Proper 17 :: Sirach 10: 12–18; Psalm 112; Hebrews 13: 1–8,
15–16; Luke 14: 1, 7–14
This is a homily by
Fr. Gene Tucker, given before St. John's Annual Picnic at
Greenwood Furnace State Park near Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on Sunday, August 28,
2016.
“FRIEND,
COME UP HIGHER”
(Homily text: Luke
14, 1, 7-14)
There’s
a wonderful song from the Broadway musical “Annie, Get Your Gun”, written by
Irving Berlin and which premiered in 1946, entitled “Anything You Can Do”.
The
sentiment of this song forms a good introduction into our gospel reading for
this morning, in which a group of Pharisees seem to be jockeying for the most
prominent seating positions at a dinner party to which Jesus had been invited.
So,
borrowing from Irving Berlin’s song, here is the entryway into our
consideration of the Pharisees’ behavior:
The
original song begins this way: “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do
anything better than you.”
Applying
the sentiment of these lyrics to the Pharisees, we might say: “Any law (of
Moses) you can keep, I can keep better. I can keep any law (of Moses) better
than you.”
Applying
the song’s theme to their behavior at the dinner party, we might say: “Any
place you can sit, I can sit higher, I can sit any place higher than you.”
The
picture we have in the gospel accounts of the Pharisees isn’t a pretty one: They seem to be proud of their achievements in
keeping the slightest and smallest requirements of the Law of Moses. They
relish their position in society. They make their prayer boxes (worn on their
foreheads) broad (the technical terms for these prayer boxes is phylacteries) and the tassles on their
prayer shawls long. They love to be greeted by their titles in the
marketplaces, and they love to parade around in their long robes. (See Matthew
23: 5, 6 for Jesus’ description of these persons.)
Furthermore,
these Pharisees looked down on everyone else who didn’t measure up to their own
conceptions of holiness. That would include those whom Jesus specifically named
in His parable: The poor, the crippled,
the lame and the blind. These persons were regarded by the Pharisees as being
unholy people whose tragic lot in life was directly due to their sinful
condition. Such persons were to be avoided. For the Pharisees, all of this is a
matter of knowing who is “clean” and who is “unclean”. The fear of
contamination by associating with or by coming into contact with a person (or
persons) who was “unclean” governed their attitudes. Of course, by the Pharisees
own reckoning of themselves, they were “clean”, totally “clean”.
To
our modern sensibilities, the attitudes of the Pharisees might strike us as
arrogant. It seems like their attitudes struck Jesus as being arrogant, as
well.
Notice
that the Pharisees are going about the business of making a closed circle for
themselves. Jesus remarks that “when a banquet is given,” these Pharisees are
not to “invite (their) friends, brothers, relatives or rich neighbors.”
Apparently, Jesus is exposing the common practices of the Pharisees, who wanted
to associate only with people like themselves.
Holy
Scripture has a forward-looking aspect to it. (The technical term for this
forward-looking vision among biblical scholars is proleptic. That is to say, Scripture has a sense of anticipating
what is to follow.)
It is
in this sense that Jesus names people who will be invited to come into an
ongoing relationship with God through the work that Jesus came to do. In time,
it will be the “unholy” ones of society who will be the focus of Jesus’
ministry. It will be the “unholy” ones of society who will respond to the Good
News that Jesus proclaimed, those who would come into the Church. It will be
those who had the least to lose and the most to gain, that is the poor, the
spiritually crippled, lame and the blind, who would be drawn into the Church,
where they were introduced to God’s love. As a result, they came to dine at
God’s table in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
It
has been said that a unique aspect to the Church’s identity and
reason-for-being is that the Church exists primarily for the benefit of those
who are not yet part of it.
If
the Church is to be true to its founding principles, then it cannot allow its
members to glory in their own achievements. Here the Pharisees offer us a
valuable object lesson. The Pharisees were self-made men. They were proud of
what they had accomplished by their own spiritual bootstraps. But the Church
proclaims that there are no such spiritual bootstraps, for each and every one
of us has been saved exclusively and only by God’s grace, made known in the
person and work of Jesus Christ.
So,
as God has redeemed us by taking the initiative in sending Jesus Christ among
us to show us the way to the Father, so we have received God’s wonderful gift
of grace, God’s unmerited goodness toward us, God’s free gift which none of us
could ever earn.
So,
remembering that each one of us were once the “nobodies” in God’s plan,
remembering that each one of us was spiritually “unclean” before God at one
time, we can invite others into the loving fellowship that God has offered each
one who is willing to respond to God’s invitation.
To do
so is to hear God’s words saying, “Friend, come up higher.”
AMEN.
