Table Places and Honor

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

September 1, 2013; 15 Pentecost, Proper 17, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 14:1, 7-14)  On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.

"When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, 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 the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

__________

One of the reasons it can be hard for us to interpret the New Testament is that our culture is fundamentally different from the first century Mediterranean world.  Understanding something about their presuppositions adds particular interest to today’s gospel.

Jesus lived in an honor culture.  For people in his world, honor was what money is to us today.  In Jesus’ world, one’s worth was measured corporately, by the amount of honor you carry. 

In our culture we have credit ratings.  You can’t get a loan to buy a house without good credit.  Right? 

In an honor culture, your good name and your reputation of ultimate value.  No one will freely associate with you in a covenant relationship unless your honor is good – unless you have a good name and a good family reputation.  In an honor culture, your honor would be measured almost as accurately we measure credit scores today. 

Your honor rating is the alignment of two things:  what you think you are worth and what society acknowledges you are worth.  And it’s not about money.  It’s about honor.

An honorable person is one who is sensitive to one’s own reputation – who accurately understands the opinions of others and lives consistently within the status and honor that the community grants.  A shameless person doesn’t understand the rules of what is honorable and what is not.  A very shameful person is one who aspires to a certain status and finds that status is denied them by public opinion. 

Everyone at the Pharisee’s dinner party understood Jesus’ illustration about the person who misjudged his status and sat in a seat of honor that was above his status.  That is a conventional story about honor and shame with a conventional lesson that would have been comfortable to anyone present.  The Book of Proverbs is full of similar advice.

S

o let’s dig a little deeper.  Let me tell you about a typical seating chart at a first century banquet.  Imagine a U-shaped table, low to the floor so that everyone could recline, typically toward one’s left, in order to use the right hand to reach for the food and drink.  Imagine looking toward the table with the open end of the “U” facing you.  To your left, the first table position was filled by the person responsible for going back and forth to the kitchen to resupply the tables.  Next to him, at position number two, was the host.  To the host’s immediate left reclined the guest of honor.  And the other guests sat around the table in declining order of prestige.  Someone in the middle of the “U” at position seven would be a person of more honor than someone at the opposite end of the table, say at position eleven. 

A wise person could look around a room and find his appropriate place, correctly evaluating his rank.  A fool, a shameless person, might place himself at position four, and when the real occupant of that place comes in, the fool would find the other places filled, and would have been bumped to the end of the table, suddenly earning his shameful standing by aspiring to something he didn’t deserve.

Now a brief aside for another story.  When next we read John’s account of the Last Supper, have this order of seating in your imagination.  I think you’ll see that the guest of honor that evening, seated to the left of the host Jesus, was Judas Iscariot.  After all he was the treasurer of the apostles and maybe the chair of preparations.  Judas may have been Jesus’ closest and most trusted, honored companion among the twelve.  Come back for more during Holy Week.

But back to today.  Jesus’ advice about being slow to grab a seat of honor was conventional advice.  His words would have been received positively at this meal at the Pharisee’s home.  But what Jesus said next would have sounded scandalous. 

Everybody knew that throwing a banquet was an affair of honor.  A host must be careful to invite people of comparable rank, people whom he might owe an invitation to, or those who might invite him back to a table of comparable honor. 

Everybody knew the order of seating could become a field of challenge:  Who is more honorable than whom?  How will the host and the guests acknowledge each person’s reputation and social worth?  Furthermore:  Will the table enhance the worth and honor of those present, or will they be demeaned by sitting with inferiors?  To place honorable persons with dishonorable persons would bring shame to the host?  He would have miscalculated and insulted his most honored guests.  He would have lost face, and honor.  It’s a tough game.

J

esus’ words to the host were like a wet backhand across the face.  "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.”  [Despite that being the whole conventional system.]  “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Jesus’ words are an indictment and a challenge to the whole social order.

You see, “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind” are those that the Pharisees taught were not to be included in the congregation of the faithful.  The Pharisees believed that all Israel was a holy people, a nation of priests.  And therefore all people were bound by the 613 individual laws of the Torah of Moses.  And in the Torah, in Leviticus 21, the scripture says that no one “who has a blemish shall draw near, [or] one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles” – these are excluded from the holy people, the nation of priests.[i]  And the poor?  They are like these others – unfortunate, but also dishonorable. 

The conventional belief presumed that these afflicted ones deserved their fate.  Maybe you remember the question from John 9, when people asked Jesus his opinion, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Jesus did not accept the question.  He changed the rules.  Jesus refused to victimize the victims.

J

esus scandalized his society by his open table fellowship, by his welcome and his free touching and healing of those believed to be cursed.  He completely sabotaged the honor system, welcoming sinners and outcasts, declaring blessing upon those thought to be judged and punished by God.  He announced “blessed are the poor, the meek, the hungry, those who weep and mourn, the hated and ostracized.”  And then he flipped the tables and said, “Woe to you who are rich and well fed and laughing now.” (Matthew 5 & Luke 6)

At Jesus’ table, the wealthy, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, are expected to sit down as equals with fishermen and tax collectors and Mary Magdalene at a table where he calls them all “friends.”  He told his disciples, You know how those honor tables are; it shall not be so among you.  No, the greatest among you must become like the least, and the leader, like a servant.  (Lk. 22:24f)

Can anyone doubt what Jesus would say to us today about our social system and its hierarchies of money and power?  We may not be an honor culture, but in our way of acknowledging worth, we aren’t so different from the first century.  We just use money instead of honor.

And if we are not to earn Jesus’ condemnation as hypocrites, we are going to have to create social structures and individual behaviors that favor “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” and all of those who fall between the cracks in our systems of power and prestige. 

T

his table is our model.  That’s one of the reasons we say in our invitation to communion, “Whoever you are, or wherever you are in your pilgrimage of faith, you are welcome in this place, you are welcome at God’s table.”  We’ve all got a challenge before us to follow Jesus’ lead of radical hospitality and generosity. 

---

[i] thanks again to Paul McCracken for his Lectionary Notes, this from August 27, 2013, and to my friend Charles Page