Learning humility

Luke 14.7-14

This is not just a passage offering advice about weddings and dinner parties.

It is good advice - which I spectacularly ignored at a major civic function at Bury St Edmunds when I was there. As vicar of the civic church, I expected to be on one of the higher tables. I waltzed in with someone and walked up to one of the higher tables, not the highest – I knew I wasn’t on that – but my name wasn’t there. So, I then had to casually walk past the other tables pretending that I wasn’t looking at the names, until I reached the table where my name appeared.  It would have been so much less humiliating if I had started at the bottom and worked my way up!

Peter Bruegel the elder. A Peasant wedding

This story that Jesus tells is an illustration of one of the old Proverbs of Isael. “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here’, than to be put lower in the presence of a noble” (Proverbs 25:6).

But it is more than advice for a wedding party.

It is about the heart. How we see ourselves and how we see others and how we see God.

The key verse is, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:11)

This is a major theme in Luke’s gospel; a theme that is announced in the Magnificat, the song Mary sings when she is told she is to be the mother of the Son of God.

“God scatters the proud in the imagination of their conceit. He casts down the mighty from their thrones… He sends the rich away empty”.

But he does this in love: He casts down so that – if in our humbling we turn to him - he can lift us up. He empties us of the riches of this world so that – if we turn to him - he can fill us with himself and the things of the Kingdom.

 So these stories in Luke 14 are the Magnificat in mini.

The person who chooses not the lower, if you note, but the lowest seat, the seat that others would be ashamed to take or be given, not through some inverted pride or false humility, but because they genuinely want all others to have more honour than themselves, will be lifted up.

Augustine is quoted as saying, “The way to rise is to begin by descending. You plan a tower that shall pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”

 

So how do we learn to humble ourselves?

1.      Learn to take the lowest seat

The world is obsessed with honour.

I’m sure you recall the great sketch with John Cleese and two Ronnies. ‘I am upper-class. I am middle-class. I am lower-class’. The upper-class man looks down on the middle- and lower-class men. The middle-class man looks up to the upper-class man and down on the lower-class man. And the lower-class man simply says, ‘I know my place’.

We are obsessed with honour and status and respect.

That is why these guests are trying to get the higher seat. It is not just a question of honour. If you are sitting at the right table, then you will be sitting with the sort of guests who will be able to help you to get on.

In the world’s economy, honour or ‘respect’ is out there to be grasped, like a seat at a banquet.

And it is a zero-sum game.
If I am seated higher, then you are seated lower than me.  

And honour can be obtained – through, for instance, service or rank or charitable giving. We have an honours system. We call our MPs honourable, and our clergy reverends – revered ones. And in some cultures, if you don’t show the right respect to another, it can be very dangerous.

So when Jesus says, ‘take the lowest seat’, the seat that others would be ashamed to be seen in, he is not saying, think of yourself as of lower status than anyone, but simply, don’t play that game.

You do not need to. If you are a Christian, if you have received the Lord Jesus, if you are growing in him, then you are a chosen and beloved and forgiven child of God. You know where you have come from, and you know where you are going. You know who is with you in the crises, and who will provide for you what you need. And you have nothing to prove – not to your parents, your community, your family or yourself.

And the lowest seat holds no shame for you. Indeed, Jesus came and freely chose the lowest of the lowest seats – on the cross. He came, as he said, not to be served but to serve. He is the master who, when he finds his servants waiting for him, strips off his clothes and waits on them. The paradox of Christianity is that the lowest place, the cross, is the place that is lifted up.

And as people who are willing to take the lowest seat, we do not need to invite to our dinner parties those who can do good to us: who will offer us a return invitation, sparkling conversation, patronage, or boasting rights.

Professor Slughorn is a character in the Harry Potter novels. He puts on dinner parties, but he only invites those who are important or have connections. They are like trophies to put up on the wall.

And as people, willing to sit at the lowest seat, we are free to invite the forgotten and those with no status: ‘the poor, crippled, lame blind’.

 

2.      Learn to look at other people with the right eyes

We are called to see people, whoever they are, even ‘the poor, crippled, blind, lame’, as human beings created in the image of God with the same potential as you or me to be sons and daughters of God in the likeness of Christ.

Look at your neighbour (Don’t actually look at them – that is very embarrassing!).

The world begins by seeing them in terms of rank (she/he is or was a CEO, a professor, a general, a bishop) or age or beauty or skin colour or sex or how they are dressed and what that says about them.

But as Christians we are challenged not to look at the outside but called to look deeper

So, for instance, James writes that if a rich person comes into church, we are not to show them more honour than if a poor person walks in. It might be good for our church’s bank balance, but it is not good for our church’s soul. We are judging them by what appears on the outside.

We are called to look deeper – to what is inside, to the God spark that is within them, the God image that is in them. It is that image which, if we allow God to take us and mould us, shapes us to be the person that he made us to be, with our unique desires and abilities and experience. 

And if we look deeper we will discover that each person – even the greatest bore who drones on about something that we find so dull, or about themselves and what they have achieved – if looked at from God’s perspective - is amazingly fascinating.

And we are called to honour others in the right way.

I have been struck by how often the word honour appears in the wedding service. We are called to ‘love, comfort, honour and protect the other’. We ‘honour’ them with our body. We honour them in public and in private. On the street, in the bedroom, in the office, in the lounge or kitchen. It is so important. We honour them in the little ways, by not taking them for granted, by saying please and thank you and sorry. And we honour them in big ways, by lifting them up.

But this is not just for the marriage relationship.

It is so important in all our relationships.

Paul writes in Romans 12, ‘Outdo one another in showing honour’.

The competition is not how much honour I can grasp for myself, but how much honour can I give.

I have to confess that I struggle with this.

I pray that God will help me begin to see the other as he sees them. And that I will see that person who I assess as insignificant, unattractive, boring, who cannot help advance my interests or my projects, as he sees them: as someone created in his image who matters eternally.

 

3.      Look at God with the right eyes 

God is the God who did take the lowest place, who does see us as we really are and who loves to lift up.

The passage ends with a lowering and a raising up.

“But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14:13-14)

It begins with us being willing to take the lowest seat, being bigger than the culture that grasps for honour or status, and becoming a servant to those who, in this world’s terms, have nothing to offer us. And it ends with the resurrection.

And behind all of this, the passage points us to the ultimate lowering and lifting up.

We think of Jesus, who left heaven to come to earth for us. He emptied himself and took the lowest place on the cross. He experienced the shame of the cross. There was no honour in the world’s eyes there. And he dies for us, for our forgiveness.

But God lifted him up. He raised him from the dead. He exalted him on high. And he has given him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.