Finding Our Place

Luke 14.1-14; Philippians 2.5-11

Jesus must have been something of a handful as a dinner party guest. In our reading from the Gospel, a leading Pharisee, that is a person with prestige and power in the religious and civil community of the time, asks Jesus to lunch after Synagogue worship on the Sabbath day. On the way to his house, with the other guests in tow, Jesus stops to heal a man with dropsy, knowing full well it will, at very least, be an embarrassing action as far as his host is concerned. For already there was controversy over his healing activities on the Sabbath.

When they arrive at the house and the guests are getting settled around the table, Jesus launches into a none-too subtle speech about who has selected which chair, and where they really ought to be sitting, but are not. And then to top it all off, he gives the host a serve, arguing that the guests he’s chosen are there because he knows they will have to ask him back; and that it would be a good deal better if he’d hadn’t asked them at all, but had chosen a whole bunch of others, who had no hope of repayment in kind. One can only wonder how the conversation picked up when the first course finally reached the table.

There is a debate among the commentators about whether these words of Jesus belong in the category of wisdom sayings, that is, prudent observations about good inter-personal relations, in this case table etiquette, or whether they are something more. I lead toward the latter view. If it’s only table manners at stake here, there’s not much more to be said. There it is. Apply it to your entertaining if you wish.

But three things tell against that. First the story appears in the Gospel. Luke is interested in presenting Jesus as the revelation of God’s kingdom: that is, Jesus, for Luke, is the unveiling of who God is in our world, what God intends for our world, and how God acts in relation to us. That has to be more than prudential seating plans at dinner time. Second, the passage opens with the healing of the man with dropsy. That is unmistakably christological. It has to do with Jesus’ authority over the Sabbath. The Sabbath is God’s day, but Jesus is Lord even here. And third, Luke notes that, when Jesus saw how the guests chose their places around the table, he told them a parable. And a parable is not just a bit of everyday common sense dressed up in story form. It is a window onto the gospel; an interpretation of the action of God in Jesus Christ.

So how does this table talk of Jesus illuminate the dynamics of the kingdom of God? Well, I think the story operates first to reveal something about Jesus and then, on that basis, something about what following Jesus means. The story is obviously about a dinner table. But that in itself is an immediately clue. Time and again in the gospel record, Jesus’ table fellowship, his eating together with others, is a sign, perhaps the sign, of the God’s gracious presence. Our celebration of the Lord’s Supper is the condensed expression and continuous memorial of this. The table is a symbol of the feast of God’s grace, mercy and peace in the world.

Alright. So where does Jesus fit at the table? Of course, we would say, in the place of highest honour. If he is God’s kingdom come, where else would he be? True. But in the Gospel, there is no place of honour at God’s table, for God’s own Son, without his first taking the place of the cross. Honour, as manifest in God’s action in Christ, comes only through self-giving. Jesus comes to this world in humility, even degradation. Born in a stable to peasant parents. In life: without status or property or power. In religion: without ordination or institutional authority. In death: numbered with the criminally condemned. The best NT commentary on Jesus’ parable of the table seating plan is Paul’s famous Christological hymn in Philippians 2.

‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, and taking the form of a slave was born in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name which is above every name …’ (vv 5-6)

This passage is really Jesus’ parable retold as a theological understanding of who Jesus is and what Jesus does in the world. If Jesus is truly God with us, God incarnate, then this is God. God comes to us as one who takes the lowest of all seats. Christ is obedient even to death on the cross. In other words, God does not deal with us from some lofty height of glory, or power, or position. In Christ, God comes to where we human beings are. And not just to the nice places, not just to the places where we have it all together. God comes to the places where we are most lost, and violent, and hostile, and alienated. To put it in terms of the parable, God in Christ comes to the low end of the table not the top end. And because Jesus does that, because he meets us in our weakness and darkness, according to Paul, God has highly exalted him. Because of the cross, comes the word: ‘Friend, move up higher.’ This is God’s table etiquette, so to speak. Christ is exalted to the very presence of God only through this journey of self emptying in service of God’s love.

