Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2025

When you imagine Jesus teaching, I wonder where you picture him? On a hillside, perhaps, as in the Sermon on the Mount, or maybe in a boat, either addressing crowds gathered on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, or encouraging anxious disciples as the waves crash around them. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is frequently portrayed at table, sharing a meal or sitting as a guest, and from this scenario, he gives some of his most important teaching. Now, Luke is making a bit of point here. Jesus is not just any old rabbi, or even any old prophet. In this mode, Jesus is a philosopher. In the Graeco-Roman world, the dining table was one place for teaching and discussion, hence the interrogation Jesus undergoes by the Pharisees, and the way in which he responds. This is not merely a social occasion in the way we would recognise it: think seminar lunch, rather than chatty grazing, and we’re perhaps getting slightly closer to St Luke’s territory.

There are a variety of things going on here. First, in the early part of the story we didn’t hear this morning, there is a healing on the sabbath, and the pharisees are silent in the face of Jesus’s action. We join the scene at the moment when Jesus notices guests inching themselves into places of honour, and he tells a parable against a mindset which just seeks exultation or advantage for itself. On one level, this is straightforward, ethical housekeeping. And yet, note the context. Jesus chooses to locate this teaching within the image of a wedding banquet. Now, anyone who has ever dealt with a seating plan at a wedding breakfast knows what a complex minefield that can be – but this is not necessarily an ordinary wedding. The nuptial imagery here points towards the end of time, the great wedding feast when the world and its time will be consummated. If you seek honour in that world, Jesus is saying, learn humility in this one.

What then happens is perhaps even more socially uncomfortable. Addressing his host – the person who has invited him – Jesus highlights the dangers of inviting people for lunch or dinner in order to obtain reciprocity or status. But he then goes further, and returns to the image not of lunch or dinner, but of a banquet. A banquet in the ancient world was quite a specific, particular thing, a large occasion where the host provided a lot of sustenance. In antiquity, the wealthy would sometimes provide the poor with a banquet in order to enhance their own fame and standing in a community – and for these poor, a situation in which food was freely given, was a rare opportunity to satisfy hunger. These banquets are perhaps akin to the communal meals we know were held by early Christian communities. Again, Jesus critiques the expectation of repayment or reciprocity. The pharisee is encouraged to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, because they cannot repay the debt.

Underlying all of these images are two concerns. First, who’s in and who’s out? Secondly, how should we deal with the question of repayment or reciprocity? And although these parables and saying are profoundly related to everyday, ordinary questions, they also relate intimately to salvation and holiness.

All societies are underpinned by codes, customs, practices. The range of these codes, and how they are embedded in practice and expectation, is sometimes referred to as culture. The ‘cultural norms’ of a society or an institution will tell us quite a bit about the culture we are exploring. The critique that Jesus offers in these stories is in part a critique of culture. Here in Westminster Abbey, if you come to a special service on a special occasion, you would notice seating areas demarcated by green or red tickets, and stewards helpfully looking at seating plans to ensure you end up in the right place. There are decisions being made about who sits where, and if we’re honest, these are often decisions about status. So, is today’s Gospel directed at a situation like this? Is it directed at people like us? The short answer is both yes and no. The parable of the wedding banquet is not principally a story about seating plans; rather it is a story intended to encourage humility, and critique arrogance. But it is a parable about how we should relate ourselves and other people to structures which reveal rank and distinction. So, we should not move away too quickly from the suggestion that this parable should make us think very carefully about who we privilege and why, and even more about how we deal with any expectation of privilege for ourselves. Those who humble themselves will be exalted, teaches Jesus. In part, because a society made up of people who are certain that the world revolves around them will be no society at all, and in part because we become our fullest selves when we have a realistic and truthful sense of ourselves. Not competition, but communion.

The second story, the one about the invitation list, is a similar critique of human culture. After all, the Levitical codes which underpinned so much of first-century Jewish society specifically excluded the lame, the blind, and the poor from the priesthood. The crippled were considered ritually unclean. This is no random list! The banquet to which Jesus refers is not one where there can be an expectation of reciprocity, or where you can put people in your debt, rather this feast is one which recognises an especial kind of dignity in those whom the culture would prefer to exclude. So, we might ask, with whom are you willing to share your table/your resources/your dignity? And especially when it is clear that you will not get something in return. Those are questions which stand in judgement upon the church, and upon every culture which claims to be Christian or to have a Christian heritage.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is frequently portrayed at table, at a meal. The final such depiction before the crucifixion happens the night before he dies. In Luke’s account, very soon after Jesus has instituted the Eucharist, a discussion erupts around that table about which one of the disciples was to be regarded as the greatest. How stark that contrast must have been, for status to bubble up even as Christ gives his life away. ‘The greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves’, the Philosopher-Messiah teaches them. This leader serves his people by giving his life for them, and by feeding them with that life. The medicine of the Eucharist, the medicine we receive from the Lord himself at this table, is balm for the life of the world, and remedy for its ills. Here, the image of reciprocity collapses: how could we ever repay Christ? But he does ask for our response; the response of discipleship, the response of living and loving within his Body, the Church, in which we live and breathe alongside people of every race, culture, class and background, as brothers and sisters who can learn those twin gifts of humility and gratitude, called not to competition, but to communion.