The Best Spot at the Table

DAILY BYTE

My fiancé and I learned in the wedding planning process that one of the most challenging tasks is the seating plan... It is a dreaded task, I hear, for many – I think because it presents the challenge of trying to find a place for everyone to sit where they will feel like the most important and valued guest at the wedding. Because of course, if everyone were given free reign to sit where they wanted, everyone would want to sit next to the bride and groom, which unfortunately, would lead to quite a messy pile-up.

We want to have seats of honour. We want to feel like we’re the most important people in a room. We want people to see our best sides – our most intelligent, beautiful, funny, creative, inspiring sides. And we want to be appreciated and recognized for those things.

Jesus tells the first parable in Luke 14:7 when he notices that the people at the dinner he’s attending are acting just like that. They are clamouring for the best seat - wanting to be seen and recognized. And conversely, they are not wanting others to see that they may not be the most on top of things with the best pedigree and best credentials and best party tricks.

We spend a lot of time in life pushing our resumes, trying to climb the social and economic ladders, arguing for our proposals and even plain exploiting the gifts that God has given us when we use them out of pride, knowing how good we are at things. Let’s face it – we don’t like to be humble.

And perhaps even more than we resist being humble – we don’t like to have other people humble us. I, of all people, can vouch for the fact that I don’t like people telling me what to do, and I don’t like my way of doing things to be criticized. Do you? Don’t think so...

But, I think there’s an important reason that we run from humility, and that’s because we’ve had bad experiences with it. We’ve experienced peoples’ unhelpfully harsh criticism. We’ve experienced being “put in our place” – which this scripture might seem to advocate, read incorrectly. We’ve heard others put us down simply to pump themselves up. In short, we’ve seen humility abused by power. And we’ve had circumstances like lost jobs and broken families and inconvenient deaths thrust upon us, humbling us in ways that feel terribly uncompassionate and unfair.

And if we read this parable of Jesus, as though the person being humbled is alone, simply being put in his or her place, then we would be reading it as the world often acts, but we would not be reading it as it is written. Because it’s not written in the lonely context of being singled out for failure. It’s written in the context of a wedding banquet – the gathering of a community to celebrate unity and vowed friendship. When the person in the parable is humble and asked to move to sit in a place of honour, he is not just some party-crasher – but he is called ‘friend’ by the host.

Are you feeling humbled at the moment? Has someone humbled you? Have you put someone else down, simply to pump up your own ego? How might you work on living a more humble life? Who might you learn to call friend? Do you need someone to call you, friend?

FOCUS READING

Luke 14:7-11 (NRSV)

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honour, he told them a parable. ‘When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honour, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, “Give this person your place”, and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, “Friend, move up higher”; then you will be honoured in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’