Luke 14.1-24

Last week we looked at five verses. This week we’re going to hit twenty-four, all at once.

The reason we’re going to see so many is because they all happen in the same place: this whole discussion takes place at a single dinner party.

What makes this dinner party peculiar is that it happens at the home of “a ruler of the Pharisees.” And we see in v. 1 that when he goes to this Pharisee’s house for dinner, “they were watching him carefully.” So you know this is no innocent, friendly party.

One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema takes place in The Godfather. Don Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, has suffered an assassination attempt, so his son Michael invites the head of rival gangster families to dine with him at a local restaurant—presumably, to take his father’s place and to reach a truce. So the rival heads come together at the restaurant. What they don’t know is that Michael has hidden a gun in the toilet. I won’t tell you the rest, in case you haven’t seen it.

The point is that knowing what Michael intends to do by inviting these men to eat with him builds an almost unbearable tension, while they go about eating their food and chatting about other things.

This dinner party that Jesus is invited to is kind of like that, because it takes place at the home of “a ruler of the Pharisees.” And we see in v. 1 that when he goes to this Pharisee’s house for dinner, “they were watching him carefully.” So you know this is no innocent, friendly party. These guys are trying to trap Jesus into saying something which they can use against him, to kill him.

And Jesus is going to do what he always does—he’s going to take advantage of the opportunity he has here, to teach those in attendance something essential about the kingdom of God. He’s going to tell us how citizens of his kingdom should deal with their relationships with other people—and the further he goes, the more he shows us that it’s actually not really about us.

I’m going to summarize each point in a succinct rule.

It all begins when a sick man comes in.

Rule 1: Treat Others As You Would Treat Your Kids (or Your Animals) (v. 1-6)

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One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. 2 And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy.

Anon, 2016. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

The man who came in probably had some kind of edema, in which excess fluid gathers in different parts of the body. This is the last time we see Jesus heal someone on the Sabbath. This time around, we don’t see any of the drama we saw the previous times. It’s a brief encounter, meant to introduce what’s coming.

Rather than seeing the Pharisees make a show of being offended at the idea that Jesus would heal someone on the Sabbath, he asks a simple question.

3 And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” 4 But they remained silent.

It was a brilliant move. If they say yes, then they contradict what they’ve said before. If they say no, then they risk seeming heartless and uncaring—something they have been accused of by this man far too often of late.

So they say nothing, and Jesus does what we know he’ll do. V. 4b:

Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. 5 And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” 6 And they could not reply to these things.

In other words, there is no good reason to consider this poor man as any less important than their own children—and certainly not less important than one of their animals, whom they nevertheless cared for. He was no less worthy or valuable, no less human, than anyone.

So they could say nothing.

Rule 2: Never Take the Best Seat at the Table (v. 7-11)

Now apparently at this point, they all get ready to eat. And some people sit down at the “places of honor.” Imagine you’re eating with a celebrity, someone you admire greatly, and there are lots of people invited. You’re going to want to get as close to that person as possible.

Same thing here. Whether they want to be close to Jesus, or to the master of the house, we don’t know; but they are choosing for themselves the places of honor. So Jesus addresses these people, who were invited to the dinner party.

7 Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, 8 “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, 9 and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit in 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 table with you. 11 For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

This is one of the more well-known parables of Christ, and its meaning is quite plain. But no matter how clear its meaning is, it remains one of the hardest parables to actually put into practice, because it incites us to something which will be a struggle to all of us: humility.

All of us, naturally, are prideful people. Pride manifests itself in two general ways: arrogance (the “I’m awesome and you’re all losers” mentality) and selfishness (the mentality which thinks the world I live in revolves around me). Every single one of us will struggle with both, in some way or another.

You may not be the type of person who thinks much of yourself. You may actually have a pretty low self esteem. But every one of us knows what it’s like to have an opinion about something, to be 100% sure we are right, and to struggle to consider any other possibility. We all know what it’s like to dig in when we should be listening. That’s pride.

And what’s perhaps even more predominant is the “it’s all about me” mentality. Because we are individual human beings who have individual human minds, all of us see the world from our own perspective. We have our own likes, our own fears, our own desires, and whether we want to or not, our natural mode of operation is to build our lives around the things that are important to us. That’s just part of what it means to be human.

