Moved Up Higher

Homily for Sunday, August 31, 2025
The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Luke loves his dinners.  Though all the Gospels tell the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and also of the Last Supper, to his Gospel Luke adds multiple other dinners.  It is Luke that tells the story of Jesus dining with Mary and Martha (10:38-42).  It is Luke that gives us the story of Jesus dining in the home of Zacchaeus (19:1-10). It is Luke that tells the Parable of the Great Banquet (14:15-24).  And it is Luke that gives us the stories of Jesus dining not once, not twice, but three times in the homes of Pharisees.

These three dinners with Pharisees increase in tension.  Time number one was mostly benign:  Jesus was dining in the house of Simon the Pharisee when a “woman in the city who was a sinner” bathed Jesus’ feet with her tears, dried them with her hair and then anointed Jesus’ feet.  Remember how Jesus contrasted her actions with those of his host Simon, who “gave [him] no water for his feet… who gave [him] no kiss… who did not anoint [his] head with oil”?  Jesus then told Simon, “The one to whom little is forgiven loves little” (7:36-50). Time number two ratchets up the tension: When Jesus went in and took his place at table, Luke writes that, “the Pharisee was amazed to see that he did not first wash before dinner.” “Jesus said to him, ‘You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools!”  (11:37-43), which Jesus then followed with a series of sayings, each beginning with, “Woe to you, Pharisees…”  Time number three is this morning’s Gospel lesson.  By this point in the Gospel there is open conflict between Jesus and many of the Pharisees, and they have wised up; as Luke reports, at this dinner, “They were watching him closely.”

In this tense environment –in these chapters Luke builds tension, anticipating the crucifixion – [in this tense environment,] if the Pharisees were watching Jesus closely, Jesus was watching them closely, too.  Luke writes:  “When he noticed how the guests chose places of honor, he told this parable.”  What Jesus noticed was the “pecking order” of first-century Palestinian hierarchy, with the ostensibly more “distinguished” persons jockeying for the ostensibly more distinguished seats.  Jesus said:

When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you has been invited…  But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say, ‘Friend, move up higher.’”

Then Jesus delivers the punchline:  “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”  

Given the context of Jesus for the third time dining at a Pharisees’ house, given how charged the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees had become, and given that we the readers know that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and the crucifixion, when Jesus says that "all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted,” it is likely that Luke is drawing our attention to the cross.

The “lowest” place in the Gospels, the least distinguished place at the table, is the cross.  Indeed, the cross is not only the lowest place in the Gospels, but in the cross, “Christ took the lowest place in the world” (Pope Benedict, Deus Caritas Est, 35).  Paradoxically, this lowest place that Jesus took on the cross also raised him up. (“Friend, move up higher.”)   Jesus not only “moved up higher” when “on the third day he rose again from the dead” at the Resurrection; he not only moved up higher to become “seated at the right hand of the Father” at the Ascension; but Jesus’ taking the lowest place in the world on the cross generates power that likewise moves us up higher. The cross moves us up higher not only in that we will be raised up in “the resurrection of the dead;” the cross moves us up higher not merely because someday we will enjoy “the life of the world to come.”  But by Jesus taking this lowest place in the world, the cross “moves us up higher” by enabling us to more fully share in Jesus’ power to serve.

As Jesus continued in this morning’s lesson:  

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your 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.

When we “do good… expecting nothing in return,” Jesus says elsewhere in Luke, “Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High” (Lk 6:35).  In other words, when we serve others selflessly after the model of Jesus, expecting nothing in return, we align ourselves with the crucified Christ, who (in the words of Paul) “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” and who “humbled himself… to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and who, “Therefore God has highly exalted” (Phil2:7-9).  

We may not think of service as being “moved up higher,” but as our lives are rooted in this lowest place of Jesus’ cross –as we worship and do our best to follow the one who humbled himself even to the point of death – we are indeed called up higher, for we then walk with and serve alongside our crucified and risen Lord.  

This service rooted in Christ and the cross differs from a secular kind of serving, well-intentioned and helpful though it may be.  For when our lives are linked with Christ, and when we allow ourselves to experience Christ’s love and the power of his grace, we cannot help but serve others not only materially but also spiritually.  And where we live in the western suburbs of Boston, spiritual poverty tends to be greater than material poverty.  When we root our lives in Jesus’ cross and resurrection, we do far more than we can imagine to feed this collective spiritual hunger.

There are some who will never understand this kind of service – we yet have “Pharisees” among us who do not see,or refuse to see, the deeper reality of Jesus and the universal human need for his love.  But for those who do see and understand,we know that “to know [him] is eternal life, and to serve [him] is perfect freedom” (BCP, p 99).  

As we ponder our own relationship with Jesus and where we ourselves might like to be seated at the table, maybe keep in mind another parable from Luke’s Gospel, that of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10.  Perhaps this week take time to meditate on this parable and there learn more deeply what it means to serve, what it means to love, and what it might be like to hear Jesus’ say to us to, “Go and do likewise.”