Scripture Guide
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Preaching Commentary
Guests? Or Hosts?
After picking up the first verse of the chapter in order to provide a setting for Jesus’ words, this week’s gospel reading contains two teachings. The first (v. 7-11) is addressed to his fellow guests. The second (v. 12-14) is addressed to his host. Thus, the very structure of this text provides an immediate problem for the preacher: Which of the two teachings do you focus on? (I won’t go so far as to claim it’s impossible to do both, but I think trying to address the whole text from the pulpit will likely result in two sermons being smashed together.)
To the Guests
Jesus observes that the other invited guests “chose the places of honor” (14:7). In Jesus’ day, a banquet like this would have been held with guests reclining around a large u-shaped table. The most honorable places were those at the bottom of the ‘u’, closest to the host.
Jesus suggests that rather than trying to snag a particularly good spot, guests should choose the less honorable positions (Jesus actually says “lowest”). Practically speaking, Jesus explains that this behavior will have the effect of avoiding the potential for shame should one be forced to move down to make space for a more distinguished gets, and allow the potential for public honor, should the host invite you to move up higher.
We don’t recline on dining couches around u-shaped tables, but your congregation knows how this works. If a big group goes out to dinner for someone’s birthday, the choicest spots are in the middle next to or across from the one celebrating. The spots at the end are the worst spots, where you can’t hear and your conversation partners are more limited. A reception with a seated diner works the same way: the closer you are to the table of the bride and groom, the better.
Be cautious here. Going too far down the path of explaining dining customs and seating arrangements and Jesus will give off a "Miss Manners" vibe. This isn’t an etiquette class. Jesus isn’t a cotillion instructor. The gospel will not be preached if all we communicate to our congregations is they shouldn’t take the best seats.
The context matters. On this occasion, Jesus was not attending just any Saturday dinner party. Rather, he was dining at “the house of a ruler of the Pharisees” (v. 1) with other “lawyers and Pharisees” (v. 3) and “they were watching him closely” (v. 1). These are religious leaders, and Jesus knew that the posture of their hearts in a dinner setting was the same as the posture of their hearts out on the street or worshipping in the Temple. It was dinners like this that gave Jesus the raw material for the Parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector in Luke 18:11, which is the summary statement, is notably more about eschatology than etiquette: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (14:11, ESV).
As Luke Timothy Johnson writes,
It is not the appropriate way to get exalted that Jesus addresses, but the frame of mind that seeks exaltation in any fashion. (p. 227; see also the C.S. Lewis quote below)
John Calvin observed that in this passage Christ is
not really speaking of outward and civil modesty…but by a comparison taken from men, he describes what we ought to be inwardly before God.
Our proper humility before God makes it possible for us to be honored at the great wedding feast of the Lamb. There, the Lord will say to us, “Friend, move up higher” (v. 10), but as always our exaltation will be an act of grace, not an act of our own doing. We can’t jockey for a seat at the Lord’s table and any attempt to do so will find us exposed in the end.
Application
Because Jesus’ advice on seating practices is so concrete, it provides an opportunity to the preacher to talk about the difference between true humility and a false humility based on outward appearance. (Think of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.)
If everyone were to take Jesus’ words seriously and begin to fight over the lowest seats, in order to prove their humility as a point of pride, then we’re right back where we started.
Along these lines, Basil wrote that we should not “affect humility by violent contradiction, but rather gain it by condescension or by patience” (quoted in Catena Aurea). By “violent contradiction,” Basil means acting or speaking contrary to our actual social status, what we’ve more recently begun to call the “humblebrag.” Feigned humility is not humility but pride wearing a bad toupee and mustache glasses as a disguise (the internet can provide the preacher plenty of illustrations here, appropriate and amusing for the preaching context). False humility seeks and craves honor; true opens our hearts to receive grace and love.
To the Hosts
“He said also to the man inviting him…” (14:12).
This is a pivot point in the passage. Now Jesus has a different message for the host:
When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you will be repaid. (14:12)
Surely Jesus does not object to having dinner with friends or family. After all, he depended on just such warm hospitality (think Lazarus, Mary and Martha). So let your people off the hook for having a backyard bbq with the neighbors.
This is about the stewardship of our resources and what we get to count as graceful generosity. There is no generosity in commercial exchange – which is what many dinner parties, gala events, and happy hours are about.
