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FINDINGS II
Proper
17 - C - August 29, 2010
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Luke 14: 1, 7-14 On the occasion Jesus was on his way to the house of a leader of the
Pharisee party for the Shabbat meal he was being watched closely. He was himself
watching and saw how other guests chose places of honor. So he told them this
parable: "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit
yourself down in a place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you
has been invited, and the host who invited the both of you may come to you and
say, 'Give place to this person,' and then in disgrace you would have to get
back in line and take the lowest place. But if you went to the lowest place
first, the host might come to you and say 'Move up higher,' and then you would
appear as honored among the other people at the table (proving that) those who
exalt themselves are very likely to be humbled while those who humble
themselves have nowhere to go but up." He said also to the host, "When you give
a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or relatives or wealthy
neighbors, in case they might invite you in return, thus repaying your
hospitality. When you put on this kind of thing, invite the poor, the crippled,
the lame and the sightless. They cannot repay you, but in that you will be
blessed in the resurrection of the righteous." (Translated and paraphrased by
Harry T. Cook)
 By Harry T. Cook
8/23/10
RUBRIC
Emily Post and Ann Landers would probably have agreed with
the advice to play humble at a dinner party in hopes that you would be seated
by the host somewhere above rather than below the salt. But each would balk at
the other piece of advice: Don't invite the well-off who can return the favor;
invite those who for obvious reasons couldn't. Life in the Hamptons, on Park
Avenue and Rittenhouse Square, in the leafy suburbs of the Grosse Pointes and
Bloomfield Hills, on suburban Chicago's North Shore and elsewhere among the
grandees of society would never be the same again if that counsel were to be
heeded.
Thus in this passage we revisit the lines from Luke chapter 1
and the Magnificat: "He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath
exalted the humble and meek," and in the revisitation of them are reminded that
the gospels' social analysis is largely egalitarian.
WORKSHOP
We have before us an entirely Lucan passage with no
observable parallels in Q or Mark. So we are able to ask what peculiar Lucan
agenda these nine verses were meant to serve in Luke's greater scheme. The RCL
omits vv. 2-6 because, one presumes, they represent an unlikely interruption in
a highly formal affair. Table hospitality in the Mediterranean world was
serious business, highly symbolic and every bit as well orchestrated as in
contemporary upper classes. In fact Luke located several important episodes at the
dinner table (see 5:29ff, 7:36ff, 10:30ff, 11:37ff, 22:14ff and 24:30ff.)
We are told that people were watching Jesus very closely as
he approached his host's table. If you are as I am, viz. of humble origins, and
have been at a dining occasion well above your social station, you know how it
is to have all eyes critically on you as you nervously ponder the array of
cutlery before you and wonder which implement to pick up and when.
Whilst Jesus was being checked out (and this is event is not
included in the appointed reading), a person with dropsy. i.e. one with large,
unsightly swellings, appears. One wonders how a person thus afflicted could
have gained admission to such an event. (Perhaps in the same way "the woman of
the city who was a sinner" got into that other dinner party.) As Luke has
depicted him on other occasions, Jesus was quickly diverted by the suffering
man, but not so quickly as to miss an opportunity to take on the lawyers and
Pharisees present. Jesus is depicted as asking them if it lawful to cure people
on Shabbat.
Answer came there not. Their silence in Luke's imagination
may been a result of being flabbergasted by Jesus' effrontery or of knowing the
moral answer was different than the legal one and so remaining mute in their
embarrassment and unwillingness to speak heresy.
Not content to offend over the soup course, Luke's Jesus
proceeds to assail the guests (and host!) over the entr�e. He has uninvited
counsel for both. To the guest: don't seat yourself too high at the table
because it's an assumption perhaps unwarranted by social conditions, making the
climber liable to embarrassment if and when he or she is seated in a lower
place. What the guest who came not to dine but to preen should do is play Uriah
Heep and conspicuously take a lesser chair in hopes that such a gesture would
bring social advancement.
It is a tad worrisome that the parable could well be taken
as a lesson in social climbing strategy rather than as a mockery of such
society games when the Who's Who concerns pale beside the specter of human suffering.
Now on to the host in question and to others who may soon be
hosts themselves: Don't make up your guest lists from the social directory.
Need and resource must converge. Moreover, those who have been marginalized unfairly
must be brought to the center, not because they're among the 400 but because
they are human beings who happen to be in great need.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
Pity the parson with the country club just up the lane from
the church. He or she must now go into the pulpit bearing a radically
egalitarian message, if the sermon is to be based on the gospel. Or he or she
could take to text Genesis 27:11 KJV and avoid the issue altogether. Should the
rector tackle the gospel in an intellectually responsible way, the next dinner party
at the rectory had better include a habitu� from the soup kitchen down in the
city as well as the CEO of a big corporation who pays the largest pledge in the
parish. In fact, the two should be seated together, the former just above the
invisible line on which the salt cellar sits and the latter just below it.
"Jesus Christ!" exclaimed a clergy colleague who read this
issue of FINDINGS II in advance and found himself aghast at the prospect of
such a thing. "Exactly," was my reply.
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