and the movement is in the text. Verse 8 is about where you sit at a table you were invited to; verse 12 is about who you invite to your own; verse 21 sends a servant into the streets of the city; verse 23 sends him out to the roads and hedges outside it. Each instruction is addressed to whoever benefited from the previous arrangement, and the last one is given to a servant rather than to a guest.
Verses 1-14
Simply At a leading Pharisee's house on a Sabbath, a man with dropsy is standing in front of Jesus and everyone is watching to see what he does. He asks the lawyers whether healing on the Sabbath is lawful. Nobody answers. He heals the man and sends him away, then asks which of them would leave a son or an ox down a well until the next day. Nobody answers that either. Then he tells the guests to take the lowest seat rather than the best one, and tells his host to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, precisely because they cannot return the invitation.
Context Verse 4 is one word long in effect: they were silent. The same silence comes back at verse 6, and between them a man is healed without anyone having spoken for or against it. This is the third Sabbath healing in the book, after 6:6 to 10 and 13:10 to 16, and the argument is the same each time, that they already do this for animals. The advice at verses 8 to 11 sounds like table manners and is not: verse 14 gives the reason, which is that you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous and not before. What is being described is a way of running a household that only makes sense if the accounts are settled somewhere else.
Verses 15-24
Simply A guest says how blessed anyone will be who eats in God's Kingdom. Jesus answers with a story. A man prepares a big supper and sends word that it is ready, and the people he invited all make excuses: a field to inspect, five pairs of oxen to try, a new wife. The host is angry and sends the servant into the streets to bring in the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. There is still room, so he sends him out to the roads and lanes to make people come in, and says none of the first list will taste his supper.
Context Matthew 22:1 to 14 tells a banquet story too, and the two are not the same story told twice. There the host is a king, the meal is his son's wedding, the invited guests kill the servants, the king burns their city, and a man is thrown out for his clothes. Here the host is a man, the meal is supper, the three excuses are ordinary property and family business, and nobody is punished except by not eating. The last clause of verse 24 is also not in every edition. Three of the thirteen add FOR MANY ARE CALLED BUT FEW ARE CHOSEN, which is how Matthew 22:14 ends, and they are the World English Bible, the Bible libre and the Nova Biblia Livre. Ten stop at the supper. Those three are the same three editions that lack the word daily at 9:23, which this file notes without explaining, since why an edition groups with others is not something the corpus can answer.
Verses 25-35
Simply Large crowds are walking with him. He turns round and says that anyone who does not put him ahead of father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters and his own life cannot be his disciple, and neither can anyone who will not carry his own cross. Then two questions: who starts a tower without pricing it first and gets laughed at when it stands half built, and what king marches on twenty thousand with ten thousand without working out whether he can. So, he says, none of you can be my disciple without giving up everything you have.
Context Verse 26 is the hardest sentence in this Gospel and the thirteen editions do not agree on how hard it is. Nine of them use the word HATE: Segond 1910, the Reina Valera 1909, the Riveduta 1927, the Luther 1912, the Biblia Gdanska, the Petrus Canisiusvertaling, the Bible kralicka, the Cornilescu and the Vietnamese 1934. Two say DISREGARD or DESPISE, the World English Bible and the Nova Biblia Livre. The Bible libre says DETACH HIMSELF FROM. And La Biblia en Espanol Sencillo says something different in kind: does not LOVE ME MORE THAN his father, which is the comparison Matthew 10:37 makes rather than the sentence Luke has. The two French editions are on opposite sides of it, so whether a French reader is told to hate his family depends on which edition is in his hand. This file reports the four readings and rules on none of them; it also notes that the following verses argue about cost and calculation, not about family feeling.