A Humble Alternative to Social Climbing
Luke 14:1,7-14

Jesus is once again a guest for dinner. This is no surprise. Jesus dines his way through the Luke’s Gospel. Not only does Jesus feature meals in four parables and discuss eating at least three other times, but there are also nine meals referenced in Luke’s account of Jesus’ life. Table fellowship was both an important opportunity to teach and an important symbol of the coming communion in the Kingdom of God.  

Jesus use of meal times also fit within the Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures in which he lived. In the Greek and Roman culture, meals were very important indicators of social status and they provided important opportunity for social climbers to move up a few rungs. 

This is how table fellowship worked in Greco-Roman times. The person hosting a meal was looking to improve their standing in the community with a fine meal. The people who came to the meal were both those higher up the social ladder who could make the host seem more important and those lower on the social ladder who were looking to the host to improve their standing.   

Every invitation to dinner had to be carefully considered. If you accepted a dinner invitation, you would be expected, obligated, to reciprocate. Before you said yes to going to dinner, you needed to consider first whether you were prepared to counter with a return invitation in the near future. It would be polite to decline the invitation rather than take on an obligation you could not see through. 

Jesus would have been an exception to the rule. As a Jewish teacher, a Rabbi, Jesus would likely have been offered a place at the table to show the host as a generous, Torah observant Jew who made room for a teacher of the Law. But in the dinner recounted in today’s Gospel reading, we know that was not the case. 

Luke told us in the first verse of this chapter that both the guests and the host were closely watching the rebel Rabbi they had invited into their midst. It seems that they believed in the adage, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” The Greek word used here (also in Luke 6:7 and 20:20) paraterounmenoi means literally to watch from the side. It implies “hostile observation” as it was used to describe someone watching you out of the corner of his or her eyes with sinister intent.[1] Apparently the invitation, which would seem to honor Jesus was made with hypocritical motives. 

It is in this setting that Jesus, characteristically, does the unthinkable. Jesus gives advice on how to handle social situations and in doing so, he would have shamed both the host and the fellow guests he had seen vying for places of honor. Yet Jesus is not playing the role of a First Century Miss Manners or even Martha Stewart before her current troubles. Jesus advice that day is far too radical to be simply a matter of good social policy.  

Sure Jesus gives the practical tip that you should take a lower seat and then you’ll look all the more important when the host elevates you to a seat of honor. But Jesus is not finished teaching. He goes on to say that the host should not invite people to dinner who can reciprocate the invitation. In these two linked sayings, Jesus first warns guests not to try to claim honors for themselves, then he goes on to suggest than when acting as a host you should do the equivalent of committing social suicide. 

Remember the setting. Your social standing in the community flows from this ongoing back and forth of serving as the host and guest at dinner parties, each party a stepping stone to more honor and favor. But how would this work once you start to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind? Once you start inviting folks who will lower your standing in the community, there is no going back. The invitations to you will stop and the folks who now are beholding to you are the only people in the community unable to help you advance your social standing. 

I don’t want to let you off the hook. I think Jesus thought it would be a wonderful idea and a grand sign of the Kingdom of God if folks started to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind to dinner. Jesus wanted the lowly to be honored and this was one sure way to accomplish it. Yet, I don’t think that’s all that was going on. After all, then the invitation to the lowly might just be seen as yet more stepping stones to social success, this time greater social standing in the Kingdom of God, instead of in your own town. If you’re willing to use your neighbors to get ahead in your own community, why not use the poor and the lame to score points with God? Right?  

I don’t think so.  Luke says that Jesus told a parable and then what follows is the Miss Manners-like advice. Parable means literally to “throw along side of” and Jesus parables mix images to jar the hearer into a new way of seeing the world, a new way of thinking. I think Jesus is describing the world as God sees it. When God looks at the world, there is no one who God can invite to a banquet who will improve the divine social standing. God has already reached the top of the heap. There is nowhere but down for the Trinity to go and that’s not exactly possible either.  

Jesus preached about the end of time in terms of a messianic banquet. The Kingdom of God will look like a grand feast with all the faithful gathered around the table. Yet, God did not invite the best and the brightest to this feast. God invited you and me. We are the poor, for we have nothing to offer God. We are the lame, for we cannot give all of our strength, our human might to God. We are the crippled, for we have let our past hurts and pains get in the way of serving God. And we are the blind, for we cannot keep our eyes focused on the things of God. We are the ones who can do nothing for God and yet God has invited to the feast just the same.

We are the ones who should not spend our time on Earth with a holier than thou attitude jostling for the top seats in God’s kingdom. Those spots, Jesus would say, are for the Father to give out and the places of honor will not go to those who spend their lives seeking honor and power and glory. 

Some of the Pharisees felt as if they deserved God’s favor for being so holy. Jesus warned that that sort of posturing never impresses God. Forget the reward, you didn’t earn it anyway. You didn’t have to.  

Forget figuring out how to prove your social standing whether it is in this life or in the life to come. You don’t have to be the sum of what other people think of you. You are more than what others see anyway. You are God’s own child and you are welcome in God’s kingdom as such, not because you worked your way in. 

No amount of trying to gain favor with the power structure of this world can improve your situation. Trying to bargain with the social register just reduces you to the sum of what other people think of you. Instead consider how even though you didn’t deserve it, God loved you fully, completely, overwhelmingly. That knowledge is supposed to be humbling. When we consider how good God has been to us, we are to be awed into treating others differently because of it. 

Now, if we can return to the text with all this in mind, Jesus point seems a bit clearer. Jesus watched how people were jostling for seats of honor, looking to move them selves a few rungs up the social ladder. Jesus also saw the same problem in how the host had motives behind who he did and did not invite to his home for dinner. Jesus cut through all that junk and reminded his hearers that all of them, all of us too, are the lowly ones invited to the feast by the creator of heaven and earth.  

Knowing that we are undeserving of God’s love, we are to reach out, humbly, lovingly to the rest of God’s creation, responding without any idea of getting ahead in this world or the next. We are to leave the honor and glory stuff for God to sort out while we busy ourselves sharing God’s love with others, who are just as undeserving of that love as we are. 

Amen.