Written by In St Luke’s Gospel, eating with others is a notable characteristic of Jesus’ ministry. He has Jesus eating with others about twice as frequently as in the other Gospels of Mark, Matthew and John.
In today’s reading (Lk 14:7-11) Jesus is a guest at the home of a leading Jewish official. At first it looks like Our Lord is giving him some worldly advice about how to avoid being embarrassed or even humiliated with the seating arrangements at a banquet. However, for Luke the setting of a meal is always an image of the heavenly banquet expected to take place with the coming of the Messiah. (Christians now associate this with the Lord’s Second Coming.)
The party of Jews known as Pharisees believed that if you scrupulously kept the laws of their religion then God would automatically have to give you prime seats at this heavenly banquet. But Jesus told them in so many words ‘Anything good you will ever get from God will come only from God’s generosity and not because you have done something to deserve it …You cannot deserve anything from God … anything you do get will be a gift, not a reward … so the only way to relate to God is to get rid of notions of entitlement … you are entitled to nothing and cannot demand anything from God.’
Instead, Jesus says that we must approach God like a poor person invited to a meal in a wealthy person’s home. They’d recognise that they’d been invited not because they deserved it but simply because their host was generous. We, too, says Jesus, must have this same attitude in our relationship with God, an awareness of our ‘nothingness’ or ‘lowliness’ before God.
This state of lowliness is what the Bible, including our First Reading (Ecclesiasticus 3:17-20, 28-29), calls ‘humility’. If I am humble in this sense, I will take from God anything I have been given, even if at times it entails hardship and pain. We can meet God only on God’s terms, not our own and we are entitled to nothing. We cannot earn, deserve or force God to give us anything. We cannot bargain with God (even though, at times of desperation, we may try). We can only ask. We are to see that the good things, opportunities and gifts that come our way are from God’s generosity and not from anything we have earned. We might think we deserve what we have, especially if we have worked hard for it, but at a stroke it all can be taken away.
The Pharisees did not like hearing this and, perhaps, we might feel the same. For instance, how easy it is for us to think when a serious illness strikes or something badly goes wrong in life that we think: ‘but I’ve been so good … I’ve kept to the rules of my religion, I’ve gone to Sunday Mass, said my prayers and kept the commandments … Why has God allowed this to be done to me when, surely, I deserved better?’
So, perhaps, today gives us the opportunity to be grateful for what we have. And if things are not going as well as we’d like, then we might make this prayer our own:
God, grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can … and wisdom to know the difference.
At the end of today’s Gospel Jesus makes the further point that we must extend to others the gifts we receive from God. This must not be limited to those who can return our generosity, like family members or friends. He asks that we share our good fortune with the ‘poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind’. They were the impoverished people of his time and did not have the means to repay any generosity they received. Supporting them, he says, will determine our place at the heavenly banquet in what the Second Reading (Hebrews 12:18-19,22-24) calls ‘the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem’ that awaits us all.
As we all know, the cost of living is spiraling. Inflation is predicted to reach 18 per cent by the end of the year and the energy price cap is rising by 80 per cent in October. So I wonder if you would agree that a new category of people in our time that Jesus would ask us to support would be people not coping with the cost of living crisis, particularly those living in possible fuel poverty?
A number of charities are encouraging people who can afford it to donate their £400 energy grant from the government to help poorer households. They are setting up schemes for those who do not need the discount to divert it to those who are most desperate. In addition to all the other charities we support, I commend for your consideration the work of Christians Against Poverty with this fuel poverty scheme. If you wish to know more about its work in Christ’s name, I commend its website https://capuk.org/ to you.
Michael Campion
Holy Name, Jesmond
28 September 2022
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 