TRIGGER warning: the start and end of this reflection use a sporting analogy that readers with no enthusiasm for the attractive game may find tiresome.
READING this Gospel is like getting cozy on the sofa to look at a football match on television, then waking up only to find that you just dozed off straight after the kick-off, and have missed the entire of the primary half. You know the rating, since it is on the screen. But the substitutions and set-piece moves, the drama and the pointless arguments with the ref — they’re lost to you.
Luke 14.7-14 is just like the second half of a football match. We must rewind, and browse with 14.1-6 in mind. Jesus is on his strategy to dinner, a sabbath meal at the home of a number one Pharisee, when he encounters a person with “dropsy” (oedema). Of course he heals the person. Jesus’s message to the bystanders who criticise him for sabbath-breaking is that God’s healing is a 24/7/365 imperative.
What happens next reads like a foundation Gospel for the Church of England: “Choose a seat on the back.” In the case of the person with dropsy, the Law of Moses appeared to speak clearly in regards to the proper course of conduct. But it seems that only context can enable us to interpret the Law appropriately. In the case of the dinner and the invited guests, the Mosaic Law doesn’t apply. So, thoughtful guests must fall back on manners, consideration, or — as those that cannot resist codifying the uncodifiable would label it — “etiquette”.
No one desires to make themselves appear boastful, as on this story of the dinner. But false modesty may be just as socially inappropriate. The term “humble-brag” has not yet made it into my beloved Oxford English Dictionary, but it can. My two top suggestions, each born of experience, for avoiding social assumptions that may cause excruciating shame are: (1) amongst students in Freshers’ Week, never ask someone, if you meet them for the primary time, in the event that they are also a more energizing (they at all times become finalists, or postgrads, and even members of the teaching staff). And (2) never, ever, EVER ask a girl when her baby is due unless she’s already told you that she is pregnant.
Act humbly, and chances are you’ll be exalted: because when you act arrogantly, chances are you’ll well end up humiliated. Very sensible. But there’s a risk in such humility, not mentioned within the Gospel. You may find yourself eating your dinner feeling unappreciated, omitted, because no host appears at your elbow to say those cheering words, “Friend, come up higher.”
The Gospel world is a hierarchical world, by which everyone recognises that some individuals are more essential than others, and so deserve preferential treatment — everyone, that’s, except Jesus. The last section of this Gospel, vv.12-14, carries the purpose further. This turns what had looked (in vv.8-11) like a humiliation for a number of the guests into a mirrored image upon the host. Why was that host inviting only the type of individuals who can be fighting over the perfect seats? A greater host, a greater person, can be filling his house with “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (v.13) — if not since the host wanted them there, then since the host had the sense to do what it takes to receive a blessing from the Lord.
Here is a useful message: if we cannot do the correct thing for the perfect reasons, still doing the correct thing since it is “the correct thing” carries some weight with God. Not all of us are naturally compassionate, sympathetic, or (for that matter) comfortable within the presence of a giant bunch of strangers. But we will still know and do what is correct, since it is what God has told us that he wants from us.
At the time of writing this, the brand new Premier League season is about to start. I’m already participating in a unique approach to seat selection — not one commended on this Gospel (though it is understood from elsewhere as a biblical method of creating decisions: Acts 1.26). Better seats can be found to those that can afford them. But corporate hospitality and posh refreshments won’t ever produce the identical thrilling sense of inclusion and customary endeavour that sitting within the “lowest places” does — even when those lowest places are still disgracefully overpriced.
