2nd September 2007TRINITY XIII

Fr Julian Browning

Ecclesiastes 10 : 12 - 18 ; Hebrews 13 : 1 - 8 & 15 – 16 ; Luke 14 : 1 & 7 - 14

All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.   Luke 14.11 

We have been invited to the feast with the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind. This is the feast celebrated each week at this altar.

Jesus speaks the words of eternal life. Why do we find it so difficult to understand them? We try hard enough. He uses simple words. But too often the meaning seems to float out of our reach, and we back with ourselves for company, playing by our own rules. Our daily prayer, if made at all, all too often, is an unspoken assessment of ourselves and how we're getting on, like those annual personal assessment forms so popular today, leading to the conclusion: 'God, I thank you I am not like other people.' Which is almost as bad as the prayer in the old Jewish prayer book: Blessed art thou, o Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a Gentile. Blessed art thou, who hast not made me a slave. Blessed art thou ..who hast not made me a woman.'

We fail to understand Jesus because Jesus dismisses the logic and the selfishness which we use to guide ourselves. He says that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and that those who take the lower place will be asked to move to a higher place. He says that the first will be last, and the last first. He offers peace, but says he has not come to bring peace but a sword. He tells us to love our enemies. He says that the meek will inherit the earth. The Christian world is sort of upside down world, and we dont find it easy to live in it.

The Gospel today is about places of honour, and who sits where. It was a traditional theme of ancient literature, a literary device, the banquet at which people try to angle for a better seat because they think themselves special. Those on the guest list are the elect, those who are not on the guest list will never get fed at the heavenly banquet. It's always us and them. We can spend our lives begging for an invitation, ensuring our place. The Pharisees, who never put a foot wrong, knew they would be invited. Let me introduce you to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were fine people. They stood up for personal holiness and social responsibility. They laid down rules and they kept them.. They had the Law of Moses to read, and to live by. They felt that their society was under threat. They saw the moral fabric of society being undermined, so they kept the Law all the more carefully, and tried to see that others did so too. The Pharisees were very reasonable people. They did a lot of good. They were patriotic, keen to spread religious knowledge, generally good church goer material. So there's no need for an introduction to the Pharisees after all. There is a strong streak of the Pharisee in each of us.

This makes Jesus's stories about Pharisees quite interesting for us. When Jesus meets the Pharisees he is meeting us, or at least a side of us. Jesus saw the Pharisees' good points. His teaching had the same historical roots as the Pharisees' teaching, the Old Testament. He said, 'Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets.' He was in the same tradition, spoke the same language. So, when he says, 'All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted', the penny would have dropped in their minds, because they knew their Bible backwards, and there it is, in Ecclesiasticus: 'The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself; so you will find favour in the sight of the Lord. For great is the might of the Lord; he is glorified by the humble.' It's news to us, but they knew all that already.

But Jesus knew something about the Pharisees which they didn't know. He saw that for all their learning, the Pharisees did not know how to get to heaven. Their whole way of life was based on what human beings could do, not on what God could do. And that isn't good enough, however, well behaved we might be. God is more interested in who we are, than in what we do. Nobody is to be excluded: when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. The Pharisees could not see the wood for the trees. In their world and our world of rule-making and rule-breaking, there is no room for a God who loves and forgives his people. The Pharisees, for all their good intentions, had become too self-contained, too self-critical. They had locked out the living God. There was no mystery to beckon them on, no vision of God's kingdom come on earth. And because their religious system left no room for God to act, they did not recognise God when he walked among them on earth. And so the whole mesmerising story of the Gospels gathers pace, until the day when the Jewish doctors of the law and the Pharisees succeed in getting Jesus done to death. And when they did so, they really thought they were doing God a service.

Many of Jesus's more startling statements are a sort of shock treatment to make us see the world and each other in a new way, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. We need a vision, like the vision of Mount Zion I talked about last week. If we let the vision die, then we sink back into Pharisaic self-absorption. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed like this: 'God I thank you that I am not like other people.' The Christian has a different starting-point. He or she, whether in church of out of it, always prays as a member of the Church, as one of God's people. Where Pharisees see separation, the Christian sees unity. We have the same fallen nature, we are on the same journey towards death and eternal life, and we have the same Saviour, and the same God and Father who has mercy on us and forgives us.We have been invited to the feast with the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind. This is the feast celebrated each week at this altar.