On a sabbath, Jesus went to dine at the home of one of the leading Pharisees, and the people there were observing him carefully. . . He told a parable to those who had been invited, noticing how they were choosing the places of honor at the table. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not recline at table in the place of honor. A more distinguished guest than you may have been invited by him, and the host who invited both of you may approach you and say, ‘Give your place to this man,’ and then you would proceed with embarrassment to take the lowest place. Rather, when you are invited, go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, ‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’ Then you will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table. For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Then he said to the host who invited him, “When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment. Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14.1, 7-14)
In her book Light in the Darkness, Sister Joan Chittister shares the story of a man who went to seek the counsel of an old monk revered for his wisdom. The man said, “Father, I have come to you seeking enlightenment.” The old monk answered him, “Well, then, for the first exercise of your retreat, go into the courtyard, tilt back your head, stretch out your arms, and wait until I come for you.” The man went out and did as the monk had said.
As soon as he stretched out his arms and tilted back his head, it began to rain. It rained a lot. After a while, the old monk came for him and said to him, “Well, have you been enlightened today?” Disgusted, the man answered in a sour voice, “Are you serious? I’ve been standing here with my head up in the rain for more than an hour. I’m soaking wet. I feel like a fool!” The old monk smiled and answered, “For the first day of a retreat, that sounds like great enlightenment to me.”
There is much to be said for the story that Sister Joan tells and there is much to be said for the story that Rabbi Jesus tells us today in the Gospel of Luke. Both are reminders that those who are attuned to the ways of God walk humbly in the world. It is a message as old as the prophet Micah who said in the Hebrew scriptures, “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Taking a step back, we may want to look at the context for Jesus’ story. Luke introduces the story in telling us that on a particular sabbath Jesus went to dine at the home of one of the leading Pharisees. However, before he is able to enter the house he sees a man who is suffering from dropsy, a severe inflammation that results in swelling.
For some reason, the lectionary has chosen to skip over this part of the story, although it is important to the overall message that comes later. Because it is the sabbath, Jesus knows the thoughts of the Pharisees, but he nonetheless asks them, “Is is lawful to cure on the sabbath or not?” They refuse to answer him.
Just a short while earlier he had garnered a harsh rebuke from the religious leaders for healing a woman who had suffered for a long while with hemorrhaging, the healing also done on a sabbath. When no one answered him about the current situation, he touched the man and healed him, sending him on his way. He turns to the Pharisees and other leaders, “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath?” Again, they gave no answer.
He now enters the house of the Pharisee where he observes how the guests were racing to get the choicest seats at table. As was the custom at the time, the seating at a meal was determined by importance, those most important taking a seat to the right and left of the host with the other guests taking seats in descending order of importance, the least important being seated furthest from the host.
On seeing the situation play out, Jesus uses the moment to teach an important message, one that flies in the face of the customs of the times, telling his listeners that they should choose the lowest place instead of the highest place, emphasizing the point that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
While it surely shocked the Pharisees and other leaders who heard Jesus’ not so subtle rebuke of their behavior, it shouldn’t surprise us, not at this point anyway. We have traveled with Jesus long enough in this gospel to know that the “divine reversal” is at the heart of his message, the belief that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
This is simply another instance of that same point, Jesus again throwing everything on its head, inverting the ways of the world to align with the ways of the Most High God, forecast to us already at the start of the gospel when Mary tells Elizabeth that the Most High God “has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the lowly.”
That message at the start will continue throughout the gospel and into the Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s second volume. It is at the core of Jesus’ teaching and it will become the linchpin for authentic discipleship after Jesus’ death and resurrection. To walk humbly before God is the sine qua non of a disciple of his, the absence of humility in a person denying him or her the right to claim faithful discipleship.
Given that fact, this passage surely confronts and challenges us because truly humble people are few and far between. Just take a moment to consider how many people in your circle that you would call humble, persons who never brings attention to themselves, never boasts of their income or trips abroad, never puts themselves ahead of others. If you are able to come up with a handful of people who meet that criteria it will be a wonder.
