Sometimes the straightforward teachings of Jesus are so, well, straightforward that commentary risks confusing the simplicity and directness of what he’s on about. Today’s Gospel appears to be one of these, but pondering it for a while now, I found some interesting background which is helpful to deepen the meaning of Jesus’ words even more. We have a curious scene in today’s gospel reading: “On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath…”. Just pause there for a minute. Going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees?
The conflicts that Jesus has been in up to this point with precisely the Pharisees have become the stuff of living legend. They are the ones responsible for tending the Law. He’s challenged their readings of the Law and reminded them of the witness of the prophets and wisdom writers about true righteousness that the Law is intended to serve.
Further, it’s the Sabbath, and some of the most public conflicts Jesus has had with the Pharisees have been about breaking Sabbath rules, for example on the occasion he encouraged his friends to pick grain to feed themselves and others on the Sabbath. Was creation (including us) made to serve the Sabbath, or was the Sabbath made to serve creation and to serve God’s intentions for creation? Jesus had been about turning the tables theologically and ethically long before he erupted overturning the tables of money lenders in the marketplace in Jerusalem!
And even further, it’s a meal. In the home of a leader of the Pharisees. Table community, by invitation, an invitation given to Jesus (this Jesus who usually hung around with the ne’er-do-wells and slaves, the tax collectors, sinners and women). And he didn’t just hang around with and eat meals with them, he taught them, from their own religious traditions, a different relationship with the Law. And not one about which the Pharisees were at all pleased.
I think this bit of background is really important to what follows. Jesus has appealed to the writings of the Prophets and to the Wisdom tradition in his conflicts with the Pharisees, and his message to them has been consistent: that the Law is God’s creation: a school for holiness in the service of God’s grace. The Law is not God; the Law is God’s creation intended for our good; the problem is with the Pharisee’s poor stewardship of the Law. Because the Law, just like any other of God’s gifts, needs to be stewarded – taken in, used in the service of righteousness, justice, mercy, kindness, true humility. This is the teaching of the prophets and of the wisdom tradition, who thereby point to what the fulfilment of the Law is all about: the service of God’s greatest desires for creation. Jesus has come not to abolish the Law but to bring it to perfection, its own service of perfect freedom, we might say. Jesus has come to liberate us. It might be said that Jesus has liberated the Law too, towards its original purposes in God’s loving intentions.
But something had gotten horribly warped in the Pharisees’ relationship with the Law.
Canadian Reformed tradition Theologian Jamie Smith in his book Desiring the Kingdom, describes the effect of how our desires shape what we imagine the kingdom of God to be like. Digging deeper, he explains that our desires themselves are shaped by all sorts of forces moulding their values into us. It’s a cliché that we become what we admire or love. What is it that shapes our love? Some of the things that shape us are things we’re conscious of: the influence of our parents and the values instilled in us through school. We are shaped by the friends and communities in which we find ourselves by choice; and there are also things that we haven’t chosen to be a part of as such, but that shape us in profound ways.
Even our most deeply human needs can become warped. We all desire to be held in good regard by others, to be valued. In a competitive society, we learn that to be valued one must be a success, and even more than actually being a success, to be seen to be a success, and even more than being seen to be a success, that success needs to be according to the values most celebrated in the world. Money, fame, power… are the obvious ones. So insidiously these forces work on us and warp us, that we may not even be conscious of how deeply ingrained they are. With compassion, I think something like this is going on with the Pharisaic class and vocation.
The Pharisees’ desires to serve God had become warped over centuries of exile, return, and now under the brutality of the Roman occupation. There are now needs not rock the societal boat, and needs to be careful not to upset the oppressors. In this context something has warped and pushed the Pharisees from a vocation of stewards of God’s Law into a stance like sentries – armed guards – safeguarding the internal integrity and uniqueness of the Law as something to cling to over against the oppressors, yelping to give the whole community a more solid identity under colonial rule. But this warping had the effect that the Law eventually eclipsed the reasons God had for the Law in the first place, and was getting close to eclipsing God.
What Jesus knew from the Prophets and the Wisdom traditions is that the Law serves God’s will for all of creation to flourish in love and righteousness, justice, mercy, and generosity. The Law serves this flourishing; the Law doesn’t come first: God and God’s will comes first. And we know more about God’s will by listening to the Prophets and to Holy Wisdom than we do by reading the letters of the Law alone. Grace, God’s gift of God’s own self, revealed as Love, illuminates for us the meaning of the Law that God has given.
