The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, 2016 – Jeremiah 2:4-13; Psalm 81; Hebrews 13:1-8,15-16; Luke 14:1,7-14
We find Jesus today at a dinner party. One had to be, it seems to me, either quite brave or quite uninformed to invite Jesus to a dinner party…because he almost always wreaks havoc. Sometimes it is happy havoc, as (in John’s Gospel) at the wedding feast in Cana where the water suddenly becomes remarkable wine, and sometimes, as in today’s Gospel from Luke, it is not. Sometimes Jesus explodes the party, overturns it, turns it inside out. For a dinner party is in the perspective of Jesus, in the presence of the Son of Man, a very important thing. A dinner party is not just a dinner party. It has one foot in the kingdom of God. And so it matters what it looks like. It matters how we keep the feast.
This dinner party is a dinner party at the home of a leading Pharisee. It is a dinner at the house of an important person, probably for important people, and the guests behave as guests do at a gathering of important people. They jockey for position. They want to sit beside this Pharisee; they want to be seen talking to the right people; they want to be seen to BE the right people. Dinner party as net-working; dinner party as self-promotion. None of this is surprising; that is what you do at the home of a leading public figure. We have all been at this dinner.
But we have not been at this dinner with Jesus. This is not what Jesus does at a dinner. Jesus sees us sitting at this table with one foot in the kingdom of God, and he pokes a hole in the whole self-promotion scene.
When Jesus noticed how the guests were choosing the seats of most importance, he said to them,
When you are invited by someone to the marriage feast, don’t run straight for the best seats. Perhaps someone more important than you will come along and your host will ask you to move. No, when you are invited to the marriage feast, take the worst seat of all. Sit at the table with the people who have no pull. Sit at the table with the little people, the people who don’t matter, the people you have never heard of. Be one of them. Then perhaps your host will see you and invite you to come up higher.
This sounds like a bit of sage advice: don’t put yourself forward; let your host give you honour. Proverbs says much the same thing:
Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence
Or stand in the place of the great
For it is better to be told “Come up here”
Than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.
But in Jesus’ hands this sage advice becomes a word to overturn the world. Jesus invites us to hear in Proverbs something more than good advice for the world as it is. Jesus invites us to hear in Proverbs and to see in this dinner a pointer to the presence of the kingdom of God. Proverbs is talking, after all, about the king. It is the king in whose presence we stand, waiting to be called up higher. And Jesus, at this moment in Luke, is talking about the kingdom.
“They will come,” Jesus has just said in the last chapter, “They will come from east and west and north and south and sit at table in the kingdom of God.” Here are the guests, sitting at the table, as Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem announcing every step of the way the coming of the kingdom of God. Here is Jesus at dinner with God’s people, and he has just healed a man. They will come from east and west and sit at table with the Son of Man, and the blind will see and the deaf will hear and the sick will be healed and even the lame ones will walk. This is not just any day, but the day of the dawning/revealing of the saving grace of God. This is not just any dinner. This dinner, Jesus says, is a parable. The table at which Jesus now reclines, the diner at which God’s power to heal and to restore walks abroad upon the land; this is not just any dinner. It is in the presence of Jesus a pointer, in itself and beyond itself, beyond all the dinners of the world, to the great feast of which all our feasts are meant to be the image and the shadow, the feast called in Luke and in Jesus’ teaching the marriage feast, the marriage supper of the lamb.
This dinner is a parable. It is a pointer to another dinner, the great dinner, the marriage supper of the lamb.
And this supper, the supper of the lamb, is not like the feasts of the world. This feast is the place in which glory is found in the form of the lowest and the least.
When you are called to the marriage feast, Jesus says, do not sit down in the place of greatest honour. Go and sit down in the place of the lowest and the least. For it is there that the king will find you. It is here that the one who calls you will know you, you his servant, you his guest, here in the place of the lowest and the least at the marriage supper of the lamb.
For this is the feast of the lamb. This is the feast of the One who was slain, the king of all glory who chose a cross for his throne. Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.
The last place is Christ’s place. This is who Jesus is. This is the truth about the world God makes, the truth about the world where God reigns. Glory has the shape of humility. It is in the one who chose the last and lowest place that honour, God’s own honour and blessing and glory and power, are known.
Once has God spoken; twice have I heard it: power belongs to God.
Power belongs to Jesus, who chooses for our sake the place of the last and the least.
This is what the true feast, the true table, God’s table, looks like: a whole world of guests rushing to be last, each for love of the other. This is not what the world’s feasts look like, but it is the feast to which we are called. When you are called to the marriage feast, take the last place, Jesus says. Take the last place, and the king will know you, for you will look like the Christ. Take the last place and the king will call you. Come up higher. Sit by me. Sit here with me, by my pierced side.
This is not what the world’s feasts look like…but they could. Our feasts are a parable, Jesus says. All our dinners are a parable, a pointer in the presence of Jesus to the kingdom of God’s love. It begins at this table, for already the Lord calls us. Come up here, he says at every Eucharist, come up here and share in the supper of the lamb. Come up here in love for each other, caring for each other, putting each other first. Come up here in love for each other as Jesus came down in love for you. There is in this communion that we share with each other in Christ Jesus our Lord already a foretaste of the joy that is waiting. God calls us now to this table, the beginning and the pledge of the supper of the lamb.
And it is not just here that we are called. All of our dinners, all of our feasts are lit by the light of God’s feast, the joy that is now and that is to come, hope for the last and the least.
Why is it the poor and the dumb and the lame and the blind whom we are called to invite to our tables? Because this is what God’s feast looks like. This is what Christ looks like. These are the people Jesus loves: Jesus joining the lame man at his own table, choosing the dying woman’s place; taking our hand at the bottom of the table, calling us higher, into God’s grace. The poor and the dumb and the lame and the blind: invite these, the last and the least. All our dinners a parable of Christ’s supper, all our feasts the place of Christ’s love.
