Proper 17C: Wedding Banquet
Précis
Lectionary readings
We know Jesus as the one who turns over tables in Matthew 21 in the so –called “cleansing of the temple”. But here he is again in Luke’s Gospel upending tables—but this time it is in the parable of the wedding banquet where he overturns the social order of class, influence, and power—suggesting that persons of prestige take the lower position.
In this week’s lesson from Luke’s gospel we encounter—laid bare—Jesus law of love and compassion (especially for the afflicted). This is an ethic that upends, disrupts, transcends, and subverts all other religious laws, social norms, codes of conduct, family relationships, and standards of courtesy, civility and class. All of these are wiped aside and reordered into a single ethic of love and compassion. We saw this last week when Jesus, violating the religious, ethical, and social norms of his day, healed the crooked woman on the Sabbath. And we will see it again next week as Jesus calls us to decenter love of family, of mothers, and sisters, and children and brothers for the One Love, of God and Neighbor. This One Law of Love, this is not simply a law of kindness, of charity, of sentimentality. Under this new law, we are taken out of the old social relationships that anchored us in our communities, uprooted and upending, and we are to redefine ourselves in a new social order, a Beloved Community.
Jesus exhorts his audience to “take the lowest place” at the table, rather than the position of honor—to humble oneself and allow others to be lifted up. But he does not stop there, not only has he upending the familial and social relationships, but now he says when we through a party we are not to invite our friends and family and esteemed neighbors—but those who we don’t know: we are to go into the streets and invite the poor, the disabled, the ill, and the afflicted. It will be strange table at which we gather to enjoy a supper of strangers: at this strange table there is no other social relationship—nothing else that binds those gathered together-- other than this law of love and ethic of compassion which replaces all other relationships and allegiances (including familial ones).
The letter to the Hebrews is letter is addressed to the first Christian communities of Palestine, formed by Jews—by race—who had been persecuted and punished and whose possessions had even been confiscated, all of this because they became followers of Christ. They no longer had anything in his world: they had lost their status, their status even (in the case of those who had been temple priests). Their table (their social table) had been overturned and upended. People were vulnerable and had begun to doubt. So this letter, this sermon really, is an exhortation, “Remember those who are in prison, as though you are in prison with them; those who are being torture as you yourselves are being tortured.”
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