There is some background to the words that come out of Jesus’ mouth over food and drink. And now back to the dinner party and Jesus’ message When you arrive at a dinner like this, don’t presume the place of honour. Enter with humility, and you may receive honour. Accepting social convention that some will be honoured and others less so, Jesus at first glance seems to be offering a good little teaching about humility and knowing one’s place. In fact, he is actually quoting the Wisdom of the Book of Proverbs. And of course he goes further, which we’ll get to in a minute.
What is it to honour someone? What is this honour? Good regard, even high regard, yes. The assumption given in social convention then as now is that some people are more important than others. That some people merit a place of honour due to their achievements and acknowledged skills for a particular role in the community; and that others are honoured in our society for other reasons, and different cultures have different ways of effecting honour. Usually those other reasons are about the amount of power someone has, power in the form of influence over others, oftentimes power in the form of money, sometimes power in the form of mysterious charisma that attracts us to award them with the power of celebrity.
In its highest form, I wonder if the giving of honour might be understood as an expression of gratitude. The Giller Prize and other awards in the arts can be seen as thanksgiving to the artist because of how we have been moved for the better and our lives more filled with beauty because of their gifts, and so we say thank you.
With honour comes power, influence, a voice in the community.
As a spiritual exercise some time, spend a day paying attention to places of honour that you witness: who is honoured in what ways and for what reasons? The small things and the big things, the beautiful and the disturbing. We can hope that discounts offered to senior citizens at some shops and on public transit is at the least a vestigial sign of our society’s honouring of those with the gift of years. That’s something to think about. But are all those whom we honour by granting them power of influence over us worthy of true honour? The power of influence of celebrities and social media “influencers” is incredible. And then of course most starkly stands the question of who is excluded from even the most basic honouring of their human rights?
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What happens if we follow that notion that to honour someone is to express gratitude to them. From a God’s eyes perspective, that honouring would look a lot like paying attention to whom this person is, in their full humanity and seeing in them the gifts that God has brought to life in this person. It would look a lot like a conscious choice to look for the honourableness, meaning the God-given dignity and special giftedness of each person and knowing the inherent worth of each person as worthy of God’s love. It would look a lot like seeing Christ in each person and letting our thanks be known to God for the gift of each person. It would look a lot like grace.
The American theologian Serene Jones wrote recently “To be in sin… is first and foremost to be unaware of grace, to live without God…” To be unaware of grace.
There is something in us that keeps blinding us to grace. Something activated by powers and principalities, forces engaged by our own choosing but more often than not forces whose work in us we normally don’t even recognize, warping even our good intentions, just as the Pharisees’ commitments to God through the upholding of the God’s Law got warped so that the Letter of the Law eclipsed God’s grace.
Jesus had reminded them – in those public conflicts – over and again that the prophets and the wisdom traditions shone a light on the true meaning of God’s gift of sabbath. That the seventh day sabbath rest established by God within creation is a gift to all of creation. It is a gift of rest from work, yes, but more deeply it’s a liberation from all that keeps us from being fully alive, all that enslaves us, and all that warps our desires away from God’s desires for the flourishing of creation. To people already dealing with hunger, for example, starving on a Sunday because you’re prohibited from gathering food is not sabbath liberation. To a people just outside the doors of the pharisee’s home starving for justice, the elite dinner party inside doesn’t help to free them from their suffering.
So, far beyond a bit of a lesson on social humility, Jesus has offered a wisdom tradition entrée into a picture of grace. Not just you who humble yourself will be honoured, but all who do so will be. But there’s much more, the simply climax of grace. Then Jesus takes his host aside: don’t invite your friends next time – the ones at your own or higher social and economic standing who can repay you and invite you to their lavish banquet in return. Invite those who are poor, the oppressed, the suffering. This is the honour you give to them, and you give to God, in opening your door and your cupboards to them, to recognize them as worthy of God’s love and therefore of your own love. Grace is not transactional. It is not bought and sold. It is not monetized or traded. Grace gives freely. This is a different economy. A different economy entirely, because what you’ll find is that this graced dinner party won’t just be about a host bestowing generosity on those less privileged, but that true welcome, without price or obligation, opens the way for each and all the guests to share gifts with each other including with host, and the event is transformed, ultimately in honour of the Giver of all Life, God.
May God’s economy of grace shape our desires with this vision of the Kingdom of God. May God help us, as we live in this economy of grace, to know our desires better for what they are, to help us to laugh at the false and shallow things around us, the powers of influence that try their darndest to eclipse our hope in God’s higher power of love. May God help us to so live that all may truly have a place of honour at the table of grace. And may we be faithful stewards of this gift of grace.
The Revd Dr Eileen Scully