Readings: Proverbs 25.6-7, Hebrews 13.1-8, 15-16, Luke 14.1, 7-14
We are supposed to be a very status conscious society, but when it comes to a formal dinner, I suspect most of us are much more concerned about whom we shall (and perhaps even more whom we shall not) be sitting next to, that how far above or below the salt that may be. There was a time when where you sat in Church was of the utmost importance and something for which one was prepared to pay handsomely; now we very properly allow age and seniority its precedence at the front and at no extra cost! but I very much doubt whether the august occupants of our front pews think they are more important because they sit there, any more than humility or deference is what tends to make the younger members of our congregation sit at the back.
Things were different in Jesus’ time; we heard in our readings how your position at table, and whether you were invited to table at all, were matters of acute importance, reflecting one’s status in society as whole.
The banquet is common, perhaps the most common, metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven and an essential feature of the banquet is the invitation. The banquet parables are much concerned with who is to be invited, and where the guests are to sit. It’s a concern which the disciples evidently shared as they are frequently found disputing who is to sit where at the feast to which they assume they are invited in heaven. One doesn’t envy the task of the poor disciple responsible for the seating plan at the Last Supper.
That Jesus turns the whole idea of invitation on its head, must have been very hard to swallow, but that is what he does in the sequel to our reading. You will recall the story of the banquet to which the initial invitees refuse to come, because they have bought a field or five yoke of oxen or just got married. The King instead invites- and then compels the beggars and the riff raff of the lanes and alleys to come. This compulsion is puzzling to us, but one thing is clear; it is the very opposite of an invitation and, equally, it makes a nonsense of any concern about where you might be sat at the banquet.
To return to Jesus’ advice about placement in our Gospel today, advice which clearly draws on the passage from Proverbs, I am struck by its almost cynical practicality. This practical logic is that if you want to avoid humiliation, it is better to choose a low place initially rather than risk the acute embarrassment of being moved down table. Such practical reasoning is not unique in the Gospels, but I find it uncomfortable. So too is Jesus recommendation that one ask the “the poor, the lame, the maimed and the blind to dinner so as to be blessed by them and achieve repayment at the resurrection of the just”. It’s the repayment that is the problem. It’s not, apparently, that taking a low place or inviting the poor to dinner is at desirable in itself; rather it simply a means to securing a seemingly selfish end. This is not what we expect of moral teaching.
I want to believe that inviting the poor and ignoring conventions as to status are desirable in themselves, as promoting a world in which either health and wealth may be more evenly distributed, or one in which such distinctions have no meaning- that might, I imagine, be the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven.
This is not, however, the social structure which Jesus seems to envisage for his Kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven is not seen an egalitarian place; it not a society blind to poverty and disability but one in which the traditional values and status of the poor and disabled are reversed. The Kingdom remains an hierarchy, but one with a difference.
My puzzlement is in part because I have misunderstood the differences between our world and the deeply hierarchic ancient- and especially ancient Jewish, world. In Jesus society one’s position and status as slave or master; patron or client; member of the family or outsider; priest or lay; Jew or gentile, were crucially important; not matters merely of appearance and outward show but fundamental significance; they dictated whether or not one belonged and where one belonged; to whom and by whom obligations were owed; whom and by whom one was served. And here we have Jesus real point; a vital aspect of his teaching was the place of service and the radical and paradoxical proposal that it is by serving that we may achieve eternal life; that sacrifice and subservience are the keys to the kingdom. It’s a lesson most vividly demonstrated, not told, at another feast, the Last Supper, where the full extent of Jesus’ own service and sacrifice is given premonition in the almost banal washing of feet and then the mysterious symbolism of shared bread and wine. In this context, where you sit and whom you invite, take on a much more serious significance; they are not the trivial questions that they initially seem to us.
In a similar way I have misconstrued the cynicism of Jesus’ teaching. It is indeed uncomfortable to see it as merely the means to an end, however important that end is. But a characteristic of Jesus’ teaching is his fusion (to say confusion would suggest that it was unintentional) of time and place; of the here and now and the hereafter. We are never quite sure whether the kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven are places or states which we may attain in this world or whether they must wait for another life or a second coming. The point is that they are both and the corollary of this is that ends and means coalesce; the means of bringing about the kingdom will constitute a state of affairs that is the kingdom itself, in the same way that it is through forgiving others that we are ourselves forgiven, and through trying to express and live God’s love for the world ourselves that we shall experience the full benefit of his love for us.
So for us as a Christian community we shall find our place in the hierarchy of the Kingdom by seeking to serve the world around us and seeking to open ourselves to others however uncongenial they may seem to be. We need to ensure that our place is alongside the poor and prejudiced of our society and that our doors are always open to the stranger and newcomer. In a small but significant way we can do this by looking again at how we sit in church; we are already looking at ways of making the space at the more welcoming. Less radically, unless you need to sit by the aisle, you might think of abandoning the Anglican tradition of making newcomers to shuffle past, and instead move along to make room. Such small gestures can have a disproportionate effect.
The hardest thing to grasp, however, is that we should not make gestures, nor really serious sacrifice, because we think they will lead to reward in a different and future life, but because they are themselves valuable, because by such actions we will be to make ourselves instruments of God’s creative and healing love and that will be to experience that healing and eternal life ourselves.
This sermon has occupied a somewhat rarefied atmosphere; let me end by referring to another feast happening here at the end of this month; our Harvest Lunch will be a special event in which we shall share remotely with the refugees within the Syrian borders; here are the poor and the maimed whom we can symbolically invite in. Please try to come to the lunch, and if you can’t make a contribution to the charity it supports- there are details in the pew sheets. Amen.