Gotta hold on to our place in the social hierarchy, the food chain of money and status and looking cool.
In today's gospel reading, Jesus is invited to a banquet and notices how the guests are jockeying for the best seats at the table, the best positions in the social hierarchy. What he offers them is something like a New Yorker cartoon, a parody of their own self-serving strategies to gain a higher status.
Flannery O'Connor, the Southern, Christian writer, was once asked why her characters were so grotesque. She replied that you had to paint large, grotesque figures for the blind to see. She said we are largely blind to the assumptions that we live by and that drive our behavior. She fashioned grotesque characters and violent plots to wake us up to who we are and what we are truly concerned with. Her stories shock, but they also reveal. She was doing in her stories what Jesus does in this gospel passage today.
Like Flannery O'Connor, Jesus is holding up a mirror to the folks at the party, exposing the self-serving way their minds work.
And he offers them a ludicrous, non-starter of a strategy for gaining the edge on everyone else at the party. He suggests playing humble in the hope of winning big for all to see. Don’t head for the best place at table, take the lowest one, pretend to be humble, and then the host will reward you by inviting you up higher.
It’s a questionable strategy, and you’d have to be pretty obsessed with your own advancement in the food chain to even try it.
You could lose big time. Instead of inviting you higher, the host could end up saying, "Well, I see you've found your rightful place." Or you could end up enjoying the riff-raff at the lower end of the table so much that, when the host does invite you higher, you decline because you're having so much fun.
So Jesus' strategy is a questionable one, and if the guests entertain it even for a moment, they are exposed, busted for the status whores that they are. It suddenly becomes clear that what is driving them is their own insatiable drive for status.
In exposing them in this way, Jesus is inviting them to something deeper, something more real. To find their dignity, their deepest joy, not in their place on the food chain, but somewhere else.
When we know we’re infinitely loved by the Creator of the Universe it really doesn’t matter where we sit at somebody’s dinner party. Or if we even invited. There is great freedom in not having to worry about those things. We find that our dignity doesn't depend on that stuff, but on something deeper, on our being loved and cherished by God. And that is something no one can take from us.
Our hearts are centered somewhere else, our treasure lies somewhere else. Maybe this is what St. Paul meant when he wrote:
But whatever gain I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.
These are the words of a man who has really found something, something more important than where he happens to be in the social hierarchy and in the eyes of others.
In addition to advice for the guests, Jesus has some advice for his host:
When you give a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or 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.
He’s calling out the “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine” approach to dinner parties . He’s revealing that this host’s guest list is not just about the host’s extravagant generosity, but about reinforcing the social hierarchy and ensuring his own place in it.
Once again, he is holding up a mirror so the host can see himself and the game of social posturing and hypocrisy he’s caught up in.
This past week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s life-changing “I Have a Dream” speech. Maybe today’s parable sheds light on what we Americans celebrated there...
What if America was a banquet, and at this banquet the servings were fair wages, just trials, civil rights and liberties, but only certain people were invited? According to those who “March(ed) on Washington,” this was exactly the case. Blacks were simply not invited to that feast and they have had to struggle to receive the same opportunities as whites, the same level of respect, and equal rights.
Blacks’ experience of slavery, the most recent verdict in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman situation, and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act--these things show the struggle persists because our corporate and political leaders go to great lengths to keep the social hierarchy intact, to tightly control the guest list to the banquet, to keep a place of privilege for whites.
White privilege. The writer Tim Wise, who happens to be white, gives a few examples of it from various studies, including some from the Justice Department.
- Job applicants with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a call-back for a job interview than applicants with black-sounding names, even when all job-related qualifications and credentials are the same.
- White men with a criminal record are more likely to get a call-back for an interview than black men who don’t have one, even when all the qualifications, demeanor, and communication styles are the same.
- White women are far more likely than black women to be hired by temp agencies, even when the black women have more experience and are more qualified.
- In the housing market, there are about two million cases of race-based discrimination against people of color every year in the US. That’s not just bad for folks of color; the flipside is that there are, as a result, millions more places I can live as a white person. White privilege.
- Or consider criminal justice. Although whites are equally or more likely than blacks or Latinos to use drugs, people of color (blacks and Latinos mostly) comprise about 90 percent of the persons incarcerated for drug possession.
- And although white men are more likely to be caught with drugs in our cars (if we are even searched), black men remain about four times more likely to be searched in the first place.
- And as the war drums start to beat yet again, it is black and Latino kids, their moms and dads and families, that will pay the heaviest price.
That’s privilege for the dominant group. It is far from Dr. King’s dream that we remembered this last week, that we not be judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.
Jesus seemed to feel more comfortable at a different kind of banquet than the kind he was invited to in today’s gospel, the kind we seem to have in this country. He loved to have dinner with whores and tax collectors and known public sinners. And as a devout Jew he looked for the day when all people of every tribe and nation would feast in the kingdom of God, where everyone would have a place, no one would be excluded.
And, like Jesus, we look with hope to that day, too, and re-commit ourselves to bringing it about, and celebrate it, as it were, in advance, every time we gather at this table, where everyone has a place and no one is excluded.
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