Humility is Not Ambition in Disguise

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The lectionary Gospel passage for this coming Sunday is Luke 14:1, 7-14; it is yet another example of editors attaching spectacularly terrible headings to pericopes of scripture— in this case: Invite the Poor to Your Banquet. No matter what the publishers would have you believe, this passage is gospel, not law— a word of sheer gift, not another demand added to your ledger.

At this juncture in Luke, Jesus has just named Herod — and the forces of death with him — a fox. And he has named himself our Mother Hen, making us — pay attention — the brood sheltered beneath her wings. That image is not incidental; it’s a preview of what Jesus is about to do to death.

It is a prediction of what Jesus is going to do to death.

In the very next scene, Jesus, as he’s wont to do, offends his dinner companions by healing a man with dropsy on the sabbath. “Which of you,” Jesus asks the Pharisees and lawyers, “having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” When they stare at the floor, bested, Jesus presses the matter by spinning a parable about a wedding banquet. At the story’s end, with a quiet voice that carries its own authority, he says:

“When you are invited to a wedding feast, don’t take the best seat. Someone more important than you might come, and the host will tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Move down,’ and you’ll shuffle off in shame to the lowest place. Instead, go sit in the lowest seat, so when the host sees you there, he’ll say, ‘Friend, come up higher,’ and you’ll have glory in the sight of everyone. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

And we hear it wrong every time.

Invite the Poor to Your Banquet

We hear “humble yourself,” and we think Jesus is handing us a strategy — that the way to climb the ladder is to start on the bottom rung, as if humility were just another form of ambition in disguise. In other words, we mistakenly believe Jesus is exhorting us to manufacture humility; such that, the gospel is ultimately ordered to merit and demerit after all.

But Jesus isn’t handing out homework.

The key to the parable is the image which preceded it: Christ sheltering her brood beneath her wings agains the onslaught of Death.

The point is death.

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