Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary
Preaching well from this week’s gospel reading (Luke 14: 1, 7-14) requires preachers to stay alert to the specific social customs and circumstances that provoke Jesus’ teaching on this occasion. More than any other gospel, Luke presents Jesus’ ministry as filled with table scenes and table-related teachings. In today’s text, we find Jesus at a Sabbath-day dinner at a Pharisee’s home. That he is invited is surprising; his relationship with at least some Pharisees is tense now, due to two recent, audacious Sabbath-day healings (Lk 6:6-11 and 13:10-17). As if to emphasize the conflict, Jesus heals yet again on the way to dinner (14:2-6). At the meal, the one watched becomes the watcher: what Jesus sees taking place prompts him to challenge the widely accepted, taken-for-granted practice of choosing prime seats at the table, thus reinforcing one’s social status. Jesus urges precisely the opposite: take the lowly seats. As the attendees gasp, Jesus turns to his host and proposes that, for the next dinner party, the guest list should privilege the poor, the lame, and the blind (vv 12-14).
None of us are strangers to the human penchant for positioning ourselves in close proximity to notable persons at a public event or private party. Typically, on arriving at a wedding reception in the U.S., one receives a place card. Finding a low table number on one’s card is flattering indeed. This is taken as an indication of how intimately one knows the families of bride or groom. Yet, if we preach this text as if Jesus is just sidling up to us with a gentle reminder to be less “full of ourselves” in such situations, both we and our listeners will have missed entirely Jesus’ world-reordering purpose.
The behavior Jesus advises—voluntarily taking the lowest seat at the table—would, in this context, be unthinkable. Were these sagely rabbis and their close friends to begin behaving as Jesus suggests, onlookers would think them unhinged. Indulging in the self-effacing, alternative social behavior Jesus commends here would utterly upend the widely accepted, ancient rules by which one’s standing in the community was established, throwing into chaos the ranking system on which they depended.
Yet v 11 makes clear that wreaking havoc for its own sake is not Jesus’ aim. Here, Jesus invokes an eschatological perspective by his use of passive verbs that suggest divine exaltation or humbling (“will be humbled,” “will be exalted”). It will be those who, in this life, are lowly to begin with, or who deliberately relinquish privilege and entitlement, whom God will exalt at the end of time.
As so often in Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ teaching here challenges our human preoccupation with gaining wealth, power, and social status and explodes the notion that any of these confer security. Jesus watches our striving, our climbing, and our competing and then bids us embrace behaviors that, in effect, “break the machine.” The ways of the reign of God deconstruct and reconstruct our norms and redirect our striving. Yet, breaking free of this world’s ranking systems is not an end in itself; it is for the sake of others’ thriving. Time is short; Jesus is drawing steadily closer to Jerusalem to face the final days of his ministry. At the last, he will give himself over, utterly and entirely, to the systems of power he has challenged. They will imagine they have destroyed him; yet death will not finally hold him. Jesus’ rising shall vindicate his vision of true power and thus reveal the true nature of God.
Insights into Biblical Greek Grammar and Syntax 