Jesus tells some fancy people at a fancy party — have you thought about inviting people who aren’t fancy?
For Sunday
Proper 17C
Collect
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 14:1, 7-14
“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host…”
Reflection
It is undeniable that Jesus is talking about ranking and social hierarchies. The kind that we are born into and the kind we make up for ourselves. Which also means the kind that we both loathe and yet keep reinforcing.
To make things even worse, Jesus is a dinner guest in someone’s home. And that is where he’s talking about how awful hierarchies are and why you shouldn’t invite people who get you things to your parties. Instead, invite people who have nothing to offer you. Both in terms of stuff and in terms of prestige.
Of course, everybody knows that Jesus has been invited to an exclusive gathering. And we also all know why. For the same reason anyone gets invited to an exclusive gathering: either you are in the club already or you have something to offer the club.
To this, Jesus throws shade in the form of a reasonable teaching.
He says, essentially: When invited to something, don’t take the best seats. Because someone more important might show up and then the host is going to have to ask you to move.
What strikes me today about this is that Jesus implies that they possess a kind of self-awareness that I’m not sure they [we] really possess. So it kind of lands like an insult.
Can you imagine being at a fancy dinner with your fancy friends and the new guy says, Hey, maybe not sit in the best seat because someone fancier than you might show.
Anyone who is already shrewd would be like, Dude, great advice. Better to move up than to move down.
But the thing that unites this group of people is being fancy. They all think they’re the big fish who deserve the best seats. They tell each other:
Fake it till you make it.
In their world, you take the best seat and wear it like a boss. I don’t suspect they expect someone would unseat them. And if they do, no big deal. They’ve gotten where they are doing exactly that.
Jesus is telling us the truth about social standing is that it is entirely bankrupt. Not one thing about its structure fits in the Kin-dom.
But our proclivity to lift those people up a broken system who need nothing would be a huge deal for the people who are held down by that system. Imagine if we could reverse engineer our impulses to serve rather than gain? We might be taking Jesus seriously.