Whose Banquet?

To set the scene for today’s Gospel, imagine a large U-shaped table with attendees reclining forward, with the host and guest of honor at opposite corners so they don’t have to turn their necks sideways to speak to each other. Perhaps they’re already reclining, but the rest of the guests are jockeying with each other, in increasingly louder tones, for seating within earshot or eyesight of the host and guest of honor. Jesus apparently is still standing around observing the seating competition, but then raises his voice —

— When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Now everybody stops and looks at him. Some scholarly Jews might well note that he’s paraphrasing today’s Old Testament reading from Proverbs: “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.” Some of the attendees might be reconsidering their strategy; maybe they should plop themselves down as far from the host and guest of honor as possible. But that would probably be too obvious, so then everybody finally settles down at that U shaped table.

Having commanded everybody’s attention, Jesus himself might have been told, Friend, move up higher closer to the host. Perhaps Jesus took the opportunity to tell the host: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 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.”

One could decide that Jesus is just reminding them of that pithy proverb, or anticipating Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has inspired both Warren Buffet and Charles Manson. But Luke tells us that Jesus was telling a parable, best defined by the British scholar C.H. Dodd as: a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.

If Jesus is doing more than advising us on how to win friends and influence people to do what we want them to, the first clue to the meaning of Jesus’s parable goes back to Dodd’s classic book, The Parables of the Kingdom. That’s the kingdom of God, the first thing we acknowledge in The Holy Eucharist — And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen. So, to understand Jesus’s parables of the kingdom we need to imagine how, in a world of sovereign rulers, it is God alone who is fully sovereign.

And what might Jesus’s parable today tell us about God being sovereign in the thing we perhaps most like to do together, eating? We might remind ourselves that when we get together for Christian fellowship as the people of God, for all of our planning and hosting and honoring, there is in truth one host and one guest of honor: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit having blown us together and breathing one spirit of peace, love and joy through all of us.

There is the Jewish tradition of Elijah’s chair, representing the presence of Israel’s great prophet who didn’t die but was taken up to heaven. I almost wonder if every gathering of the Church should have an empty chair, not to symbolize God’s absence, but to remind us of God’s presence, and of who our host and guest of honor really is. And if God is the host of our banquets, then we need to remember that it is God who sends out the invitations, and that all of the guests are equal before God. There are no hierarchies of wealth, success, seniority, or status.

What Jesus tried to tell the host, and all of the guests, is that in God’s kingdom, it is not our banquet. It is God’s banquet where all are invited and of equal honor.

August 31st, 2025

12th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 17, Year C

The Rev. David Kendrick