But all too often, that aspect of our nature begins to seep out of us in ways that are just unhealthy. Probably the easiest way to see it in our day and culture is in social media. Social media is uniquely engineered to feed our selfish nature, because it is almost always me, posting about me. Even when we post about something else.

[ DIFFERENT SOCIAL MEDIA ILLUSTRATION — ways we take for ourselves honor that doesn’t rightfully belong to us.

Let’s say you hear me say something about humility you really liked, something really quote-worthy, and you decide to post it to Instagram. So you post that quote about humility to Instagram, but in the back of your mind you are well aware of the fact that posting this great quote about humility makes you look really good—you get to prop up someone else (you write my name in the post), but you know that everyone else knows you’re the type of person who would post something like this.

So let’s say you hear that Warren quote about humility, and you decide to post it to Instagram. So you do. But in the back of your mind you are well aware of the fact that posting this great quote about humility makes you look really good. You get a hundred likes on your post, and you love all those likes.

(I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it; but many of us are way too trigger-happy with social media. Maybe before posting that quote, spend some time alone with God—just the two of you—and ask him to help you become the kind of person the quote is talking about.) ]

And social media is far from the only culprit here. Most often, it comes up in simple conversation.

Here’s the point: we all struggle with this. We all struggle with wanting everything to be for us. We all struggle with wanting the place of honor. And we’ll use all kinds of very subtle means to get there.

So what is the solution Jesus gives us?

Don’t look for the place of honor; be the kind of person who looks for ways to honor others.

Many of you know Guillaume Bourin. He’s now a pastor in Canada, but for about a year he and his fiancée (now his wife) were part of our family here at Connexion (Elodie was here for even longer than he was, and he joined her here when he moved back to Paris).

Guillaume and I knew each other well before he ever started coming here.

So you go to your buddies and say, “I think there might be something there. You see how she laughed when I told that joke? You see how she’s dressed today? I think that was for me.” And you all have a laugh about it, and you go on with your lives. It’s the sort of vaguely macho conversation a lot of guys participate in.

Guillaume is a theological beast. He knows his Bible backwards and forwards; he’s extremely intelligent and quick on his feet. In a theological debate he can steamroll just about anyone he’s up against.

But this guy doesn’t take his sister in Christ into consideration. He doesn’t know that she actually has fairly low self-esteem, and has a tendency to doubt herself.

And she hears about this guy bragging to his friends.

She’s taken totally by surprise, because she was unaware that there way anything going on: she just wants to enjoy the friendships of her brothers and sisters. So suddenly she’s doubting herself, and second-guessing all of her relationships with other men in the church—wondering if her being friendly is going to be misinterpreted as flirting, wondering if she’s somehow being inappropriate in the way she talks to men.

In addition, he’s got a lot of influence with a lot of young Christians in our church: he runs #Transmettre and the blog “Le bon combat,” and any time he would come to church people would inevitably come to him with questions for him on various matters in the Bible.

So suddenly she’s doubting herself, and second-guessing all of her relationships with other men in the church—wondering if she can be just friendly with a brother in Christ, or whether he’s going to take it as flirting, wondering if she’s somehow being inappropriate in the way she talks to men.

You see the problem—this “harmless conversation” wasn’t harmless at all. This girl is badly shaken by this (even though she did nothing wrong), all because one guy wanted his friends to think this pretty girl had a thing for him.

Guillaume and I knew each other well before he ever started coming here, and we knew that for the most part, he and I run along the same theological wavelengths; nearly every time we talked theology, we were in agreement.

But not always. And we knew that before he came to church.

So here’s how that could have gone. It would have been easy for Guillaume to come in here and be a part of the church, and have a heavy influencing hand against the pastors of this church, just by answering questions people asked him. He could have maintained his influence by accepting those discussions, especially on matters on which we differ.

But he didn’t do that.

Every time someone asked him a question, and he knew that his answer would be different from mine (or he wasn’t sure what I’d say), he would always respond by saying, “Go ask the elders what they think.” And if he knew that we would be in agreement with whatever he thought, he’d answer the question, and he’d say, “Go ask Jason—I know he’ll say the same thing.”

