Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: Hebrews 13: 1-8 and 15-16; Luke 14: 1 and 7-14
The question of reserved seats in churches has always been a difficult one. It should be the case that everyone in church has equal status; all beloved children of God made in his image; all sinners who fall short. So all should receive equal treatment when they enter a church building.
But in practice, this isn’t the case. Were you or I to turn up for a royal wedding, unless we had an invitation we wouldn’t get in. And yet a church wedding is a public act of worship. Turn up for the annual Civic Service at Worcester, for example, and a whole section of seats would be reserved for those representing the council and the judiciary. We would have to take our seat much further back. I don’t envy sidespeople and stewards on those occasions, having the task of telling people that as you haven’t got the correct ticket you can’t sit there.
In many churches, especially larger ones, there are seats or indeed boxes for the Mayor of that town, complete with the appropriate coats of arms. In other churches you may find old pews with the words ‘free seats’ or something similar inscribed on them, indicating that not all seats were free. Social standing has, sadly, always been a feature of church life, and especially in the Church of England. A friend of mine was dismayed to find, when he became a vicar in Kent, that the parish boasted a ‘Senior Wives’ Group.’ How ghastly does that sound?
It’s all a long way from Jesus of Nazareth. In the section of Luke’s gospel we are following on Sundays at the moment, Jesus courts controversy wherever he goes, it seems. Last week, he healed on the Sabbath. In a couple of weeks’ time the scribes and Pharisees grumble because he goes into the home of sinners and eats with them. And today, he notices how guests in the house of the Pharisee chose the places of honour. You or I might just accept that this is how it is, but Jesus immediately challenges this social convention.
But, challenging though the parable is, there may be a hidden message as well. Throughout the new testament, and indeed in the old testament too, God’s kingdom is often likened to a feast, or a banquet, or a wedding. Jesus gives other parables or pieces of teaching about wedding feasts; who does and doesn’t get in; how ready one should be for the occasion. In this parable today, he does say ‘Don’t sit at the top table’, but the teaching also seems to be a warning. The religious people, the hierarchy, the establishment, thought they were the favoured ones – Israel being God’s chosen race. But their behaviour and manipulation of the Law for their own ends was alienating them from God. Pride comes before a fall. So he might have been addressing his remarks to the Pharisee who had invited him, or to all those present, but he was also challenging the Israel of his day.
But, since Jesus Christ ‘is the same yesterday and today and for ever’ – as that verse in Hebrews says – it is right that we apply Jesus’ practical message to our own day and circumstances. Contemplate how often, even unconsciously, we divide people up between those to bother with or not. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of talking to somebody but becoming aware that their attention has wandered to somebody standing behind us who they seem more interested in. Now I’m sure not many of us ‘pull rank’ at social events; most of us haven’t much rank to pull, but we all stand on our dignity at times, even if it is only to say ‘well, I sit here’ when we find someone in our favourite place. Or perhaps you have sympathy with a former Bishop of London who objected to the seat he’d been allocated at some function or other. ‘Comes to something’, he growled, ‘when I’m given a back seat in my own diocese.’ Jesus would probably have thought that quite a good outcome! In contrast, I recall another bishop who would almost apologetically introduce himself when he went into a certain office in Church House, Westminster, imagining that no-one would have heard of him!
Simone Weil, the Christian French philosopher, who died in 1943, talked about the need for every Christian to ‘decreate.’ Simone Weil said that the essential fact about the Christian virtues – in her words ‘what lends them a special savour of their own’ – is humility. For her, the heart of Christian obedience is the content to be the last, the willing acceptance of ‘the lowest place’. This abolition of the ego goes against the grain, I imagine, in all of us. John Pridmore notes that according to St. Paul, for the Greeks humility was a vice, not a virtue. But no doubt Simone Weil had Paul’s famous words from Philippians 2 in mind, which tell us that Christ, although in the form of God, emptied himself, assuming the nature of a servant.
When one considers some of the most difficult teachings of Jesus, such as the instruction to leave self behind, to take up the cross; to take the lowest seat; to which we might add freeing ourselves from the love of money as Hebrews instructs, we might think it all a pretty impossible ethic to maintain. But, of course, that was just how Jesus lived.
Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 to a Jewish family from Alsace. Poor health beset her for most of her short life – she died when she was 34, but she devoted herself to political activism, taking the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and working for the Free French Government in exile in Britain during World War Two when she was here. She had a deep mystical experience in 1938, but said “I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word.” She more or less starved herself and died from cardiac failure. After her mystical experience she tried to emulate the sufferings of Jesus.
John Pridmore, again, says that ‘she was one of those very rare Christians indeed, who, believing that what Jesus teaches is true, did what he said.” An Archdeacon said to Pridmore, “Simone Weil was a saint, but totally barking, of course.” Voicing aloud what most people acknowledge, that you would need to be sectioned if you took Jesus at his word and lived the way he said we should in every detail.
For the author of the letter to the Hebrews, ‘the lowest place’ is ‘outside the city’ – the place where Christ died. The radical renunciation required of the Christian believer is the abandonment of all the security; the material comforts and institutional privileges that most people naturally consider important.
Even if we find this an impossible challenge, we have practical directives from both readings today to point us to a less self-centred way of life: Go and sit down at the lowest place…..don’t invite your rich neighbours to a dinner in case you might be invited back, but invite the poor…..Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers…..Remember those in prison as if you were there…..remember those being tortured as though you were being tortured……be content with what you have.
‘Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Consider how many times Jesus makes this point in his teachings, parables and actions. It’s all about true Christian love; considering the well-being of another before your own; giving to those we love without expectation of receiving anything in return; loving without demanding we are paid; loving freely without terms and conditions.
I was reminded of the words of a hymn about humility that I haven’t sung for many decades, written by John Bunyan, who, by a curious coincidence, died on this day in 1688:
He that is down needs fear no fall, he that is low no pride
He that is humble ever shall have God to be his guide.
I am content with what I have, Little be it or much;
And, Lord, contentment still I crave / Because thou savest such.
Fullness to such a burden is / that go on pilgrimage;
Here little, and hereafter bliss / is best from age to age.