Proper 17 2019, Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81:1, 10-16, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1, 7–14
“They were watching him closely.” Because he was at the head table, he was the special guest. And because Pharisees were observant by definition; plus they would be watching each other too: Who is trying to talk to him, and who is keeping his distance? Who is keeping pharisaical, and who is risking it? Who is moving up, and who is down? Whom do we honor, or do we tolerate? Who is successful, and who is losing? The whole atmosphere would be watchfulness.
I have always been observant, even vigilant. I’m always watching, always analyzing, ever judging, I’m a critic. And I feel like I am always being watched. I live my life on view. When I was little, we would go visit my Grandma Meeter in a conservative Dutch community in New Jersey, and she’d take us for a Sunday walk, and we’d fool around and she’d say, “Walk nice. What will people think?”
She had reason to feel this way. My grandma had been born out-of-wedlock—her father was unknown—and her mother went crazy and ended her life in the state mental hospital. My grandma lived with shame. Yet she was loving and generous and courageous, and she loved to laugh, but I remember how self-conscious she was, especially in church, and she preferred to sit in the back.
But my Grandpa Meeter liked to sit up front, so they ended up in the middle. My grandpa did not mind people watching him. He sang loud in church. He would call out greetings in three languages, Dutch and English and Frisian. He was devout and faithful and successful in his business. But not once in his life was he ever nominated for consistory. Because he was crippled from his childhood, and he walked with a gigantic limp. People didn’t want to have to watch him march in like that when the elders all came in together to start the service.
When we went to church with my mom’s parents, the Hartogs, we sat in the back pews of the balcony. They too had reasons for shame. My grandpa was a known adulterer. In the words of our Hebrews reading, he did not “hold his marriage in honor,” nor “keep his marriage bed undefiled.” The elders had suspended him from taking Communion. When he repented of his ways he was reinstated, but he never did take Communion again, and they sat in the very back.
We are social creatures, we can’t help but watch each other and analyze. So do you find church a place of welcome and security, or a place of uncertain hospitality and ambiguous acceptance? Do you want to be noticed and talked to or do you need your privacy? Are you looking for fellowship, or would you rather just focus on God without us distracting you? Do you want to be recognized or do you keep back because you don’t know what your status here would be?
Jesus tells a parable that offers a strategy for avoiding unexpected humiliation. If you don’t want to look bad at a party, act deferential, and you can only go up. If you assume the place of honor you might get humiliated. This strategy is obvious and true, but did we need the Son of God to tell us this?
Remember that Jesus designs his parables to give some resistance to your understanding. A parable has layers of meaning. The first layer is obvious and easy to understand. But it is actually too easy to understand, on purpose, so that if your heart is hard, you will think you understand it and be satisfied with yourself. The deeper layer has resisted you, as it was meant to do. The parable will be closed if you are closed. But if you keep open, the parable can open its deeper layer, which can seem almost the opposite of the outer layer.
Jesus has done that here. The outer layer suggests that humility is an act you can adopt to spare yourself a worse humiliation. But the deeper layer is that you don’t have to act at all. How do I get that? Well, the key that opens the deeper layer is the last thing the Lord Jesus says here, about inviting to your banquets the people you wouldn’t normally invite. Jesus suggests what the active virtue of humility is, and it has nothing to do with how you look in people’s observation.
The active Christian virtue of humility is simply acting without regard for your own self-interest, and with no expectation of repayment. It is removing the idea of investment from your relationships with other people. In your relationships, don’t be concerned with the benefit you might get back from those relationships. The active virtue of humility is acting without observing self-interest.
This sets you free for all kinds of creative relationships with people you would not normally connect with, especially those who cannot do anything for you. Not that you should let them take advantage of you. In Our Lord’s illustration you’re the one who gives the luncheon and you’re the one who gives the banquet, so you’re the host and you’re in charge of what you offer them and what you do not offer them. This kind of active humility is not self-abnegation nor a lack of self-respect. When someone acts all knavish or obsequious, that’s the humiliation of victimization, not the active humility of freedom.
This also sets you free from getting miserable and resentful when other people have failed or disappointed you. You don’t care where you sit or whom you sit with. You are able to live on, and be self-determining and even joyful in the midst of a very fallen humanity. You are able still to offer what you offer and you are even able to keep on loving the unlovely.
Of course this is challenging. We do have expectations of each other. We do have obligations to each other and to each other’s interest. Even in the generous of marriages there is some necessary self-interest, some mutual obligation, requiring faithfulness. And I don’t think the Lord Jesus means to ruin all wedding receptions in the future by not allowing the inviting of your friends and family.
But the challenge still stands, you recognize its value as the attitude of the alternate humanity that is countercultural to the always dominant humanity that puts self-interest first. Whether we’re speaking of the dominant humanity of today, as exemplified by our President and our Governor and our Mayor and all the powerful people in politics and economics and our cultural institutions and universities, or we’re speaking of the dominant humanity of the Roman Empire within which our Gospel and our Epistle both were written.
I have spoken before of the new kind of humanity that is a major theme of St. Luke’s Gospel. You see it in a different way in the Hebrews reading, in that catchall list of short exhortations that do not feel quite unified. The underlying unity is that these exhortations contradict the dominating aspirations of the best and brightest in the Roman world. Remember those in prison, as if you’re in prison with them, remember those being tortured, as if you’re tortured with them, and torture was legal in the Empire and a tool of state.
Prison and torture were risks the early Christians had to live with because of their belief. And yet they considered themselves more free, free to be more creative with their relationships and more loving as a way of life. They were examples of the new kind of humanity coming to life in the world because of the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
So it’s not just for the church that we have to welcome in the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. You could say that it might be true for the church, but not for the nation. You could say that the nation should only welcome in the educated immigrants with skills and money to contribute, and that our national policy should express our national self-interest.
Yes, the words of the Lord Jesus and the exhortations of Hebrews are certainly for the church, and for the practice of the church. But the vision is larger than that, for the Kingdom of God is beyond the church for the new humanity. We’re talking about a whole humanity that welcomes into our general society the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, and the immigrants who precisely cannot pay us back, and then we will be blessed, says the Lord Jesus.
Brenda Lynn Stolk was a young woman in my second congregation, in Ontario. She was a nurse practitioner, in a group home for the mentally handicapped. I did her wedding. It was a great big Dutch-Canadian wedding with very many relatives and substitute relatives among the immigrants. At Dutch wedding receptions they usually seat the domine right up front. Not at Brenda Lynn’s. Who were seated at the head table? The mentally handicapped residents of her group home were her special guests. And during that reception they kept watching her with affection and love and pride, because she was a beautiful bride. Her greatest beauty was in showing us what God is like, that God is love.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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