Shared meals are important. We all need to eat, we all eat to live. So when we eat together, it is often a celebration. Meals create a sense of community. Some of our best conversations happen at table. I remember a pastor of mine long ago, who went so far as to say that the definition of a family is people who eat together. There’s truth in that. Shared meals bring people together and bond them to each other.
Which is maybe why so much of Jesus’ teaching ministry happens over a meal, just as it does in the gospel reading we just heard.
Shared meals create a sense of shared identity. But they can also be displays of social status, and that’s what Jesus is noticing as the guests at this meal choose their places.
And though we live in a culture which isn’t as explicit and overt with respect to honour and shame as Jesus’ culture was, we still get it, don’t we? The status thing? I mean, I see it most clearly at wedding receptions. Who makes the guest list? Who doesn’t? Which of the friends get to be in the wedding party and sit at the head table - and who doesn’t? Oh, the tears I’ve seen. I’ve been surprised and honoured to be invited to some weddings, and disappointed to be left off the list for others. And then there’s always that moment when I scan the seating chart before the meal, looking for clues as to what my hosts think of my social status.
Jesus sees it all as he watches the guests choose their places for dinner at the house of the leader of the Pharisees. Again, the culture of honour and shame was a bigger deal in Jesus’ time than our own. The guests would have sat at a big U-shaped table with the host in the middle. The closer you sat to the middle where the host was, the more honourable your place, the higher your social status. But there was no seating chart – so the guests who were choosing their places just had to figure it out.
Jesus, the good Jewish rabbi that he is, he observes all this and realizes, hey, this is a teachable moment. He begins by telling the guests a parable, one that they already know from the book of Proverbs. “When you’re invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honour, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place.”
Sounds like good advice. The book of Proverbs is after all, for the most part, a book full of good advice. On the surface, it sounds like Jesus is advocating humility. But really, at least the way the guests hear it, what he’s doing is using humility as a strategy for preserving social status. So far, the heads are nodding as the rabbi uses scripture to address a practical situation.
Jesus then sums it up for them. “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Now that sounds a little edgier. In the Greco-Roman world that ruled first century Palestine, humility was definitely not considered a virtue. It was a sign of being crushed. Humility was associated with shame, failure and weakness. Encouraging the dinner guests to humble themselves would have been unsettling. Observant Jews were expected to humble themselves before God, but did that apply to the seating arrangement at dinner parties? Or is Jesus still talking about using humility as a strategy to make sure we aren’t humbled? Now he’s got them thinking.
He’s unsettled them, these people who are the upper echelon of society, the leader and his guests. And now that he’s got them thinking openly about social status and pecking orders and guest lists, he turns to his host and gives him the real zinger, taking his teaching to a whole new level:
‘You’re worried about social status, and your guests are worried about where to sit, but the real problem is that you’ve invited the wrong people entirely!”
Because when we put together a guest list for a luncheon or dinner, we do tend to invite our friends, our relatives and siblings, and our well-off neighbours. We invite the sort of people who are socially acceptable, the ones we like, the ones we want to spend time with. These are the sort of people who might reciprocate, whom we expect to reciprocate, by inviting us in turn when they have a dinner party.
But God has no regard for our social status, and views our social posturing as harmful. Instead, Jesus is calling us into a new way of living, a way of life marked not by social status, not by reciprocity, but rather by grace.
“When you give a banquet, invite the poor, invite those that society views as lower status, because they cannot repay you.”
This seems, to put it mildly, counter-intuitive. Counter-cultural. Radical even.
Because that’s not the way society works. We are so used to living according to the rules of reciprocity. The repayment of favours. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Tit for tat. Sometimes we call it karma, or getting what you deserve.
And we live this way in the context of a social hierarchy. A pecking order. I don’t expect to get invited to Taylor Swift’s wedding. Mark Carney hasn’t called me to invite me for dinner yet. But I darn well better get an invitation to my neighbour’s kid’s wedding, because I invited them to my kid’s wedding.
And it’s not just that we’re used to living this way, but we’re comfortable living this way because it creates order in our lives. Reciprocity creates order. We know what to expect, we know where we stand relative to others. We like that, or at least we’re comfortable with it.
But God is not interested in our social order. God is not interested in reciprocity. No, what God wants for us is grace.
Grace is generous, grace is giving, grace is undeserved, unmerited gift. With no strings attached.
Jesus is grace embodied. And so, when he sees the social elite playing their status games, he tells the host that he should have invited the poor and those of low status to the banquet instead, breaking the cycle of reciprocity and opening the door to grace. Did you ever notice how often Jesus is accused of eating with the wrong people?
Grace is inviting the lowly, the marginalized, all the people that can’t even afford to buy a gift to the wedding banquet. It’s surprising, it’s radical, it’s counter-cultural, it goes against self-interest. Grace is generous and free, unexpected and undeserved. It confers dignity upon others by loving, serving and giving with no strings attached.
And of course, it’s not just about dinner parties. Think about it for a moment. Where in your life are you governed by reciprocity, social obligation, tit for tat, the repayment of favours, getting what you deserve?
And where in your life do you experience grace?
Jesus came to embody grace. To show us that God has freely conferred upon us a worth and dignity beyond what we deserve or could ever secure for ourselves, to help us to understand that we have been created in God’s image, loved as God’s children and looked upon with favour.
And having received this grace, we are now free to do the same for others. No strings attached.
Amen.
Homily Yr C P22. August 31 2025. Trinity
Readings: Jeremiah 2.4-13; Psalm 81.1,10-16; Hebrews 13.1-8,15-16; Luke 14.1, 7-14
Photo by Michael Morse