Calvin writes,
To perform any act, in the hope of a reward, to rich men from whom we expect a similar return, is not generosity, but a system of commercial exchange.
A clear example in our contemporary world of the thing Jesus is talking is corporate tickets to sporting events. This page from InviteManager (a company that manages corporate tickets for companies) reveals the data behind such ticket use. One of the many breathless claims on that page:
When a business person invites a guest to a game, that guest represents $161,544 in revenue for the company.
So if you get company seats to the ball game, there’s more going on there than generosity. Don’t fool yourself, Jesus says, especially if you’re the host.
But Jesus says something more. He says that instead, you should “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind” to your feast. It’s one thing to work the care of the needy into our charitable giving; it’s quite another to work the care of the needy into our social lives.
Our social lives are usually far less broad than Jesus suggests they should be. John Chrysostom exhorted his hearers to take this literally. Imagining his hearer’s objections that “the poor are unclean and filthy,” Chrysostom responds,
Wash him, and make him to sit with thee at table. If he has dirty garments, give him clean ones. Christ comes to thee through him, and dost thou stand trifling? (quoted in Catena Aurea)
For an illustration, see the story about Jim Haynes below, who seems to have done more or less exactly this.
Now we have some places the preacher can prod, gently:
Take an audit of your own social relationships. How far has the care of the marginalized made it into your own social (not professional!) life? Encourage your hearers to do the same.
How does your church do outreach in a way that builds community and social connection with those you seek to help? What are shining examples? Where might you do better?
Can you reframe hospitality from a social obligation to an opportunity to mirror, however faintly, God’s extravagant love and generosity?
At the end of the passage, Jesus addresses the fear that, as Calvin put it, “whatever is gratuitously bestowed would be lost” Not so. “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (v. 14). Like the first section, the horizon of our behavior stretches into eternity. As always, Jesus is concerned is about the people we will become for all time.
References
Thomas Aquinas. Catena Aurea. https://www.ecatholic2000.com/catena
John Calvin. Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, Vol 2 (trans. William Pringle, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Grand Rapids, MI) https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom32.ii.xxxi.html
Luke Timothy Johnson. Luke. Sacra Pagina vol. 3. Daniel Harrington, ed. (Collegville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991)
Discussion Questions
Have you ever been to an event or party where you could clearly sense the differences in honor accorded to different guests?
What is the difference between humility and self-abasement?
Do you prefer to be the guest at a party or the host at a party? Why? Does your preference suggest anything about which Christian virtues come most naturally to you?
Take a quick mental inventory of your social life. How often the socially marginalized – “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” (v. 13) – show up in your social relations?
How might we increase the types and varieties of people we interact with socially?
As long as we try to be generous in helping people in need, does it really matter if we interact with them on a social level? And if so, why?
Sermon Resources
Key Quotes
- View
The way to rise in the kingdom is to sink in ourselves.
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Today I come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault that makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
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Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.
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Humility is the garden of all the virtues.
Key Illustration
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Welcoming, Hospitality, Parable of the Great Banquet
A man named Jim Haynes died last year at 87 years old, in Paris where he’d lived for decades. Jim Haynes was known as the “man who invited the world over for dinner.” Why? Because for more than 40 years, on Sunday nights he held informal dinners at his home where anyone was invited. People would squeeze into his apartment, shoulder to shoulder, strangers striking up conversations, balancing their dinners on paper plates and reaching over each other to press the plastic spout on a communal box of wine.
Absolutely anyone was invited - all you had to do was call or email and Jim Haynes would add your name to the guest list. No questions asked. At these parties, “there would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities - locals, immigrants, travelers - milled around the small, open-plan (home). A pot of hearty food bubbled on the (stove) and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle.”
At the dinners’ peak, Jim would welcome up to 120 guests, filling up his home and spilling out into the back garden. An estimated 150,000 people came to his dinners over the years he hosted them. “‘The door was always open,’ said Amanda Morrow, an Australian journalist who stayed with Jim for a year-and-a-half. ‘It was a revolving door of guests...Jim never said ‘no’ to anyone.”
Scott Bowerman, Source Material from Vicky Baker, “Jim Haynes: A man who invited the world over for dinner,” BBC News, Jan. 24 2021.