PENTECOST 13

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: PENTECOST 13
PROPER: 17C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 2, 2001

TEXT: Luke 14:1, 7-14 – “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.”

ISSUE: The passage tells of another time that Jesus is tested. He is invited to the head Pharisee’s dinner party, and carefully watched. Jesus challenges the Pharisees concerning their honor obsession and dares to say that only God can truly honor a person. Worldly opinions are unreliable. Jesus, insulting the host, teaches him how to be a host by inviting the poor, lame, blind, the least, and last, who cannot repay. The teaching challenges the church and its people to embrace its true calling and mission. Here’s another great reversal.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
One of the important aspects of being a Christian is to be able to discern what is really important in life. It is an aspect perhaps of what any religion might well be concerned with, keeping focused on what are really the important things.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus is again being tested. He is invited to a dinner at the home of a leading Pharisee. We are told that all the other gathered Pharisees were “closely watching” him. You will note well that very obviously Jesus was “watching” the gathered Pharisees as well. First, it is important to understand that for Jesus to have been invited to the home of a leading Pharisee would mean that he himself was considered to be of equal rank, or of equal status and honor with the Pharisees. You did not eat with people of lower status than yourself at this time. But, the fact that Jesus is being “watched” hints at the possibility that the Pharisees may have been setting him up to be shamed and discredited. They would have watched to see if he ritually washed appropriately. Where did he seated himself in the pecking order would have been noted. They would have been concerned with whether or not he was ritually clean. If they could find a reason to shame or mock him, his status among the people would likely have been lowered.
At the same time, Jesus is closely watching the Pharisees and he offers them a parable: “If you are invited to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, incase someone more distinguished than you has been invited by the host; and the host who invited both of you might come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher: then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.” To us today, it would sound as if Jesus was teaching how to be honorable in a hypocritical way. It almost sounds as if he is teaching these people how to achieve a phony honor status: Pretend to be humble, that you might be called up higher.
I don’t think this is what’s going on. I suggest that Jesus may be being sarcastic. He knows that he is being watched. But he is also watching the Pharisees who come clamoring for places of honor at the meal. What people and the world thought of them was dreadfully important. I suggest that Jesus is teasing them saying: If you really want to get honor don’t risk being shot down. Pretend to be humble with the possibility of being called up higher. They knew well a proverb (Proverbs 25:6-7) from Hebrew Scripture: “When you stand before a king, don’t try to impress him, and pretend to be important. It is better to be asked to take a higher position than be told to give your place to someone more important.” Here again, you have a kind of reversal. The Pharisees are watching Jesus with the possibility of shaming him, but he in his acute sharpness shames them for seeking exultation versus being honorably humble. Jesus didn’t get crucified because he was a particularly nice guy. He is in fact saying that it is God who determines who is truly honorable, not the world; human opinions are not reliable.
Carrying this curious event still farther, Jesus ventures to insult the host Pharisee. To tell your host how he should run his dinner party was not exactly in good taste, even then. It was expected that when you had a dinner for your friends they would invite you back for dinner. Reciprocity was very important in this culture. It was a part of the economic system of the time. Favors were always paid back with favors. Says Jesus to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, (or perhaps even a bunch of phony’s like you have gathered here) in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when your give a banquet invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will then be blessed or honored truly by God.” The poor, lame, crippled, blind being invited to a banquet was unheard of. You did not associate with anyone below your status. Not to invite people who could pay you back, and your family as well was simply unheard of. This suggestion by Jesus was a truly radical and unacceptable concept for the time. It is another of Jesus’ great reversals. They gathered people would be dumbfounded, not to mention outraged.
Luke’s Gospel is writing these parables as an example to the early church. Honor comes from God, and what the world thinks is not nearly so important. We express the Gospel of love for all people without concern for our own personal worth and status, without expectation of being repaid. The world has its standards, but so does the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and his standards are often quite different.
What all this means for the church today is still quite important as we do our part to proclaim the Gospel of God’s redeeming love. First of all humility is now and always has been a Godly virtue. But humility is not groveling and being less than a person is. Humility is being what you are. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Even kings and people of high rank are simply people with a variety of skills and place in the world. We have often been led to believe that we live in a hierarchy, and it is important to move up the ladder of success. There is nothing wrong with moving up to what we are capable of handling in life, but it is also true that we do not live in a hierarchy of status. We are all needed in our various skills and occupations. We need a doctor as well as sanitation crews. Life is not hierarchical so much as it is understanding who we are and to what place in life we are called to serve the common good. Being a hotshot in the world is simply not what we are called to be, but a servant with Christ that embraces all people as brothers and sisters. There is a very powerful lesson from Philippians that we read as the Palm Sunday Epistle about the nature of Jesus Christ: (Phil. 2:6f) “He always had the nature of God, but he did not think that by force he should try to become equal with God. Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had and took the nature of a servant. He became like a man and appeared in human likeness. He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death – his death on the cross.”
Right now, here at St. John’s we are in the midst of building a handicapped ramp, which is long overdue. While the church should have been the leader in handicapped access, it is one of the last of institutions that have been sensitive to special human needs. Often we hear arguments that it all costs too much. Building handicapped ramps, and giving to special human needs is costly, and its return is often negligible, if not annoying. We may end up with a meager crowd of retarded people in wheel chairs in our church. Maybe so. We may also end up with some of our very own folk who have been discouraged from being here to worship. But the point of the Gospel and how it addresses us today is not what we get in return, but what we do and spend in the name of Jesus Christ without concern for reward.
We need to carefully consider as Christians who our associates are. The majority of the time, I would suspect that we all associate with people similar in status, race, and thinking. This is normal and what you might expect in the world. We also plan many of our activities around the things that will amuse ourselves: worship, picnics, Bible study, coffee hour. But the gospel is a real challenge in terms of who do we invite to participate in our amusements? Who do we invite into our worship, to our Bible study, and with whom do we usually associate with at the coffee hour? We go for what makes us comfortable and keeps us relatively amused. Jesus’ teaching provides us with a challenge and mission beyond the usual, the comfortable, and the worldly. As a church community we have to keep working on our ways and means of providing Eucharist for all.
From an overall perspective of being a Christian Community in the world, we have to keep in mind that we are all simply the people of Jesus Christ, and through Christ there is a bigger family that includes all races. We need to work at opportunities for making friends and having interracial relationships. We need also to help to develop Christian Communities in our cities and among the poor. We need to seek out opportunities to develop and keep up relationships with older people, handicapped people, and people in nursing homes. The harvest is bountiful and the workers may well seem few, but it is in the very spirit of hope and determination to reverse the world’s thinking that we may really find ourselves, our purpose, our peace, and our place in the Kingdom we call Christ’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.