On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely. When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “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, and the host who invited both of you may 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. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 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.”
Luke 7:1, 7-14
Once again, we find Jesus at a meal. Much earlier in the Gospel of Luke, some Pharisees and scribes had asked him, “Why do you eat with sinners?” To which Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:30-32) It is no coincidence that now (with little self-awareness on the Pharisees’ part) Jesus is eating with them, calling them to repentance, being the spiritual doctor to these elites who are deeply sick with the social norms of their society, almost as if to say, “Why do I eat with sinners? Well, don’t you want me to eat with you?”
This story reminds me of something in my past. I remember in Los Angeles when I was chasing the comedy ladder in my early twenties, you were supposed to be selective about where you were seen and by who. You didn’t want to be associated with the wrong crowd. In the standup world, that’s people who maybe weren’t as talented, or who were awkward, or unfunny, or otherwise socially low. The unspoken rule was you weren’t supposed to really befriend them if you wanted to “make it.” You didn’t want to be really friendly with anyone unless you knew they were funny or cool. If they weren’t, then you might feel obligated to someone uncool, or they might try to have an obligation over you, and you didn’t want that unless that person could really help you one day.
This is probably the natural state of human affairs in cut-throat competition. I remember, shamefully, that I would avoid certain rooms/scenes and not befriend some people because I wanted to be with the in-crowd. Of course, the tragedy from my perspective was that I wasn’t that cool or talented enough or what have you, and so many of the in-crowd didn’t want to be friends with me either. Don’t get me wrong, many were friendly, and I did have genuine friendships that cut through all that, but as a general rule, there was an atmosphere of knowing what “level” you were on that was cut-throat to sociopathic. Book the right people on your show and be booked by the right people. Help those who can help you.
It was, by all accounts, exactly that way in the ancient world. In Jesus’ time, the air they breathed and water they swam in were these hierarchical relationships. One thing that always prevented genuine relationships between the poor and the rich was that gifts were always understood not as gifts, but as covert agreements. Strings were always attached for a reciprocal benefit. And so not only would the poor never be invited to the nice banquets, but the high-status would also never accept things from someone of lesser status because you knew you would be obligated to them. It wouldn’t put you on their level, it would put you under the bottom, indebted to them. For an elite, that could be catastrophic for your social life. In a strong honor culture, that would be deeply shameful.
I’m afraid we all still do this to some extent; we want social events with people we think will be of our class or status or higher, not with people who aren’t “like us.” I have been in a lot of different subcultures in my life. I’ve seen similar dynamics at play at Harvard, at a hedge fund I worked a help desk for, in the psychedelic world, and subconsciously in churches I’ve been in. Usually, we like to put a veneer of a higher purpose behind our social hierarchical decisions. For Rome, it might have been to help sustain the empire, stability, nobility, virtue. In the worlds of Harvard and hedge funds, it was about class, an intellectual bar, an elite aura that needed to be maintained. In our churches, it might be to protect our idea of what godly people are supposed to be like, act like, speak like, think like, and vote like.
And then comes Jesus. And he says no, no, no—especially to the “godly” people. No, take all your supposed higher value reasons and excuses as to why you maintain your social hierarchies and throw them all out the window. Take the idea that you only help people who help you, only befriend people who are cool and socially suave and tell the good jokes at the party and donate the most to the fundraisers, and forget all that. In fact, because that is such a natural instinct for all of us, what we really need to do is the opposite. Take that veneer of a higher purpose you use to maintain your social hierarchies and shove it.
Because the true highest purpose, the will of God as reflected in his kingdom, or the “neighborhood of God,” wants the exact opposite of all our fake reasons. Does God value the stability of the empire over uplifting the poor? No. Does God value elitism, nobility, building a successful business or career, over the values of loving your neighbor as if they were worth the exact same as you to yourself? Of course not.
Is the way of God like our human ways, only giving people things they can give back to him? That is a bigger joke than any that I ever told. We give each other things for repayment. We humans have “no such thing as a free lunch.” Well for God, it’s always and only a free lunch, beginning with literally a meal.
