“Honorable Mention” (Luke 14:1, 7-14)
Rick Olson, September 2, 2007
Imagine a first century person, a person from Jesus’ time, reading a story written just last week. And she comes to a part where a big ol’ Southern thunderstorm blows in and it says “Suddenly, the lights went out, and from across the room, George saw Sally begin to light some candles . . . ‘We need to keep the refrigerator door closed as much as possible,’ she said.” I wonder what she’d make of that? Would our first-century reader immediately get it? I don’t think so . . . even if she did know what a refrigerator was, she wouldn’t get the connection between the lights going out and the need to keep its door closed. Why? Because there’s a big piece of information missing from the story—the lights are out because the electricity’s off, the same electricity that runs the refrigerator. The first-century reader wouldn’t get that, but we would . . . the ubiquitous nature of electricity is part and parcel of our world 20 centuries later, and the author doesn’t even have to mention it, but we get it anyway. It’s part of our shared knowledge base, our shared assumptions of life in the 21st century.
And just as we 21st century Americans share a lot of that common knowledge about how our society works, so did the people in Jesus’ time. Authors of that time could assume a basic level of understanding of certain facets of their society, a basic set of shared assumptions about the way things were, that they didn’t have to spell out. Problem is, just as first century reader didn’t get the connection between the lights going out and the refrigerator not cooling, we twenty-first century readers don’t understand a lot of things they took for granted. We tend to read 1st-century literature through 21st-century glasses, with 21st-century expectations, and when we do we invariably get it wrong.
Our passage this morning is a classic example . . . reading it as if it were just a matter of who gets to sit near the host, we don’t get the full impact of what’s going on, and here’s why: Mediterranean cultures were what anthropologists call honor/shame societies. In these cultures, your social standing, your livelihood, was based on accruing honor. Now, you might say “Preacher, it’s the same thing these days . . . have you ever been to a city council meeting or a charitable event?” And while it’s true, honor is important these days too, back then it was literally a matter of life and death, a matter of survival. How much honor determined exactly where you stood, how well you lived, and even if you lived at all. And shame, the opposite condition of having no honor, was worse than death itself.
Honor is a complicated commodity . . . it was accrued based on rules e specific to each society. You were born with a certain quantity of it at birth, the amount based on your gender and the honor of your parents. This was something one was powerless to change, but a person’s honor could be increased by doing heroic deeds or via the “game” of challenge-riposte, wherein a challenge is made in public which must then be answered. Many of the seemingly innocent questions asked by scribes and Pharisees are examples of this, serious challenges to Jesus' honor.
Another way that honor could be accrued was if someone with higher social standing ascribed it to you, and that’s what’s going on here . . . Jesus looks around at all the guests trying to take the seats closer to the host, the ones with more honor, and tells them this story: “When you’re invited to a wedding banquet, don’t sit at the place of honor ’cause if someone more distinguished than you has been invited, and the host—who after all, invited both of you—may come and say tell you ‘give this person your place’ and you’d have to slink down and take the lowest place.” And all the folks around the Pharisee’s table cringe at the thought of losing so much honor . . . “Instead,” Jesus says, “go and sit at the lowest place, so that your host might come and say ‘friend, move up higher’ and then you’ll be honored.” Note he uses the word “friend” which in the middle East was huge: if an important person called you “friend,” well . . . that pretty much guaranteed you’d never have any problems ever again.