The simple truth is we live in an age of braggarts, blowhards, and bigots, all the oxygen in any given room sucked out by bloated egos and overblown confidence. Putting oneself front and center has become the common currency of most every interaction, people vying against one another to hold the floor and to shine the brightest.
If we were not already geared towards self-aggrandizement, the proliferation of social media platforms has doused the flames with gasoline. Pick any of the popular platforms–FaceBook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (X) to name a few–and we find everybody talking about themselves, boasting about their achievements, and oversharing their point of view on all matters great and small.
Through social media, everyone has been given a voice and a pulpit, allowing themselves to opine and pontificate, presenting themselves as experts, influencers, and internet celebrities. Now, the number of followers has become the measure of a person’s worth, resulting in a never-ceasing effort to increase the clicks, our chief means of self-soothing in this day and time.
Nowhere in any of it do we find the slightest acknowledgement of Jesus’ warning that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted,” another clear proof that we wear our discipleship lightly, our everyday behavior much more attuned to the ways of the world than to the ways of the Kingdom of God.
The writer Frederick L. Collins, who wrote about the lives of the rich and famous in the first part of the 20th century once said, “Always remember that there are two types of people in this world–those who come into a room and say, ‘Well, here I am!’ and those who come in and say, ‘Ah, there you are!’” He hit upon an important point, on one hand finding people who only saw their own self-importance and on the other hand spotting people whose eyes were focused on others, not on themselves.
It is easy enough to know which group of people Jesus favored and which group he wanted his followers to be a part of. In a short while, we’ll hear him castigate the Pharisees because they always wanted the seats of honor at any banquet, a put-down of those who wanted others to see them rather than being people who saw others.
And who did Jesus want the eyes of his followers to be focused on? Who were the others that he felt should be seen? He tells us when we hear him say today, “When you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind. Blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.” Once again, as we have seen any number of times before in this gospel, Jesus insists that we should be far less concerned about ourselves and much more concerned about the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. It was for this same reason that Jesus had healed the man with dropsy before entering the house of the Pharisee, his actions teaching the same lesson that his words later would.
Of course, the only way we will have the inclination and the time to look out for these little ones is if we become humble people ourselves. So long as we are inflated with our own self-importance we will never bat an eye at the privations and plight of the poor. We are blinded by our own propaganda like the prominent American politician who recently had the coliseum in Rome shut down for the day so that his wife could be given a private tour, resulting in the public being denied access to the popular sight, resulting in outrage among the “nobodies” who weren’t permitted inside the sight.
Our culture and our politics would be in a vastly different situation were we to practice Jesus’ call to practice humility. But we do not and so we find ourselves in a world where posturing and pretending are more important than keeping promises to the less fortunate and abiding by Christian principles that insist on care for the last, the least, and the lost.
The well-known Texas writer Larry McMurtry once wrote about an experience he had when he was scheduled to give a lecture at a small college in Uvalde, Texas that had few funds but had scraped together enough to have him speak to them. During the lunch break, he received a telephone call that informed him he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lonesome Dove.
The news traveled quickly and by the time his lecture had ended for the day there was a reporter and a photographer waiting for him to get the scoop. Although tired, he sat down for the interview. However, as he walked up to meet the press, he glanced at the marquee on the parking lot of the Holiday Inn where he was staying. The night before, as he had arrived, the marquee had read, “Welcome, Larry McMurtry, Author of Terms of Endearment.”
But now as he moved towards the interview, the marquee read, “Lunch Special: Catfish: $3.95.” He said he considered the moment “a salutary lesson in the rapid transit of worldly fame.” It’s the same lesson that Rabbi Jesus was trying to impart to the Pharisees who were hustling to get the seats of honor at the dinner table. Far better in the long ru, as he taught his listeners, to walk humbly before our God.
–Jeremy Myers
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