22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C – Preached at St Matthew’s Carver Street
Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29
Psalm 68
Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Brothers and sisters I am the last person to teach anyone about humility. I still get annoyed when I am assigned a serving role that I don’t want to do. I am easily embarrassed when a friend pulls me up on something I have said or done. I love being invited out. I am no exemplar of good graces.
But if a lesson in morality is what is what we have gathered here for then half of our time is wasted. For what has prayer, or incense, or singing, or bread and wine to do with learning to be a better person? If a school of good behaviour is what we seek we would sit and listen while Fr Naylor delivers a lengthy discourse of injunction and instruction. Dos and Don’ts. Thou Shalt Not and Thou Shalt.
In a former time this is what the people of God sought from their Maker and Saviour. And since they asked, this is what they received. Upon the burning mountain top all wrapped in smoke and sounded with terrible thunder Moses went up to Sinai to receive the Law of God, words carved in stone which would measure the Redeemed. On the awesome day when those who had been saved from slavery in Egypt heard a frightening voice and read with their own stinging eyes the terms of the Covenant God was making with them, they pleaded that Moses would speak to them in God’s place, so glorious and beautiful was the Utterance of their Maker and Master.
They longed for someone to stand between them and the Almighty. Like the shelter of a stone wall as a gale blows over the hills, or the small shoots which flourish safe on the banks of a great river, these frail children of dust felt their fragility, their unworthiness, their sinfulness when they gazed upon the glory of the Lord. Moses steps into the gap and delivers to those God chose as His own the commandments which were to govern them in their wanderings and at the last take them home to the Promised Land.
In this way the immature children of God show a profound wisdom. We are surrounded by those who seek perfection – however they might see it – without a Mediator. From radical politics to DIY medicine, following a dozen manuals or hanging on the words of Internet essayists. In Gyms, Labs, Lecture Halls. With surgery and coaching. Religious gatherings and professional retreats. “When we have the right knowledge” they seem to say “Then we will achieve our own private heaven”.
It is the wisdom of those who have actually met God to say “Another Thou Shalt not I cannot endure”
We who know God know we’d never live up to it anyway.
The Pharisees in the Gospels are the experts in the “Thou shalt nots”. Not only did they go around teaching the Bible they also were scrupulous in their keeping of the Law of God. At this time a Word from God which was once far off hidden in the smoke of mountains and the oracles of Prophets had in one sense become widespread and accessible. During the time since the Second Temple was built at the conclusion of the Exile a tradition of teaching grew up, an example of which we heard as our First Reading from the Wisdom of Sirach. It is the fruit of generations of meditation on God and His ways. And Jesus aligns Himself with this – He spends time with Pharisees and enjoys their hospitality. But the Pharisees knew Jesus was different. When He is in their company they watch him closely – waiting for something.
Just before the Gospel reading we heard, at the start of this meal, Jesus healed a man with Dropsy. This painful condition was a swelling of the tissues and must have made the sufferer look very unwell. There was no cure and would have been seen as a sign that this person was close to death. Jesus heals him on the Sabbath – breaking the Law as the Pharisees saw it – and explains that just as anyone would rescue their child who had fallen into a well, so too would He intervene to rescue those who are danger.
We see here Our Lord’s heart for these Pharisees, who have tried so hard to keep the rules as they see them, and cannot see that it is they who are in danger of destruction themselves.
Jesus turns to the guests and gives them a lesson in conduct and behaviour. But it is not the conduct and behaviour of the guests at this dinner party which concerns Him.
Notice in the text how Jesus changes the nature of the celebration. “When you are invited to a wedding feast”
To not make assumptions about where you will be seated at a Wedding Breakfast is certainly sound advice even these 2000 years later. But this mention of a wedding is not an accident.
