Luke 14:24

For I say unto you, that none of those men that were bidden shall taste of my supper.

As Jesus frequently did, he abandoned the metaphor here and stood forth in the majesty of his own right. He no longer addressed a servant (as did the lord in the parable), but said, "I say unto you (plural)," meaning those very men in his presence, that "none of those that were bidden (and refused) shall taste of my supper." Thus Jesus identified himself with the Father in heaven and himself as the one giving the supper, and the supper as the kingdom he came to set up.

Summers pointed out that Jesus did not mean "that no Jews would participate in God's mercy, but that none of those who rejected it would experience it."[35]

The application of this parable is not restricted to the immediate situation of Israel's rejection of Christ, for it is also descriptive of men in all ages who place personal, selfish desires above the kingdom obligations in Christ. In this parable, God's greatest gift, the salvation of the soul, appears in the analogy of an invitation to a great feast, the unspeakable tragedy being man's blind, foolish rejection of it.

Countless thousands of people were following Jesus, but the vast majority of them had no practical understanding of what following Jesus actually entailed. "He desired to check this light-hearted manner of following him, ... so he lays down the absolute demands for everyone who wishes to be his disciples."[36] What Jesus did in the next paragraph strongly suggests what Jesus did to that great throng in Capernaum who had followed him after the miracle of feeding the five thousand; and what was that? He stunned them with that metaphor of eating flesh and drinking his blood (John 6:52f). That cooled their superficial ardor; and the same effect was achieved by Jesus in this multitude through the equally hard sayings of the next paragraph.

[35] Ray Summers, op. cit., p. 179.

[36] Norval Geldenhuys, op. cit., p. 397.