Dear Sisters, dear brethren, my paternal grandfather had a well-developed Black countryman’s typically dark sense of humour. One of his sayings passed down in the family was: ‘The one who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be humbled even more.’ Had you known him you would have understood that there was no irreverence meant by this. Instead, what he meant was that there is no justice in this world, and that it is vain to expect it. Those who lust after the admiration and envy of others will, sooner or later be utterly humiliated, since as the Book of Proverbs tells us: ‘pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ And as a former MP of this constituency once famously wrote: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs..’ Indeed. That is the nature of human affairs. History generally shows this to be true. Think of some of those leaders of nations who have come near to achieving world domination, only to fall into disaster or oblivion. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte – at one time each seemed to be on the verge of controlling the known world, but not only did they all fail, but failed in a devastatingly humiliating way: Alexander conquered more of the ancient world than anyone before or since, yet died broken by disease while still only 32 years of age; Caesar succeeded in gaining sole control of the Roman Republic only to be assassinated by his former friends; Napoleon stormed through all Europe easily overthrowing kings and armies until defeated first by the terrible Russian winter and finally by Wellington at Waterloo. Of course there are others who may have managed to die while enjoying some success, but even many of those will have feared for their successors or for their own reputation in history.
And from a merely human point of view, self-abasement will never win any approval from others, but only contempt. So, for instance, if you do not seek to defend your own rights, be certain that nobody else will do so unbidden on your behalf. And there is a remarkable witness to this in the form of one of our Lord’s parables: the importunate widow and the unjust judge. The widow wears down the judge’s apathy by constantly demanding that he give her justice against her enemy. He admits that he couldn’t care less about the woman, or even about justice, but resolves to give her what she repeatedly demands of him simply to get her off his back. The widow understands that if she doesn’t keep on at the judge, she will never get what she wants. If she were simply to retire quietly and wait for justice, it would clearly never arrive.
But in all this we are looking at human life and human nature in its brokenness, without God. That is where we should never make the mistake of expecting success without some effort, and even then success is hardly guaranteed. As in many recent passages we have heard in the Sunday Gospel readings, what our Lord has to say in today’s Gospel is quite different from anything human experience could show. We should not only not look for worldly success and admiration, but actively despise it; not in a way that suggests contempt for human relations, but rather in a way that seeks to find the place our Lord wants us to choose. Why does He tell us to go to the lowest place? Well, He says it is so that we can be moved to a higher place and so be exalted in the eyes of our fellow guests. Were it simply as a way of seeking human respect, then that would surely miss the entire point. So that cannot be our Lord’s true meaning. Think of it in this way: our Lord frequently used imagery in his parables drawn from banquets and wedding feasts. This is what He is doing here. He is thinking of the banquet as a symbol of the eternal wedding feast of heaven. In heaven God will honour those who have humbled themselves for love of Him here on earth, and honour them in a way which will win the righteous admiration of the saints in heaven, not the empty admiration of people on earth.
Of course, Our Lord said this in the context of an actual historical meal at which he was a guest along with many others, and so He used this context to explain what He meant by humility leading to honour in God’s sight. At that meal were many of our Lord’s critics, men who sought honour among themselves and vied with each other for top place, thereby also seeking to prove themselves of higher status than their neighbours. They were watching Him, says St Luke, clearly because they saw Him as an outsider who said and did uncomfortable things. Indeed on this very occasion, just before the words we have heard were spoken, our Lord had healed a sick man in the midst of these guests, and as it was a Sabbath Day, this was a dangerous thing for Him to have done. The other guests would all have been highly critical of our Lord for healing on the Sabbath, since that counted as ‘work’, the doing of which was forbidden by the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day.
So it is that although He is a guest at this house and at this meal, our Lord is, from the very outset, seen as an outsider and indeed almost as an outlaw, accused of breaking the fourth commandment as though He were superior to it. Of course, we know that He is not superior to God’s commandments, for He is their embodiment as well as their interpreter. He understands them in a different way from us, and wants us to understand them in the same way as He does. In particular, He wants us to understand that the Sabbath is a time for God’s restorative power to be poured out on our sinful, sick natures to make them whole and holy. We come to Him on this day, the Lord’s day, in all humility, so that we may beg for His mercy, knowing ourselves to be unworthy of it. In this way we humble ourselves, for if we thought we were indeed deserving of God’s grace we should altogether fall short of ever getting it. Our Lord reminds us of this danger in yet another parable, that of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the Temple. And indeed, at the end of that parable He quotes the same conclusion that we have just heard: ‘the one who exalts himself will be humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.’ So it is easy to see how important this lesson is for us to grasp since our Lord lays so much emphasis on it.
In urging His audience to take the lowest place, Our Lord wants them to be like Himself, the embodiment of humility. Then He goes one step further by telling His host and His fellow guests not to invite to their banquets those who can repay their generosity in this life. What gain would there be in that when our lives are finally ended? When we stand before God, will it be of any use that during our lives we have given banquets to those who have invited us back? Surely it is better for us to invite those who cannot repay our generosity! Why? Because it will not be for them to repay us anyway, but the only One who can truly repay with justice and who can truly outdo us in generosity: God Himself. Our Lord is not telling us never to entertain our friends and relations. He is rather telling us that it is by our generosity to the needy that we make ourselves ready to receive a place in His presence with all the saints at the eternal banquet of heaven. There all the chosen will be God’s guests. We will be the ones, all unworthy as we are, the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, made rich by grace, healed from our sins that cripple us, given sight that takes away the blindness of pride and stubbornness, that will be welcomed by God the Father and by His Son into the company of all the angels and saints.
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