But something’s always puzzled me about this passage . . . Jesus’ reply—seemingly advice on how to play the honor game better—is not in keeping with what we know to be his character. In fact, it’s pretty much a reversal of his usual modus operandi. Far from helping folks ascend the ladder of success, he usually turns the ladder upside down, saying stuff like “the first shall be last, and the last first” and “the one who would be first in the
Well, there are a couple of hints in what he says that not all is as it seems . . . first, though they were at a weekly sabbath meal, he specifies a “wedding banquet” which is another one of those things certain 1st-century audiences would understand, but we don’t . . . it’s a code for the kingdom of God, for the end times, for things apocalyptic . . . in Jewish bridal mysticism, Israel is conceptualized as the bride of God . . . Christianity took this imagery over and the church became the bride and Christ the bridegroom. So right away we can see that the story’s about more than an earthly feast, it’s symbolic of the great wedding banquet that will be consummated when the
The banquet is a metaphor for the kingdom of God, and in the kingdom of God honor is bestowed not by competing for the most honorable places but by sitting in the lowest places, the places with no honor, and this, of course, is more like it, more like the Jesus we know and love, who said the first shall be last and the last shall be first or, as he puts it here, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” And the one who’ll be doing the exalting, the one who’ll be ascribing to them honor—and the Greek word for honor, by the way, is doxa, also translated as glory—the one who will ascribe to them glory
is the one whose social standing is higher than anyone else..
And the glory obtained in the eyes of your fellow banquet guests, the honor of the world, if you will, is transitory, it’s fleeting, it’s ephemeral, while the honor ascribed by God—treasure stored in heaven perhaps?—is eternal. The kingdom of the world rewards those who jockey for position, who scramble up the old hierarchy, to get the honor assigned by their fellow human beings, but God ascribes honor, ascribes glory to those who assume the humblest place. The last shall be first, and the first last.
And I say that’s all well and good, and everything, but I have one more question, one more troublesome question . . . what’s so important about taking the last place at the table—the lowest rung on the ladder, the last place in line—at God’s wedding banquet? I mean you hear Jesus say it all the time, in—as we’ve noted—multiple ways, but is there some intrinsic good to this? Is there a reason that the first shall be last, is it advantageous in some way or another, other than a heavenly reward? Are we supposed to invite the poor and the lame to our own banquets for any reason other than that we’ll be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous?
The answer is “yes” and lies in the finite nature of honor. In human societies, honor is a fixed commodity, it’s a finite quantity. There’s only one seat next to the host, and if somebody’s already there, you have to take a lower one, thus losing honor. Because of this finite amount, if you acquire honor, it is necessarily at the expense of someone else. The overall amount of honor in the world doesn’t change, so if it increases in one place it must decrease somewhere else. Because of this, the acquisition of honor always involves conflict—seen in the jockeying of position at the banquet. Honor is a limited quantity for which people must compete. And here’s why the last shall be first—if you purposefully and happily place yourself at the end of the line, in last place, if you humble yourself from the outset, you put yourself out of any conflict’s way. No one will challenge you or try to take from you any worldly honor or prestige that you do not have. Further, if you place yourself willingly in last place, on the lowest rung of the ladder, if you consider yourself the least of these, and accept that, then there’s no need to be constantly scrambling and scrabbling and squabbling for position.
Saint Benedict, in his rule for living in community, writes that one of the steps toward humility is that “we not only admit with our tongues but are also convinced in our hearts that we are inferior to all and of less value,” and today we’re shocked, just shocked that he would advise us to have no self esteem, no self-worth, but he’s not talking about Freudian psychology or depth psychology or any other kind of psychology, he’s applying the words of Jesus to life in a community. If you place yourselves willingly at the bottom of the ladder, if you take the lowest place at the banquet, then you’ve put yourself out of the running, out of the conflict for honor, for reputation, for worldly glory that rages through our communities even today. And further, if you are convinced in your heart—and here’s the hard part—if you are convinced that that’s where you belong, that it’s good to be there, then you will have the honor God bestows on you, the blessing of a calm stomach, the privilege of no ulcers, the prestige of worrying not at all.
In a “classless society” like ours, we nonetheless compete for honor in, as Joan Chittester says, “normally harmless yet corrosive little ways. We are a people,” she says, “who like embossed business cards and monogrammed leather briefcases and invitations to public events. We spend money we don’t have to buy cars with sliding glass windows in the roof. We go into debt to buy at the right stores and live on the right street and go to the right schools . . . we measure our successes by the degree to which they outspan the successes of our neighbors.”[1] And as we all know, this leads to illness, anxiety, even an early grave.
But brothers and sisters, that’s not the way it is in the
[1] Chittester, Joan, O.S.B. The Rule of Benedict: Insight for the Ages, (
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