22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

In ancient times, banquets served a very practical purpose. Lacking any form of refrigeration, people in ancient times needed to consume perishable food stuffs before they went bad. If a whole beast was slaughtered, it would have to all be consumed within a few days. Banquets served the practical purpose of helping a family to distribute an over-supply of perishable food in a manner that would ensure their own food security at a later date. This is why people would normally invite those they knew would be able to reciprocate. Inviting family and friends who had the economic means to reciprocate guaranteed a return on the investment of the family’s own outlay of capital to host the banquet. So in a very crude way, banquets were a way of spending and “banking” food capital by transforming it into social capital which one hoped would one day translate back into food capital.

So if banquets were so transactional, how then did Jesus find himself invited, when, as an itinerant preacher, he would have had no way to reciprocate and host a banquet himself? The answer to this question lies in realizing that banquets were also a manner of transacting in social capital. Banquets were an ostentatious affair in Jesus’ time, seeing as many people lacked ample space in their own homes to welcome guests, often the banquets were held in the village square, where those who had made the cut and got an invitation to dine would be on display to all the village. There would ensue an intricate game of social jostling and positioning to get the places of honour at the table, and thereby assert one’s own prestige, not only to the other invited guests, but to the whole community.

One suspects that Jesus, as the hottest thing in town, the celebrated miracle worker and charismatic preacher would have often found himself elevated to the place of honour. By gracing the banquet with his presence, he would confer social status on his host and all those who were present at the banquet. This was how he would effectively “pay” for his seat at the table. I suspect that he would have been deeply uncomfortable with the dynamics of such a game, with the elitism on display, and would not have revelled in this earthly glory. So Jesus resolves to use his place at the position of honour to undercut the transactional nature of this whole system that got him there in the first place. Hence his exhortation to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind who would not be able to repay the host by reciprocating the invitation one day.

The gospel we have heard read today skips over what happens at the banquet just before Jesus tells his parable. There is a man that Jesus sees who had a withered hand, and Jesus resolves to cure him, even though doing so would contravene the prohibition against doing work on the Sabbath. Given that this man’s sickness would have rendered him ritually impure in the sight of the Pharisees, it is highly unlikely that he was a guest at this banquet hosted by one of the rulers of the Pharisee’s sect. We can therefore infer that this banquet was held outside the Pharisee’s house, perhaps in the courtyard, where there may have been a group of local villagers, including some of the village outcasts, the poor, the crippled and the lame gathered about to witness from a distance this great banquet. When Jesus makes his exhortation, he may well have been pointing to this group of people telling his host these are the people who should have been his guests. But exhorting his disciples to invite those who can confer on them no additional social status, Jesus is inviting his disciples to take the path of humility and to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the rat race to reach the top of the social ladder.

Jesus therefore counsels his disciples to take the lowest seats at a dinner in order to be seen by the host of the dinner and then raised up to a higher seat. Now this advice may seem to us like a contrived strategy to gain an ego boost. Nothing is so pretentious as false modesty, so surely Jesus can’t be counselling us towards behaviour that is akin to fishing for compliments. So how are we to take on board this teaching of Jesus? What does it mean to be truly humble? Some people think that being humble involves refusing to accept compliments and being as self-deprecating as possible. Paradoxically, refusing compliments can be a hidden form of pride. Refusing to acknowledge one’s own giftedness is ultimately a refusal to acknowledge the giver of the gift who is God. Wilfully under-rating one’s own talents, either to elicit compliments from others, or to attain some mis-guided notion of humility is a very self-centred act that ignores the generosity of God. True humility is seeing oneself as one really is – in other words seeing yourself as God sees you. Obviously, we cannot have direct access to how God sees us, but the more time we spend in God’s presence, through prayer, the more we come to see ourselves as God sees us.

Antony De Mello’s definition of prayer is “Behold God beholding you and smiling.” This is why people who are deeply prayerful are also deeply humble. If we are able to see God smiling at us, we will be less tempted to blow our own trumpet. We will be happy to allow others to blow our trumpet for us, knowing that it is not really all about us. The praise that we receive from others redounds to God and not to us. So we will be open to humbly accepting compliments from others and recognizing that it is God who has given us the talents that we have. For prayer is not the only way that we come to an appreciation of how God sees us. We can also come to an appreciation of how God sees us through the way in which others see us. Sometimes God’s smiling at us can also come in the form of other’s smiling upon us. This is why it is important to be able to accept compliments from others. Perhaps this is the message of the parable that we hear in today’s gospel, namely that it is through relationship that we come to know our true place in the world. But in entering into relationship with other people, it is wise for us to start out from a lowly position, and not from a position of prestige and power. This is the message that this parable is trying to teach us. When we enter into a relationship, there should be space for the relationship to breathe. If we simply smother the other person with our own importance and our own achievements, there will not be space for that relationship to reveal to us who we are. Questions for reflection

1. What are the banquets of my life – where I have more than I need, and I am called to share with others? With whom do I choose to share the surplus that I have?
2. Who are the people who reveal to me who I am before God? Can I see God smiling at me through the affirmation I receive from others?
3. How do I respond to the compliments that I receive from others – how difficult to I find it to humbly accept praise from others?