22nd Sunday Year C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2013

Last Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech: “I have a dream” – a dream of respect and fairness for all – a dream to be achieved through the power of truth.

I could not help remembering it against the background of this pre-election period leading up to next Saturday.  It has been a time singularly short on inspiring dreams or life-giving visions – not setting free the goodness in the hearts of people but encouraging a sort of feeding-frenzy of self- and sectional interest [and their extension in national interest]; and pandering to our baseless fears and latent hostilities.  I feel so disillusioned and angry with the electoral process; and can see no short-term response that makes sense.

Then I looked at today’s Gospel.  My first reaction was not good.  So I thought: What is it really saying? What might be the inspiring vision there?  Jesus’ story about the places at the wedding feast was apparently a folk-story circulating in the cultural memory of the time.  It was not about humility, but a shot at the honour-obsessed Pharisees seeking to exalt themselves by means of a smart trick.  Luke tips us off by telling us it could well serve as a “parable” – to entice us beyond the obvious to look more deeply.  Perhaps, it is a veiled send-up of everyone’s pretensions and of the extent to which people will go to be noticed.  God exalts the truly humble, but not the pretend-humble.  But the folk-story says nothing about true humility or how to develop it.  So Luke adds a second teaching of Jesus that really shatters the complacent status quo and truly challenges not just his audience of Pharisees but ourselves as well.

Jesus had a dream – a dream of a world without oppression or violence or extremes of wealth and poverty or endemic sickness.  He dreamt of a world where people related with respect and mutual sensitivity, with active care and compassion, without fear or hostility.  Let us look more closely at what Jesus said: When you give a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind – those in the lowest place.  He mentioned first the poor … and then added the crippled, the lame, the blind.  In his world people with obvious physical disabilities were categorised as sinners, as ritually impure; and consequently excluded from even going near certain areas of the Temple.  Perhaps today Jesus would refer, not to the poor, etcetera, but to the unemployed and homeless, the unemployable, those consigned by society to the margins, labelled and often excluded.

Drawing on the imagery of the folk-story already mentioned, he is perhaps suggesting that true humility may be learnt by association with those already in the lowest places; or at least by learning to look at life, at our political and religious institutions, at our laws and social set-up, from the place of the lowest; to see with their eyes, to get inside their skins and to stand in their shoes.  Things we take for granted can look surprisingly different when seen from the lower rungs of the social scale.  Ask an asylum seeker what it’s like to be seeking asylum.

To be truly humble, do I need to side with the victim – honestly?  Do I need to become vulnerable, perhaps to run the risk of being exploited or marginalised?  That was the way that Jesus himself went.  The Gospel said that that was the way to be truly exalted; and added that repayment would be made when the virtuous rise again.  But do we need to wait for resurrection?  Can we already experience an expanding freedom, a growing joy and a deeper peace as, slowly, we learn to stand in the shoes of the lowest? as we stand with them in their aspirations to respect, notice and acceptance?

How might that affect the way we vote?