Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
Readings: Ecclesiasticus 10.12-18; Hebrews 13.1-8, 15-16; Luke 14.1, 7-14
Theme: “Friend, move up higher”.
The first reading for the liturgy of the eleventh Sunday after Trinity is taken from the book of Ecclesiasticus and offers some harsh words of warning to the proud. The proud will be utterly destroyed, says its writer, and the Lord will overturn those who rule in this arrogant way and replace them with the lowly. If this sounds somewhat familiar, it may be that you are associating the recurring scriptural pattern of destruction, overthrowing, and replacement with the wonderful hymn of praise uttered by Mary, the mother of Jesus, and recounted in Luke’s gospel, at 1.46-55, on the occasion of the visit to her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. And, you would not be wrong to make this association, because St Luke wants to communicate, throughout his gospel, that the visitation of the messiah to God’s people, Israel, and then by extension to the gentiles, means that the long-awaited overthrowing of the powers of darkness is now at hand with the coming of the messiah, Jesus. Pride, in this context, means all those aspects of ourselves which make us the centre of things and not the Lord. Each one of us has our own biographical story to tell in this regard, as it is part and parcel of our journeys from our old self to a new Self that, through grace, is permitted to share in the new life of the resurrection of Jesus.
The gospel passage from Luke, which we are presented with for this week’s liturgy, reflects on this decentering of ourselves in the form of a parable. This is narrated through the story of the visit of Jesus to the house of a leader of the Pharisees, and it takes place over a meal, which is often the privileged context that Jesus chose to teach his disciples and those around him of the ways of the kingdom of God. The passage recounts the story of the wise one who takes the lowliest place at the wedding banquet, so as to be saved the embarrassment of being asked to give up their place on the arrival of a more important person to the banquet. Rather than adopt the place of honour at such occasions, the passage bids us to take the lowliest place, so that our host may say to us, “Friend, move up higher”. This phrase, ‘friend, move up higher’, is pregnant with meaning on many different levels. It refers to the fact that the one who has come from heaven, who has descended from above, as we might say, is really the one who models this form of humble behaviour of taking the lowliest place and then rising to greater heights. It also refers to the fact that in the act of self-abasement, something divine happens in us. We enter into the dynamic process of (kenotic) self-emptying, which is the path of our re-centering on God.
More broadly, this parable of pride and humility is recounted by St Luke to teach the disciples of the Lord an important lesson about the Christian life. Namely, true followers of Jesus are not self-absorbed precisely because their centre has fundamentally shifted. As the second reading from Hebrews echoes in its caution about the human tendency to love money, it is Jesus who is our centre and not ourselves or our wealth, and this can only happen when we die to self and rise with Jesus into the glory of his resurrection. This transition from the death of pride to the new humble life of the resurrection is not possible to do by human effort alone. We need to be carried, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, over the abyss which separates the egotistical life of sin that we once led, so as to be able to occupy a new land of grace, that we are called to lead. That is, we are called to inhabit the territory of the kingdom of God in which the king, Jesus, is our ruler and the new centre of our lives.
Luke intimates through this gospel passage that Jesus is the one who took his place at the lowest position through his death on the cross, so that the Father would invite him to share in the wedding banquet of his risen glory at the top table. Echoes of the motifs of incarnation, death and resurrection, which permeate the gospels in many places, are clear here and should awaken us to see the symbolic levels of meaning frequently at play in the sacred scriptures beneath the surface of the literal meaning of the text.
This is why closely connected to this somewhat arid movement away from self is the reference, made in the reading from Hebrews, to the fundamental attitude of Christian hospitality. When we make someone welcome, when we are hospitable, we make them the centre and not ourselves. This is how mutual love continues amongst us, as it says in the opening line of the passage from Hebrews. Once this attitude is in place, our charitable work is no longer carried out with a certain sense of pride or of self-importance in what we are doing for others. Such work flows naturally from a simple recognition that because Jesus is our centre, nobody is a stranger, and strangers may even be angels in disguise! Moreover, in a profound sense, we realize that we are interconnected through Jesus. We are part of the one body, the body of Christ.
So, as we contemplate this our calling to live the hospitable life, the Christian life in all of its social dimensions, let us move from the stale-old death of pride to the fresh-new life of humility.
May the risen Lord Jesus send us his Holy Spirit that we may be carried over the baptismal waters of sin and death and into the graced land of his glorious kingdom. Amen.