Do you see what he did? Although he was certainly tempted to seek the place of honor in the context of our church—it was practically handed to him on a silver platter—he resisted it at every turn. He said coming in that he didn’t want any responsibility; he didn’t want to teach or preach; he just wanted to serve the church like anyone else would. And he took every opportunity to defer to us, to give us the places of honor he easily could have taken for himself.

And as a result, I was so impressed and humbled by his behavior here that I tell that story every chance I get.

A lot of people in church talk about “false humility.” We see a Christian do something well, and we give them a compliment for it, and they say, “Oh no, it wasn’t me—it was all God.” And we call that “false humility.”

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Don’t look for the place of honor; be the kind of person who looks for ways to honor others.

It’s amazing to me that in this teaching, Jesus tells us not to exalt ourselves, but to humble ourselves; and the reward he holds forward for us is that if we humble ourselves, we will be exalted. The desire to be exalted is a natural human desire—but there is a right, holy way to seek it.

If this guy really likes this girl, what can he do? He can serve her. He can go to her, and tell her what he thinks of her. He can get to know her, and find ways to encourage her in her doubts, find ways to be a brother for her (and not a boyfriend). And he can keep doing it, even if she tells him she doesn’t feel the same way.

And he says that the best way to seek it is to stop seeking it, but to give it to others.

Now, there’s some truth to that—because whatever it is you did, and no matter how much God helped, you did play a part in that. The Bible describes God as a helper, not as a robot operator. So there’s nothing wrong with saying “Thank you” when someone gives you a compliment.

But true humility is not imagining that God did everything and I did nothing; it’s not imagining that God is awesome and I’m worthless. It’s not even imagining that others are great, and I’m less great than they are.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: (find source) “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”

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Rule 3: Be Good to Those Who Can Do Nothing for You (v. 12-14)

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12 He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. 13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Anon, 2016. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

INVITE THOSE WHO CAN’T REPAY

Rule 4: When God Invites You to Dinner, Go to Dinner (v. 15-24)

All those mentioned before will be among those seated at the great banquet, the great wedding feast.

Again—Jesus is leveling the playing field.

To the lawyers and the Pharisees: the sick are welcome, and will be healed.

To those invited: don’t sit in places of honor

To the master of the house: invite those who can’t repay you

To the man who wants to eat in the kingdom of God: you will either be one of those who refused to come, or one of the needy who was let in late. Which is better?

Treat Others As You Would Treat Your Kids

Dinner party at a Pharisee’s house

Each of the first three parts highlights a different set of people on the outskirts of society: the sick (1), those of low standing (2), those who can’t contribute (3).

Those three are the groups who are invited to the dinner party when no one else wants to come.

What to do with this? No idea.

Treat Others As You Would Treat Yourself

(Although v. 11 seems to be a good application for this whole thing.)

Willing to heal on the Sabbath (v. 1-6)

Love People Who Can Do Nothing for You

When God Invites You to Dinner, Go to Dinner

Take the lowest place (humility) (v. 7-11)

14:7–11 Being honored and avoiding shame are universal human desires. Ever since the first sin of Adam and Eve we have borne guilt and shame (). As a result, much of our behavior is motivated by attempts to earn the praise of others and avoid their rejection. Jesus cuts through this by painting a powerful picture of the foolishness of seeking one’s own honor. Rather than jockeying for position, Jesus teaches and models the way of wise joy—humbling ourselves so that God may exalt us in the proper time (). The image of seating at a wedding feast easily transfers to every aspect of our lives. In all our interactions with others and in every situation we can choose the humble way of considering others as more important than ourselves (). This is counterintuitive until we get a proper vision of the ways of God’s wise kingdom as modeled in Jesus himself. God is opposed to the proud but loves to bless the humble (), and he is faithful to lift us up in his own timing.

Invite those who cannot repay (v. 12-14)

Pennington, J., 2013. Luke. In B. Chapell & D. Ortlund, eds. Gospel Transformation Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, p. 1383.

The “rejected” (?) will be in the kingdom (v. 15-24)