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Luke 14
Healing of a Man on the Sabbath
1One Sabbath,(A) when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were(B)watching him carefully. 2And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. 3And Jesus responded to(C) the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, (D) "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?" 4But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. 5And he said to them, (E) "Which of you, having a son[a] or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?" 6(F) And they could not reply to these things.
The Parable of the Wedding Feast
7Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed(G) how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, 8"When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, 9and he who invited you both will come and say to you, 'Give your place to this person,' and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place,(H)so that when your host comes he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. 11For(I) everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
The Parable of the Great Banquet
12He said also to the man who had invited him, "When you give(J) a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers[b] or your relatives or rich neighbors,(K) lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. 13But when you give a feast,(L) invite(M) the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid(N) at(O) the resurrection of the just."
Up until recently, I unfairly thought this passage to be one of the most “yawn-inducing” passages in the entire New Testament. “It’s not so bad as the genealogies, but only a step above really,” I thought. It comes at such a strange place in the story, too. In the previous chapter, Jesus tells one of the fig tree parables, basically saying “hey guys, I’m holding off God’s wrath for now so that you might bear fruit.” He heals a woman on the Sabbath, then tells the famous parables of the mustard seed and the leaven, the parable of the narrow gate and the door being shut, and it all wraps up with some Pharisees telling Jesus that Herod is out to kill Him, to which Jesus responds that He can only be killed in Jerusalem and tells of it’s coming destruction.
All of this is major, heavy, plot-building stuff. And then, in the midst of all of it, Jesus decides to sit down and play Emily Post for a little while. Boring. I mean, who wants to hear about table manners at a first-century wedding feast when the Kingdom of God is at hand? Jesus has just given Jerusalem, from a distance, the “I didn’t want it to end this way” old-school “your number’s up” speech; and then segues into telling us about how to not embarrass ourselves at a party?
I mean, I get it, Jesus has just been informed by some Pharisees who aren’t against Him that Herod’s out to get Him, He goes to dinner at one of their houses, where there just happens to be a woman who needs healing, and so He takes them to task on the whole Sabbath-healing issue that He just schooled them on in the previous chapter, and this time, tellingly, the don’t say a thing. You can almost see their embarrassed faces as they looked on. Then, they go in, start sitting down to eat, and while Jesus still has them in the palm of His hand, He decides to use this as a teaching moment as well. He says:
8"When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him
But, wait a minute, did you catch that? He’s at a dinner at the man’s house, and He tells them “when you are invited to a wedding feast…” But, they’re not at a wedding feast, their just having dinner at the guys house. Ding ding ding, clue number one, something more than meets the eye is going on in this story.
Wedding feast, what’s that all about? If it doesn’t ring a bell, let’s look quickly at a few passages. First, Matthew 22:2:
2"The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. 3He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.
And Revelations 19:7-9:
7Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
8Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear." (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)
9Then the angel said to me, "Write: 'Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!' " And he added, "These are the true words of God."
If I were preaching this sermon at Gibault, this is the point where I’d explain to the kids that “wedding feast” is one of Jesus’ code-words. You see, when I started preaching through the Gospel of Luke, one of the things I high-lighted over and over again was the fine line that Jesus was walking while here on Earth when it came to the matter of revealing His mission to people.
We often think of Jesus’ time here on Earth in very un-earthy terms. We objectify and dehumanize Jesus when we try to explain why He came and what He did. While I highly value our creeds, we tend to take them and separate them from the actual story. We say Jesus was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, was crucified, died, and was buried, He rose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven. We take a very “dragnet-esque” approach; “just the facts, mam.”
When we do this, we don’t realize that Jesus was on a very perilous mission, one which God had chosen from the moment of the Fall; they chose to get their hands dirty, to confront evil itself within the confines of human history. Christ’s life was not just a Divine revelation of Christian principles, it was a Divine intervention; it was God breaking into a world overrun with sin and evil, in order to take them both head on. This was like a Divine military operation, with objectives, strategies, and covert ops.
And during this intervention, Jesus had to walk a very fine-line between what was expected of Him as the messiah, and who He really was as the messiah. As you already know, Israel was expecting a much different messiah than Jesus, they expected a military leader, someone who’d overthrow their Roman enemies. But Jesus wasn’t about overthrowing the enemies out there, the physical ones in the world; He was about overthrowing the enemies in here, in your heart, and evil in the world.
Christ had to turn human thinking upside-down, on its head, or properly on its feet given that it was already upside-down. So, in order to avoid riots, misunderstandings, and being hoisted up as the messiah-in-power, while simultaneously changing the perspectives and expectations of His audience, so that some of them might be prepared for the full revelation of Himself as the Messiah, Jesus used parables, subtleties, and “code-words,” in order to ease them into the truth and “fly below the radar.”
And wedding-feast is one of those words. It’s code for the Kingdom of God, the simultaneously present and still-not-here, yet-to-come, Rule of God. It’s code for the way God wants things to be versus the way we usually think of them being.
So, in this passage, Christ chooses to explain first what God thinks about “places of honor.” As we’ve already read, it says:
7Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed(G) how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, 8"When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, 9and he who invited you both will come and say to you, 'Give your place to this person,' and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.
