There is a film that came out in the 90’s called Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s about a group of young adults who are in that stage of life when all their friends are getting married, so the film is one wedding after another. In one scene, the main character, Charles, arrives at one of these wedding receptions, and he picks up his place card. He takes note of which table he will be seated at, then scans the room to find his table. And when he sees it, there is a look of dread that comes over his face.
Pretty soon, we understand why. He takes his seat at the table and says hello to everyone, and as the conversation proceeds, we realize that Charles has been seated with a number of women he has dated in the past. The women chat, comparing notes about what kind of boyfriend Charles had been, while Charles slumps lower and lower in his seat, looking miserable, wondering when he might be able to escape.
Charles had ended up in the seat of shame. Did the hosts do this deliberately, or was it just an unlucky coincidence? We’ll never know. But clearly it was not a happy event for Charles.
Most of us do care, at least a little, about where we are seated at a dinner table. It mattered a lot when we were in high school, when perhaps you knew there were some tables where you were not welcome. And there may have been some tables where you would rather have gone hungry than sit there. There was a lot of status consciousness in high school, as I recall.
When we grow up and mature, we get a bit more relaxed about these matters. But it is still true, no matter how mature we are, that our egos can make us a little sensitive about where we get to sit, to what events we get invited, where we are welcomed.
We don’t know why Jesus was invited to so many dinners at the homes of Pharisees. They didn’t seem to like him very much. But maybe they prescribed to the old adage, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” And that makes sense, given what Luke tells us in the first verse: They were watching him closely.
They are watching Jesus closely. Jesus is aware that they are watching him closely. And Jesus is watching them closely.
He takes notice of how these men seat themselves at the table. From what I have read, this was probably a U-shaped table, with two rectangular tables parallel to each other and a third table connecting the two at one end.
The seats of honor would have been in the connecting piece of the table. The host or the guest of honor would be in the center seat, and the seats nearby would be the coveted seats of honor.
And while the men are watching him, and he is watching them, he notices how they are jockeying for the best seats at the table, the seats of honor. And so, Luke says, he began to tell them a parable. Unlike many of his parables, this one was very straightforward. It is right on point, such that it would be hard for them to miss the message.
When you are invited to someone’s home – or wedding banquet – do not go directly for the seat of honor, presuming it is yours. Because what if it turns out the host wanted someone else, someone of a higher rank, to have that seat? How awkward this would be for your host. How humiliating this would be for you.
Jesus tells them it would be so much wiser for them to choose the seat of least honor. And then maybe the host will call to you and say, “Come sit closer to me!” Then you would have the utter delight of being called by name and getting up and moving to a seat of honor as all the other guests looked on. How fabulous that would be.
Such advice would have sounded pretty savvy to these guests. Practical. Yes, they would have said, quite right. In fact, it was very likely something they had heard before. Jesus was paraphrasing a proverb:
Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great, for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble. (Proverbs 25:6-7)
What he had said to them, they knew already. But his next lesson probably sounded downright wacky.
He turned directly to his host: When you give a dinner do not invite your friends. Do not invite the people who will invite you back, or the ones whom you might want a favor from. Instead, invite the poor, the lame, the blind, the crippled – all the misfits. Invite the people who don’t even have a table to ask you to sit at. Do this, and my, how blessed you will be.
There used to be a famous restaurant in Birmingham Alabama called Ollie’s Barbecue. They say it was the kind of place where everyone was equal. It might have been their religious convictions that made it this way. The walls were covered with Bible verses. The owners handed out religious tracts to their employees. It was a place that felt welcoming to all. Plumbers and electricians sat side by side with bank presidents and doctors. They were all the same at Ollie’s. That is, if they were white.
If you were black, you could walk in the door and step up to the counter. You could order a meal, then stand there and wait. You had to be careful about how you waited. No looking around. Just keep your head down, and when they hand you your sandwich, get out of there.
If you were black, you could work there, too. Many of the restaurant’s servers were black. But they would not have been able to sit down at a table and be served, even on their day off.
In 1964 the federal government banned that sort of discrimination. But Ollie and his family objected, all the way to the supreme court, where they lost their case. Ollie, Jr., who worked alongside his dad, told a journalist about 50 years later that he still thinks the court got it wrong.
So Ollie’s grudgingly began serving black customers when the law told them they had to. But in the years that followed, there weren’t too many black people who took advantage of that. After all, they knew they weren’t really welcome there.
And it’s a little mystifying. Ollie and his son, Ollie Jr., were sustained by a deep and abiding Christian faith, this was clear. And their faith inspired them to create a place where all white people could feel good enough, feel truly welcome, no matter if they got up in the morning and put on a suit and tie or a pair of coveralls. They knew at Ollie’s place they would be treated with dignity.
But if the two Ollies read the words of Jesus in Luke 14, “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed,” it’s clear they weren’t hearing their black neighbors as being included in the list.
And to be honest, the Ollies – both father and son – weren’t very different from most of us. When it comes to welcoming people at our table, we all have a line we don’t like to cross. Most of us know there are some people we are not comfortable with, people we would be very unlikely to invite to our banquets, as Jesus suggests. I would only hope that, when we realize it, we can admit that it is our own shortcoming, not the fault of anyone else.
Getting back to Charles’ disastrous wedding reception dinner. I kind of think it might be a foretaste of the feast to come. What if, at the heavenly banquet, we pick up our place cards and discover we will be dining with all the people we have wronged somehow in our lives. It will be uncomfortable, yes, but it will be our opportunity for reconciliation.
Because how could it be heaven otherwise?
Let this precious life we have been given on earth be our practice for the heavenly banquet.
No comments:
Post a Comment