Marriage is how the Prophets in former times talked about God’s relationship with His people. Indeed it was a broken relationship, God’s faithfulness scorned by a people who preferred Sin. Yet God was not content to leave His Bride. The Prophets also speak of a restoration, a new Marriage. The Word of the Lord comes to Hosea:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
Jesus is prophesying that the time of this Marriage has come. The guests are being invited. God is about to make a new Covenant. The Lord will marry His beautiful Bride.
And at this wedding banquet are many who think themselves worthy. Perhaps they have kept the Law better than others. Perhaps they have given more generously. Perhaps they have suffered for the Name of God. A wiser guest comes to the banquet and takes the lowest possible place and when the host sees him, he summons him from this lowest place to give him all honour and glory and power and might.
Jesus here describes His own Mission and Ministry. He will take the lowest place. He will suffer every cruelty. He will serve the lowliest. He will embrace traitors as His friends. He will be dragged into the courts and scourged. He will lay down His life. And when he has reached that lowest place of Hell, then He will be exalted. For no other guest could pay the terrible price Jesus is willing to pay.
In the telling of these parables Jesus blends together two worlds. He sits in one place and time and with a word casts this situation and us into a cosmic and eternal scale.
While these Pharisees languish in their law-keeping and jostling over who is better or worse at it, Jesus thinks only of the great price He is shortly to pay for the sake of this new Marriage which is about to occur. His hearers may have missed this. To keep the conversation polite he ends with a proverb:
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Sound advice yes. Axiomatic. It is a law of the universe as immovable as the setting of the sun and stars in their course. And Jesus has decided which way He will go.
From the guests Jesus turns to someone we’ve not yet met: The person who invited Him. Jesus once again speaks with his mysterious twin meaning. Similarly he speaks of an immediate accessible virtue we could practice, but He also raises the stakes with this curious phrase “the resurrection of the Just”.
This is an idea which emerges during the time of the Maccabees when the Hebrews were fighting for their survival against the Greeks. It is a hope rooted in the certainty of God’s promises – that no matter what injustice is suffered on this earth, God’s covenantal justice will be revealed in the time to come. There will be a reward for the righteous, whether the Greeks win this war or not.
Jesus affirms this hope, and in so doing declares both that He is certain of God’s promises to Him, and that those for whom He is preparing to die for can offer nothing to pay Him back.
In this Parable Jesus casts Himself as the host of the banquet and those He has invited as those in need of help: The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Jesus anticipates His own resurrection on the Third Day as His reward given by the Father for the way He will spend his own body and blood to save those who are weighed down with sin, with shame, with guilt.
Jesus is going to take the lowest place and give His whole self to save those who have no power to save themselves. And this offering will be the one offering which is acceptable to God.
The old Covenant, with the booming voice and the scorching flames on the mountain, was broken again and again. The people of God could not keep their promises. The Lord Jesus Christ was sent by God to bring about a new Covenant, the great wedding of Jesus and his Bride the Church. We are invited to this banquet, made present on this Altar, not because we have kept the rules and done our best but because Jesus went to Hell and back to find us. And in this Banquet He will give us Himself.
The doubtful say that it is impossible that bread and wine should become the Body and Blood of Christ. This is plainly nonsense because if God can raise the dead He can do anything else. It is more unbelievable that in this eating and drinking Jesus will live in us and make us able to share His life, in all of its perfection and beauty.
Jesus gives a moral instruction in these Parables and we cannot escape that. His Word in both the Old and New Testaments still have a claim on our lives. But on Mount Sion, unlike Sinai, God dwells forever with and in His people. This is why we hear that in the City of God are the “souls of the righteous made perfect”. We are made perfect by participation – Jesus shares His life with us by dwelling amongst us, and we share our life with Him by yielding ever more of ourselves to His command. Not fearing the thundering voice, but as a Bride moves in step with the Groom – however awkwardly – in that first dance on the night two become one body and one flesh.
We have not come to Church to be told how to try harder. We have come to the Altar and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.
Amen.
Finally Human 