Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 10.12-18, Hebrews 13.1-8,15-16, Luke 14. 1, 7-14
I don’t suppose Jesus was really looking forward to the dinner we’ve just heard about in the Gospel. I’m a bit of a party pooper myself – I would usually just as soon stay at home and have a mug of cocoa and an early night - but even the most sociable person might have hoped to avoid this particular occasion.
He’s been invited to a Sabbath meal by a “leader of the Pharisees” a group that was often in conflict with Jesus. Luke tells us that the Pharisees “were watching Jesus closely” – they are just waiting for him to get it wrong. It’s not a recipe for a happy evening.
But Jesus is also watching them, and what he sees says it all.
“He noticed,” says Luke, “how the guests chose the places of honour”. He saw who sat where, and he understood what that said about them. It sounds as if they were subtly jostling for the best seats, making sure they’d be nearest the host, in a privileged position. But there’s something odd about this statement, and that’s simply the fact that the guests, apparently, were choosing their own seats. If you go to someone’s house for dinner that’s not what you do even now – and it certainly wasn’t then. It’s the host who decides the seating plan. And that’s even more true if the meal is a formal one, with specially invited guests, as this Sabbath meal was. You don’t just head for the top table at a posh dinner or wedding reception because you fancy sitting there.
In response, Jesus tells a parable which probably still has the power to make us cringe. Just imagine the walk of shame for the guest in it, who is publicly sent to sit at a lower table. He would probably never live down the humiliation.
We might feel a bit sorry for him, but I don’t think Jesus’ first hearers wouldn’t have seen it that way. In their eyes it would have been clear that it was the guest who was in the wrong, breaking one of the first and deepest rules of hospitality by forgetting that he is a guest. He’s not the host. This is not his house. This is not his party.
That’s what I think Jesus is drawing attention to. This isn’t a story about social etiquette. It’s what the guests’ behaviour says about their deeper attitudes which bothers Jesus; the way they think about the world they live in and the people they share it with. Those who assume they have a right to the prime positions at the dinner table probably do the same in the rest of their lives. The Pharisees are criticised elsewhere in the Gospels for acting as if they are gatekeepers for God, as if heaven and earth is theirs to command, and they alone have the right to decide who is in God’s favour and who isn’t. In another place, Jesus criticises them for laying heavy burdens on people and not lifting a finger to help them when they struggle. It wasn’t true of all Pharisees, but it certainly seems to have been true of some. And we can often behave like this too.
Human beings are naturally egocentric. When we are born we assume we are the centre of the universe. It’s a survival mechanism; babies have to make sure they are noticed, usually by screaming, because they are totally dependent on their parents. As we grow up, though, if all is well, we learn that life isn’t just about us, that we share the world, that other people have their own needs. We learn that not everything can be bent to our will, no matter how much noise we make. We discover that the world is bigger than we are, and that we don’t rule it.
Some people deal with that dethronement better than others, but most of us probably have at least the odd moment when we struggle with it, especially if we are feeling insecure or threatened. The guests at this Sabbath meal in the Gospel had very little power outside their own orbit. They lived in an occupied land, under the thumb of the Romans. But in their own small pond, they could be big fish, asserting their status by putting down those who had even less than they did. It was those people – the ones who were at the bottom of the heap – who Jesus was particularly concerned about, the poor and vulnerable and outcast, who didn’t have a place at the table at all.
Power is a sort of comfort blanket; it gives us a sense of safety in an uncertain world, but ultimately, it’s a delusion. Neither this world nor the world to come are ours to own. We aren’t the hosts: we are the guests. We receive the gift of life, but we can’t ultimately control it. You don’t have to believe in God to know this – you just have to look around you at the immensity of the universe, the mighty forces it displays. The idea that we can lord it over creation, use it as we wish, is a fallacy that, in the end, brings down disaster on our heads. We are already seeing that as the impacts of climate change start to bite.
It's especially ironic that it was a Sabbath meal which provoked this power struggle. That’s not an accidental detail. As I said last week, when we heard another story set on the Sabbath, this was meant to be a weekly celebration of the story of God resting after his labour of creation. It was meant to remind people that the world was God’s gift to them, not something they had made or could control. When we forget that and play God ourselves we do so at our peril, because none of us is big enough or clever enough to know what we are doing. As our Old Testament reading reminded us “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.”
This little tale of a supper party gone wrong, raises huge questions.
It raises ecological questions. Whose party is the banquet of life? How can we live as guests in the world, rather than assuming we have ultimate power over it?
It raises social questions. Who gets to decide in our society who is in and who is out, who gets the place of honour and who is shamed?
Then there are personal questions. When might I have acted like a big fish in a small pond, crushing the life out of others? Or maybe it’s the other way round. Have I let others squeeze me out of the picture and not had the courage to be the person I was created to be?
But behind all these questions, I’d like to suggest, is an even bigger, spiritual question. If I’m not God, the centre of the universe, with the right to command and control, do I have the faith to let God be God instead? Can I trust that I am safe in his hands. That doesn’t mean nothing bad will ever happen to me but that, if it does, he will still be with me, “never leaving me or forsaking me”, as the Bible promises. Can I believe that?
In the end that’s what delivers us from the need to grasp at a power which can never truly be ours, because it tells us that however insignificant we feel, in God’s eyes we are precious. Whether we are on the top table at the world’s feast or haven’t even made it past the bouncers at the door, each one of us is his honoured guest.
Amen
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