Luke 14 tells shocking stories about the recalibration of honor- and shame-based social expectations. Lk 14.12–14:

He said also to the one who had invited him, ‘When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’

This reminder concerning the resurrection is the key to understanding the new system of reciprocity. The parables aim at entirely removing the honor and shame dynamics from its normal province and remapping it on a vertical axis, the person and group to God, with an infinitely remote, ideal, landowner figure, God, inviting everyone. The banqueting at the divine table, the messianic banquet, is indefinitely delayed, yet at hand, in the new companionship of the new brothers, kins, friends, with the story teller at and on the table.

I mentioned the remote landowner figure. In antiquity, divine figures were expressions on a “vertical axis” (temples on mountains, metaphoric or not, large-sized statuary, astral gods and goddesses, powers in heavens) of a social and historical reality which could not be, and was not to be, spoken about directly.

The agonistic gift and expected countergift system, on the other hand, publically defined or redefined the persons and their groups on a “horizontal axis.” That was of utmost concern and permanent interest to everyone. But “horizontal axis” didn’t mean only the visible here and now, the immediately proximate neighbor or kin. Consider the spatial aspect of this “axis.” Note how the great feast, a demonstrative gift—it is not a wedding, which defines a more expansive kind of relation—, reaches out to far-away guests who need to be told in advance of the feast (on this topic, see Green’s commentary, after Bailey), and then told a second time when the time is right for the feast. A key issue, then, was that gifts and eventual countergifts were used to extend and reinforce one’s economic reach beyond family and extended kinship obviously, as well as beyond village or town. This was a critical issue in the politics of the Mediterranean world, tied mostly to the need to increase access to land and labor, and the corollary need to abate risk via property and labor dispersion.

A similar argument can be developed regarding the time dimension. This aspect is not noted by Hénaff, as far as I can see, in his thoughtful, wide-ranging discussion of Weber and Mauss in: “Religious ethics, gift exchange and capitalism,” in Archives of European Sociology 44 [2003]: 293–324). The exchange in the gift and countergift system has a built-in time dimension. Of course, a cardinal principle of the ancient world was to put pressure on those who received gifts (everyone) to return the favors of givers the sooner the better: bis dat qui cito dat, according to Publilius Syrus. But most of the “obligations” so contracted were discharged in time, sometimes a very long time. On the crucial import of this time factor and the need to frame the countergift as something else than a pure return of a favor (a copy of it, that immediacy would indicate), see P. Bourdieu, The logic of practice (Stanford UP: 1983): 105. The grace(s) of the system hid as best as they could the crudity of the calculations. And so, for instance, one needs to ask oneself whether the putative widow and children of a landowner who behaved like the banquet-giver of the Lukan story would eventually receive protections of all kinds—real value— from old “friends” of her husband after his death, or whether the obligations would wear out if not reinforced by the demonstration of power the kind of banquets described in the Lukan story illustrates?

In other words, gifts and countergifts, organized into a benefaction or evergetic system, publically reinforced and re-evaluated the status of people by defining and renegotiating their capacity to draw on and exchange acts of generosity or grace at a distance in time and space. It was a general exchange system, quite as complicated or manyfold as the modern market, with space and time dimensions that everyone was consummately interested in but that no one could master. It has been systematically studied by ancient historians (P. Veyne, etc.).

Although general and reaching beyond the immediately visible borders of kinship and localities, reciprocity systems of antiquity couldn’t take into account all that went into composing the person and the group. The ideal of autarcy—on which see Aristotle et al—was just that, a proud claim that negatively reflected the reality.

There was a more hidden, invisible, real ground for the competitive claims of autarcy by Greco-Roman landowners, and this is what the Lukan story is aiming at. The capacity to project and broaden one’s circle by gracious giving depended on access to land and labor. This access to, and control of, land and labor—“five teams of oxen,” women, slave(s)—depended superficially on the kind of relationships expressed by “giving a great feast.” The network created by honor and shame values was about gaining and securing access to the real means for the banquet, which were the exploitation by military coercion, rents—via sharecropping especially—, taxation, usury, directly enforced labor of women, children, and slaves. That is the massive, hidden source of the wealth advertised as “righteous blessing” and used in a competition for more security, that is to say, the broader circle of friends and obligations.