Saturday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Looks like Jesus has some outstanding practical advice for us today that even I can imagine taking! What a welcome contrast to so many of his other teachings that, honestly, can feel like quite a stretch. When, for instance, Jesus challenges us to give up all our worldly goods to follow him or when he teaches us that obedience to God demands that we love our (supposed) enemy, I am reminded again that following Jesus is really hard. But with Jesus’s advice today, it’s looking pretty easy. So, let’s run through it to make sure we’ve got it right.
So, you’re invited to some important event. It might be a recognition dinner at work, an awards ceremony for faculty and staff, a victory party after a winning season, a 50th wedding celebration for close friends of the family, a holiday sit-down dinner with extended family and friends, or something else. Understanding the significance of the event and deeply aware of your role in helping to bring it about, you step right up to the table and claim a seat next to the main speaker.
But then the host or organizer of the event approaches you. It turns out that an unexpected guest has arrived who is a longtime friend of the speaker. And so, you are asked to vacate your seat. Another is found for you, but it’s all the way at the other end of a long banquet table. Just moments ago, you were set to have the ear of the guest of honor for the duration of the dinner. A fitting recognition of your many contributions and status among others. Now, you just feel irrelevant. A mere spectator. In the back, no less.
With this displacement, you feel discarded, diminished, depleted. What to do?
Jesus has the answer! And it is as simple as it is practical and strategic! A win-win-win! When you enter an event like that, just head for the seat in the back. Never even attempt to take the seat of honor. If you always head for the seat in the back, you’ll never have to worry about the possibility of being embarrassed by a host moving you to the back. Moreover, you will never have to worry about being displaced or diminished. Even better, by sitting in the back you give the host the option to move you up to the front.
And that’s when the strategic part of Jesus’s solution kicks in. By assuming the lowest position, you empower the host to confer upon you a higher position. That makes your host feel good because it affirms that they are running the show and because it empowers them to be magnanimous which, if they choose to go that way, also makes them feel good.
As for you, it makes you look magnanimous too. Instead of taking up the coveted spot, which might be seen as presumptuous, you take up the lowly spot and look great! Generous, self-sacrificing, not full of yourself, humble.
So, very practical advice here from Jesus with some strategic benefits as a bonus!
Great! But what about that closing line: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Hmm. That doesn’t sound like practical advice. That sounds like Kingdom of God talk. Or, perhaps better put, that sounds like the kind of upside down logic at the heart of the Kingdom.
A worldly kingdom is all about status. A proper worldly kingdom has a king, of course, and a court and subjects, and they are all arranged in a neat and tidy hierarchy. Everyone knows their rightful place based on their status in the kingdom structure. And, if they’re smart, they don’t mess with that highly ordered structure.
And then there is the Kingdom to which we are called.
If Jesus were speaking specifically to our times, I can imagine him saying something like, “Sure, you can go with the kingdom of the world and seek to be exalted, whether that’s in your job or on social media or even just among your friends. But you need to understand that that is not my way. I am God, yet I found my seat in the back by going to the cross. How about you find your seat in the back . . . with me?”
Practical advice, to be sure. And a whole different way of being to go with it. Amen.
-Susan Trollinger