Jesus is telling us that to get a mere taste of the kingdom, we have to give like God gives: with absolutely no expectation or hope that we will get it back. Why? Because that is what God has done for us. With every single thing in our lives, our health (to the extent that we have it), our wealth (to the extent that we have it), our family, our very breath, our “right” beliefs about politics and religion…it was all given to us. And we can absolutely never pay God back. And God gave it to us knowing we could never pay it back. But we can do as Jesus did, in the words of scholar Joel Green, and “collapse the distance between rich and poor, insider and outsider,” treating outsiders as family, lifting up “the poor,” giving with no strings or calculations.
Because this isn’t just all about our ego and our internal life. Nothing in the Christian life is. You can be very humble at Harvard; I knew many nice people there and call some friends. But this isn’t just about how we internally see ourselves or our personal journey, as that’s just the beginning. The imperative is that we take that internal posture and go outward and do something to help our neighbor.
We are called to go to the places and people that society says are least honorable, just as God took a place of least honor. God, Adonai, appearing as a mere man, with a fragile human body, who could be hurt, humiliated, and ultimately crucified. God himself took the lowest “seat” in his universe: a construction worker from Galilee.
There’s a couple of cautions. Be careful that you don’t take last place for the wrong reasons. Don’t do it to make a show of taking the last seat, like what Jesus would say about praying in public. Conversely, like in high school, some of us can easily take the last seat because it actually feels more comfortable (that was me). In fact, if you hate leadership, humbling yourself might mean taking the “last seat” up front, accepting painful responsibility that you know is needed for a task at hand.
Jesus is telling us that to be pleasing in God’s eye and to delight in the things he delights in, to love what God loves and reject what God rejects, it begins by humbling and lowering ourselves just as he humbled and lowered himself, giving in the same spirit of the grace he gives us: to those who need it the most, to those who can do nothing to repay us, and in a way that means something to us.
Ah, yeah, that’s one last challenging ingredient here: we are called to give real sacrifices. You can know it’s a real sacrifice if it really stings a little bit, calling you into an act of faith. Take those animal sacrifices in the Old Testament that most of us Christians know little about. You can know this: these were true sacrifices. The Israelites did not live in a world of abundance, certainty, supermarkets, or even our general store Willey’s. They gave without knowing what the next crop would bring, whether disease would wipe out their livestock, or whether any number of catastrophes would put them at risk. Yet they still gave back some of the best of what they had to God. Of course it hurt to do that. It cost something. But it was given in faith and joy for what they had been given.
A true sacrifice costs something, whether that’s your pride, your wallet, your time, or something else. Like the generous widow versus the rich (Luke 21), if you have all the money in the world, and you give a little away, is that the greatest sacrifice you can give? In our banquet story here, Jesus says here you need to give away some of your social capital—how would that feel to lose? Or let’s say you’re a very proud person. How would it feel to apologize? The point is to give where it hurts to people it helps. Give money to those who have none, give your time for people who have no time for you, listen to people who will never listen to you, sacrifice your pride for someone who will never make you feel better.
Jesus tells us that it's not a true sacrifice if you give so that you can be paid back. It's a true sacrifice if you do things for people who can't repay you. This is exactly what Christ did on the cross. He gave where it hurts, with no strings attached, knowing there is no way we could pay him back.
But what we can do is receive his gift with faith, joy, and gratitude by paying it forward. As we also read in Hebrews 13 this morning, “Continually offer to God the sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that openly profess his name. Do not forget to do good and to share with others for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” (Heb 13:15-16)
If that’s too wordy to remember, I can sum it up with something from a man of Baptist faith closet to my heart, the legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith. Coach Smith would often write different spiritual food for thought on a board for his players, taking a small time away from practice to be spiritually fed. In his book, he remembers writing for his players, “Do something every day for someone who can’t repay you.”
We could do a lot worse as Christians than that. Do something every day for someone who can’t repay you. That’s not enough to repay God, but it’s the regifting he loves; it’s regifting grace. Amen.
Incredible rainbow shots! And a great sermon besides! Thanks.