How to Eat Properly
Proper 17
In Luke 14 Jesus offers what seems simply to be sage advice when attending a dinner party. Always sit in the least honorable place. You will never be worse off and can only be brought up to a better spot by your host. “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." Seems simple enough.
My suspicion is that our sense of ourselves and how people comport themselves in public had been so thoroughly shaped by forms of Christian thinking that Jesus’ words here would seem like a straightforward bromide rather than the deeply unsettling way his first audience would have received them.
This is because in the world Jesus inhabited people operated with fairly strict understandings of where they and others fit into the social hierarchy. Knowing oneself and one’s place and knowing others and their places was essential for navigating the world justly. That is, if justice is giving to each person what they are due, then you needed to understand where everyone stood and what was due to them as a result. Someone who did not understand themselves properly, who lacked honest insight into who they were and where they fit into things, was not someone who was likely to act justly. They were ripe for the sort of humiliation that Jesus talks about in the parable.
At the same time, someone who thought too little of themselves was also seen to be deficient in some ways. Their humility worked socially to obscure the demands of justice. In the ancient world, humility was not the virtue we now think it to be.
It is striking that Jesus offers all this while he is eating at the home of a leader of the Pharisees. In this world, dining was one of the chief opportunities for clarifying and solidifying social status. (See how easily this goes wrong in a Christian context in 1Cor 11). Inviting people to dine with you was a straightforward way to offer gifts to others. If those others were your social equals, then they were obligated to respond in kind. If they were your social inferiors, they need to reciprocate in some other way such as offering you honor or praise. If they were your social superiors, they, too, were obligated to respond in a way appropriate to their status, unless they did not want to enter into or continue a relationship with you.
I suspect that we today have all sorts of objections to this approach to justice, and with good reason. Nevertheless, what Jesus proposes are gifts without expectation of any return, meals where status conventions are either ignored or turned upside down. He is, in short, undermining the social structure upon which this world’s notion of justice depends.
On its own, however, undermining social structures and notions of justice simply results in an extremely unstable world. If things once considered to be virtues such as honesty, accountability, fairness, compassion, and mercy were no longer thought to be virtues, or were twisted and contorted to such a degree that they no longer resembled what they once did, then people would not know how to navigate social relationships. Raw power would have free reign. Extreme caution would be required. You would never know when you could inadvertently offend someone powerful who could do you real harm. In such a world fear and mistrust would abound. Social relationships would fray. Bad would appear as good and good would appear as evil. It is hard to imagine anyone desiring to live in such a world.
Fortunately, that is not the world Jesus is offering. Jesus is not proposing the obliteration of all social conventions, but their replacement with the social conventions of the reign of God. Conventions that were as different from those operating in the first century as they are different from those operating in our world. Gifts without reciprocal obligation; overturning and undermining notions of status and assumptions about who deserves what are simply the surface results of a social structure that reflects our love of the things that God loves for us.
Jesus’ fellow diners seem to get this. In the very next verse after our passage ends, we read, “When one of those who reclined at table with him heard these things, he said to him, ‘Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!’” It appears that this unnamed person gets the upshot of Jesus’ words. Eating in the kingdom is a fundamentally different affair. (The subsequent parable of the wedding banquet may suggest that Jesus also detects a measure of presumption in this person’s response.)
The social structure of the kingdom is very different from the social structures of Jesus’ world and of our own. Our relationships and obligations are determined not by our place in any current social order, but by our relationship and obligations to God. In that world we are invited to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind precisely because they cannot reciprocate. They are simply beloved by the same God that loves us. Reciprocity is no longer the ground of social relations. Rather, the focus here is our common status before God, which serves to level all human status distinctions. We are all slaves of Christ, as Paul reminds the Corinthians.
If our relationships and obligations to others are shaped by our relationship to God, we can begin by recognizing that we cannot reciprocate God’s gifts to us. God does not need anything from us. Nevertheless, God loves us and invites us into friendship with God and our neighbor. As the reading from Hebrews recognizes, God invites our praise and thanksgiving as offerings. God sees our attention to the oppressed and our generosity with our goods as offerings. God loves our desire to offer things in this way, to orient our lives toward those toward whom God is oriented, not the offering itself.
As we listen to this reading on Sunday, it is a reminder for us to brush up on our eucharistic habits as these reflect the social conventions of the reign of God. We come as common slaves of the one Lord, we offer gifts that our Lord does not need and find them returned to us as the food which enables us to flourish, a gift we have not earned, but which we need to navigate faithfully a world where raw power seeks to replace all social conventions.