September 1, 2019
Sir 3:17-18, 20, 28-29; Heb 12:18-19, 22-24a; Luke 14:1, 7-14
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We all know that status is very important to people.  There are various ways in which people establish status.  In our society, status is closely tied to money and education, but cars and homes count too.  Men in particular like to drive name-brand cars, and women are attracted to convertibles.  But in other societies, you might gain status by being the best hunter or having the fastest horse.  Different rules apply, but status is always important.

Jesus’ society was what sociologists call an “honor-shame” society.  Today’s Gospel passage shows how it works.  There was a strict hierarchy in the seating order at dinners and banquets.  Some seats were “higher” than others.  People at higher seats sometimes even ate different—fancier—food than people in lower seats.  A man would usually take a seat appropriate to his current status.  To improve his status, a man could claim a “higher” seat.  This was taking a risk.  If other people, like his host, accepted that claim, that gave honor to the man and his status rose.  However, if his claim was rejected, then he was shamed and he lost status. 

People of Jesus’ time were always seeking honor and trying to avoid shame.  In today’s Gospel, Jesus argues that a man might persuade his host to honor him by choosing a lower seat.  I doubt that this happened in Jesus’ society, any more than today a person would ask for a lower salary so that his boss could insist on paying him more.  That’s not how status works.  It’s a zero-sum game, and people are usually trying for more status than other people.

But Jesus tells us how God sees things:

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. 

This is a radical challenge, not only to the culture of Jesus’ time, but also to basic human nature.  If you watch nature shows, as I do, then you’ve seen that status is also extremely important for chimpanzees and other primates, although their method of achieving it is different.  Love of status seems to be baked into our DNA.

Yet Jesus urges us to adopt different values.  It’s hard for us, but we honor as saints people like Dorothy Day, who made her home in the slums and shared it with smelly homeless people.  And Father Damien, who moved to a leper colony to minister to the lepers.  They were used to priests who visited but kept their distance, and they despised them, but Damien lived with them and eventually contracted leprosy.  We honor as saints those who freely choose the lower seats.

Personally, I find Jesus’ next instruction the hardest.  He says that when we have a dinner party, we should invite not our family and friends but the beggars.  Now I know that that’s what Jesus would do, and I still have a home and at least occasionally have enough energy to invite somebody for dinner, but I don’t invite people I don’t know.

So did Jesus mean this literally?  I’m thinking that he did, and I’m not being as good a Christian as he would like me to be.  Remember that this was the guy who consorted with prostitutes and people who collected taxes for the hated Romans.  He didn’t just socialize with his peers.

We don’t give banquets these days, but we all have time and attention to share with other people.  God gives each of us 1440 minutes every day.  We need to spend many of them on ourselves and our families, but some are available for other people.  Jesus tells us to spend at least some of them on people who cannot repay.  Then God will repay us at the resurrection of the righteous and the heavenly banquet.