But Luke’s story doesn’t stop there. It is not just that the parable depicts what God in Christ does in the world, that is, takes the way of the cross. It also throws some light on why God acts in this way. In the last part of the story, as we saw, Jesus rather bluntly criticises his host’s selection of guests. He goes on about, ‘when you give a luncheon, don’t just invite your friends and relatives, or rich neighbours, because they can invite you back. But instead invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, because they can’t invite you back’.

Now again, this is not just advice about polite table behaviour. Of course, it might be a good idea to keep it in mind for our own hospitality. But its implications go deeper than that. This is again a disclosure of God’s action. In Jesus Christ, God manifests an astonishing grace and love. God seeks out the company, the friendship, not of those who are worthy of it, or can assume it, or buy it, or claim it by right. The truth is, in relation to God, none of us is in a position to make such claims. In relation to God, none of us merits a place at the table. But God in Christ seeks us out in our unworthiness, hostility, indifference, self-importance, and brokenness. God comes to us in our neediness, and gives us a place at his table of life. This is who God is. The cross is about God setting God’s table in the midst of the poor, the lame, the broken, the sorrowful. Not high above, but right alongside; not in unapproachable glory, but in gracious companionship; not in moral judgment, but in giving and forgiving love. This is God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

And this revelation is the most fundamental truth of this story. Only on this theological basis, does it become a parable about us and our discipleship. But then it offers us two things to ponder.

First, humility is required if we want to share the table of the Lord. We can’t read the story of Jesus with any penetration and not see that. Well, we probably can (and do!), but the parable tries to help us see things otherwise. The story of Jesus’ journey to the cross reveals that none of us has a self-earned spot at the table of God. In fact the cross reveals that we tend to be opposed, indifferent, hostile, or in uproar against God’s hospitality. God sets up the table in a war zone, so to speak, in the face of human resistance and indifference.

When Jesus says ‘that those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those that humble themselves will be exalted’, he is not suggesting that we are worthless, or insignificant, or incompetent; still less that we should pretend to be these things in order to get noticed by God. No, it has to do with recognising that we cannot create our own life and we do not redeem our own life. Both creation and salvation are the gifts of God. To share them at all means to accept them from God’s hands. And that’s not all that easy to do. There’s something in me that wants to believe I can find my own way to the table of life, make my own position of preferment in relation to others, jostle my way up the pecking order, so to speak. But this story of the dinner part reveals that I can only sit at the table of God as God invites and opens the table to me. If that is humility, and it is, the sooner I get some of it the better.

Second, following the Christ, who took the way of the cross, means that if I take my place at the table, it will not just be with others whom I happen to get along with. The guest list for God’s banquet is drawn up by God, not by me. And God seems to have very, very broad tastes in dining company. No one is excluded. This divine inclusiveness was one of the most difficult things that people of Jesus’ own day found in dealing with him. Of course, he was an impressive person in many ways: his teaching, his compassion, his healing, and so on. But the lengths he went to, to express God’s love and compassion, broke all the usual boundaries. Like the man with dropsy outside the church; like the list of displaced folk that didn’t get to the Pharisee’s table that day. Jesus insisted that God’s feast of mercy and life was meant for all, and especially for those who are wounded in some way. It was that message, and the hostility it created, which took him all the way to the cross.

This wideness of God’s mercy is as a challenge as much as the humility which discipleship requires. I don’t find it easy to live the breathtaking vision of God’s love for this world. I continually need my friends and fellow disciples, to remind me, to woo me, yes, even to drag me into having a more open heart, a more compassionate understanding, a more accepting vision, of all of God’s creatures, human and non-human, that God intends and will bring to a seat at his table.

‘Friend, come up higher.’ This is a word God longs to say to each of us. But we will only hear it if we trust what God has done in setting a table for the world in the cross and resurrection of Jesus; and if we have the humility to accept this as the gift of God’s grace to us, and to rejoice in the company of all God’s people that he sits beside us.

Graeme Garrett

Canberra Baptist Church

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 29^th, 2010