Luke tells us that Jesus was
invited to eat at the house of the leader of the Pharisees. During the meal the
Pharisees were watching Jesus and Jesus was watching them back. And what did he
see? The guests, a veritable who’s who of the town, were jockeying to get
the premium seats. Jesus, knowing that the seats people choose and the guests say
more than their social and economic standing but also reveals something of
their inner selves, took the opportunity to teach the guests and the host about
humility and hospitality.
So, Jesus tells a parable of a
wedding banquet that describes exactly what was going on in front of him. He gives
them a “pro tip:” that it is wiser to sit in the lowest place and wait for the
host’s invitation to “move up higher.” Jesus’ punch line has come to be one of
his best known, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble
themselves will be exalted.” The parable echoes Proverbs (25:6-7), which says,
“Do not put yourself
forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it
is better to be told, ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of a
noble.”
Jesus is not talking about table
manners and practical advice to avoid embarrassment. He is also not saying that
we should never sit in premium seats. He is teaching humility. It
wasn’t just in Biblical times that a sure-fire way to prop up one’s social is
to get oneself invited to parties of influential and affluent people such as
the head Pharisee and then publicly hob-nob with the host.
While self-promotion is the
accepted way to get ahead in the world, humility is the way to please
God. Those who exalt
themselves tend to think they are better or more important than others. The
humble think less of themselves and make room for others.
Jesus invites us to re-think
those assumptions by telling his
host that the next time he throws a party, he should not invite those who can
invite him back like his friends, families, and affluent neighbors. Instead, he
should invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind who could not
invite him back so that he will be repaid at the resurrection.
Luke does not mention how the
guests and host reacted to Jesus’ saying; it is not hard to imagine that they
were shocked!
Now be careful, it’s easy to
judge the Pharisees’ dinner guests who scrambled for the best seats as arrogant
and pathetic social climbers. But the truth is, they are us! Pride and the
desire to exalt oneself are part of being human… a part of our fallenness. We
all want to be better, to achieve, to be the top dog, to be number one, and to
be admired. Remember the Garden when Adam and Eve gave in to the temptation to
be like God? Or the Tower of Babel where people wanted to build a tower to
reach heaven to make a name for themselves? All through the Hebrew Scriptures
we see the people of Israel take pride and privilege of their “Chosen-ness” as
People of God and, of course, Jesus’ disciples quarreled as to who among them
was the greatest.
Indeed, many of us prefer to sit
in premium seats and share the same guest list as the host of Jesus. It feels
great to brush shoulders with famous people hoping that their importance will
rub off on us. And just like in the time of Jesus, we do what is easy and
automatically invite families, friends, and respectable members of the
community to our dinner parties. I am not ashamed to say that I will, without a
doubt, seek to take selfie with the Presiding Bishop and then post it on social
media. Nothing wrong with this – but the fact is that people generally don’t
normally take selfies with those laboring behind the scenes let alone post them
on Facebook or Instagram.
This desire to exalt oneself grows
out of need for connection and companionship, and so is our need for love, understanding,
and attention. There is nothing wrong with wanting to excel and achieve and be
loved or admired. But this can be destructive and self-defeating when, in our
desire to impress people and get their attention, we think less of them. The
gospel challenges us to exchange our need to exalt ourselves for the sake of
being loved with humility… to love others and so learn about where true love
lives. This explains all those paradoxical teachings of Jesus, like “Those who
save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will
save it.” Jesus is saying that the way up is down.
Jesus invites us to review our
guest list, especially those we do not welcome. Who is the equivalent of the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind who are not usually invited to our
parties?
Way back when I was a brand-new
Deacon, getting ready to be a priest, I was sent to a parish that hosted a
six-day a week soup kitchen. My supervising rector insisted that every day I
was there, I take my lunch with the guests. Not walking around like a hall
monitor, but eating like a fellow guest. I believe that the lesson was to sit,
listen, and know the people who came to us for food. I don’t think I really
understood that lesson until years later when I took training to be a clinical
chaplain and I’ve been learning it ever since. The point was to be present and
to see the face of Jesus in faces of the people God gives to us every day.
The truth is that we are the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that Jesus speaks about. And the
same invitation and welcome has been extended to us to join him at his table.
We are sinners, and yet, by God’s grace, we have seats of honor at God’s table.
It is a wonder that we get welcomed, though we cannot reciprocate God’s
hospitality.
On second thought, we can return
the gracious generosity of God! We reciprocate by opening our lives to those
who are different from us and those with whom we would not normally associate.
As the writer of Hebrews reminds us in our second lesson, “Do not neglect to show
hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels
without knowing it.”
And we can watch… we can watch for
the face of Christ in the people we meet, and pray for the grace to somehow be
the face of Jesus to the people God gives us every day.
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