Now, I have a secret to share with you. I have a dream. Not in the good, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sense of having a dream for the betterment of our society. No, I mean I have a dream in the same sense that I assume most of us here have or have had a dream at some point. I have a dream of where I want to be five to ten years from now. I have ambition.
Now ambition is not something which is unique to the American people. All people everywhere have dreams and ambitions of some sort. But it is a unique part of our culture, that’s why we still call it the American Dream. Here we are all about following your heart. Our movies, books, work-ethics, and politics are all about working hard and sacrificing everything you have to attain that single-minded goal, whatever it is. Here we are about following your heart’s desire, having “Your Best Life Now,” achieving the impossible. Ultimately, what I think it boils down to is this, we all want to be the hero of our own life story. We want the “place of honor” at the table.
And here is where Jesus cautions us. Now, is he critiquing the whole concept of having seats of honor? No, what He is critiquing is our felt-need to be honored, to be in that seat. He’s saying that our inclinations to assert ourselves are not going to get us that seat, and in fact they may cause us to lose it. He’s saying this tendency to say “look at me, look at me, aren’t I great, aren’t I just precious,” and value that honor, that adoration by those around us, has the effect of blinding us to the things that really are honorable, that really are valuable.
Because, in the Bible, God doesn’t seem to value what we value. He doesn’t seem to be very concerned with worldly success, wealth, power, and prestige. We don’t find Him encouraging us to “get out there and do what’s good for you.” Instead, He frequently encourages us to “get out there and do what’s good for someone else.” He tells us in the following verses:
10But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place,(H)so that when your host comes he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. 11For(I) everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
Ding, ding, ding, clue number two that Jesus isn’t just talking about us and our social norms. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” is a little to proverbial sounding to wind up just being about what chair you sit in at dinner. “He who humbles Himself will be exalted.” Who is the one who humbled Himself? Let me give you a hint from Philipians:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
(Php 2:5-9)
That’s right. It’s Jesus. Jesus humbled Himself, came to earth, lived that sinless life for us, and died for our sins. He humbled Himself, came down amongst us dirty, rotten, miserable sinners, lived for us, died for us, and now, through our union with Him in baptism and our faith in Him, gives us all the wonderful things He earned for us, despite our lowliness. Paul tells us in Romans 6 that in our baptism we were united to Christ’s death and resurrection. And, theologically, this union kind of works like a marriage. As Martin Luther put it in his pamphlet “On the Freedom of a Christian”:
The third incomparable grace of faith is this, that it unites the soul to Christ, as the wife to the husband; by which mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul are made one flesh. Now if they are one flesh, and if a true marriage-- [112] nay, by far the most perfect of all marriages--is accomplished between them (for human marriages are but feeble types of this one great marriage), then it follows that all they have becomes theirs in common, as well good things as evil things; so that whatsoever Christ possesses, that the believing soul may take to itself and boast of as its own, and whatever belongs to the soul, that Christ claims as his…
Christ, that rich and pious husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils, and supplying her with all his good things. It is impossible now that her sins should destroy her, since they have been laid upon Christ and swallowed up in Him, and since she has in her husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own, and which she can set up with confidence against all her sins, against death and hell, saying: "If I have sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned; all mine is His, and all His is mine;"
That sounds a bit like the host of the wedding feast coming up to you and saying “Friend, move up higher.” Or perhaps, to a life-long thief on the cross “today you will be with me in paradise.”
And, as much as I’d love to end the sermon there, to do so would ultimately still leave us with one lingering question: how do we get there? It’s one thing to say “humble yourself,” it’s another to go about doing it.
First, the quickest route to real humility, that I know of, is being honest with ourselves. False humility says “oh, I’m not so great,” when really, you believe you are. Real humility recognizes that, if we’re honest, we’ve still got a lot of things for God to fix in us. Examine your life, and if there aren’t a few things glaring you in the face already, take a look at the Ten Commandments. If you’re still feeling fine, read the Sermon on the Mount. If after all that, you’re still doing a fine job, then get with me sometime, I need you to be praying for me.
Second, recognize your dependence upon God and His grace. “There but for the grace of God go I” as John Bradford said, though in an entirely different context. Realize that, when it comes down to it, everything good in your life depends entirely on God’s graciousness. Recognize that, apart from Him, your ability to control the daily events of your life is little more than a façade’.
Lastly, begin trying to put other people before yourself. Think of small ways in which you can practice this on a daily basis. Do little things for people that you don’t feel like doing.
Remember, in all of this, that pride isn’t just our silly, inane attempts to gain the notice of the world. It’s not enough to say pride and ambition aren’t what God is about. We have to recognize that pride runs against the very grain of what God is about. God is about love, loving other people, taking care of those around you. Pride says forget them, what I want is what’s important. God is about you having faith in Him and trusting Him to provide for you. Pride is about you trusting in yourself. Pride violates the first commandment, setting you up as your own god, looking to yourself to provide for all your needs and satisfy your desires. Pride refuses to acknowledge how weak and lowly we truly are, and by doing so disables our ability to receive the blessings and gifts which God intends to give to us.
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