One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” And they could not reply to these things. Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” Luke 14:1-14

 

            In Washington DC a person exists who has one of the most interesting jobs on the planet.  He or she is in charge of protocol at State Dinners.  What that means is that when a banquet is held by the White House or some official function occurs the person in charge of protocol has to make sure that all honors are upheld and that no one is offended. When the president sits down at the banquet it is extremely important to know who sits at his right side and who sits at his left. The visiting dignitary has to be located in a special place of honor. But it does not stop there.  Every person who is seated is located at the proper place which depends on the position of honor to which he or she is entitled.  It is the job of the person in charge of protocol to make sure that all of these rankings are maintained and that nobody is slighted.  Otherwise major political and diplomatic problems can arise,  such as happened in the middle of the Vietnam War when both sides first met to discuss possible peace talks.  These rules were not scrupulously upheld and as a result both sides spent months debating the shape of the table for the talks – and soldiers on both sides kept dying while they debated.  Protocol had to be maintained.

            It was no different two thousand years ago.  When certain Pharisees invited Jesus to dinner the Pharisees had to observe every rule of protocol even at the expense of mercy.  This meal occurred on a Sabbath evening which meant that it was Friday night.  Some scholars believe that this might have actually been the Seder meal for a Passover feast, which meant that this meal was one of the most important ones in the entire calendar for them all, our Lord included. Things apparently were going well, although our Lord was taking notice of how the Pharisees’ pride made them choose various places of honor at the table.  But suddenly a man with an illness appears before Jesus. 

            If there were music it probably stopped at that moment and everybody stopped talking.  Now it was the time for the guests to observe Jesus and observe they did.  For the Greek word and its tense implies that they watched Jesus like a hawk.  They scrutinized every move He made because what He did would have vast implications in how they saw Him from that moment onward.

            For the illness which St. Luke called “Dropsy” had serious implications.  Dropsy was a disease that modern physicians would call “Edema” where a severe swelling of the body and face occurs because the body is retaining water.  The man at the banquet would have been disfigured and swollen to the point where he was probably hard for everyone to look at.  But more existed.  For this disease was one of those which the Book of Leviticus in the Torah designated as diseases that made a man “unclean.”  Leviticus 13:2 identified the swelling of the body as an unclean disease which spiritually left a man destitute before God.  The Rabbis of Israel according to ancient literature added to Leviticus by saying that this disease was probably the result of sinful immorality on the part of the victim.  In other words, the man with Dropsy was sick because he was basically getting what he deserved for his sinful lifestyle.  As a result, the good God-fearing Pharisees in their spiritual pride saw no need to be merciful or kind to this “sinner”.  What’s more, this was a Sabbath meal on the holy day of the week and this “sinner” had no business defiling it with his spiritual pollution.  But at the same time everyone knew the kind of man Jesus was with His compassion and His total willingness to heal the sick and welcome sinners to His side.  But would He do it on the most sacred day of the week, perhaps on one of the most sacred days in the year?  Would Jesus violate all the rules of the Sabbath for the sake of this sinner who was not worthy of anyone’s notice much less action?  If Jesus did it He’d be no better than the diseased person and just as sinful and unworthy of their respect, at least in their eyes.  The rules, the very rules of God in their opinion, said, “No. No healing.  Even if you want to go ahead and heal this unworthy maggot standing before you with his swollen face and arms and legs you can’t do it on a Sabbath day! – That was the rule!!”

            But Jesus had a word for them before He even healed the man.  He asked them if it were lawful to be merciful on a Sabbath day.  Wasn’t that more important than the rules?  And He reminded them that there were certainly times when even they would  violate the Sabbath if the person who was hurting was close enough to them.  Some of the Rabbis had stated in the very illustration that Jesus used that if a man fell into a well, yes, you could perhaps help him out on a Sabbath day. But you could never use a rope or a staff to do so for that would violate the rules about doing work.  And yet Jesus said, “However, if it were your son you wouldn’t be so persnickety – you’d get him out immediately.” Even an ox you would save, though again the Rabbis had said that on a Sabbath day the best you could do was to throw down some fodder into the well to keep the animal alive until the next day when you could lawfully hoist the ox out.  But as Jesus noticed, if it happened to be your own ox you wouldn’t be so legalistic.  If it were your own ox and not someone else’s you would ignore the rules rather than lose a valuable animal! 

            But pride is a card in mens’ hands that always seems to trump mercy.  Honor and pride and an upholding of the rules dominate our hearts and our actions.  How often did Jesus have to deal with pride in people and not just in the Pharisees?  You and I can recall how St. Peter so often bragged about his own spiritual greatness even at the expense of his fellow apostles.  “Lord, even if all the others abandon and forsake you, I never will,” He said to Jesus a few hours before in terror he denied Jesus three times.  And that was not the first time Peter had boasted in such a way.  Nor was it just Peter.  At the very Last Supper St. Luke tells us in Luke 22:24 that all the disciples were arguing among themselves about which one of them was the greatest.    And if we are honest with ourselves has not pride caused you and me many moments of embarrassment and shame, even before God?  Haven’t we all at times tried to remind God about the good things we have done for Him and how faithful we have been so much so that the Lord should surely bless us in some way for it all?  I know I have.

            So Jesus speaks about humility not just to the guests at that dinner but to us all.  Most of the Pharisees there were probably enraged at Jesus for healing that man and they were grinding their teeth in silence because as Luke tells us they knew they had no counterargument to Jesus’ call for mercy.  But pride has closed my heart to the ways of the Lord as well.  Pride makes all of us believers act and speak in ways that shame our Savior.

            The world of Jesus was not really very different from our own. Roman and Greek culture back then might have said that humility was a nice quality.  But what they really admired was pride and accomplishment and conquest.  And they did understand quite well how important it was to avoid shame.  To be shamed in front of your fellow Romans would brand you for the rest of your life and would be a mark of which you could never be rid.  The humility Jesus urged us to have was something that they could not even begin to understand.  But that makes sense.  Humility as Galatians 5 says is a fruit of the Holy Spirit working in our lives.  Without the Spirit of God at work in our hearts we can’t even grasp what Jesus is telling us today.

            For He says to each of us that we should first of all be humble within our very selves.  That is hard for a man to do when everything inside of us and around us says that a real man does everything himself.  To ask for help or to admit you are helpless means you are weak.  When you look for a place of honor at the table, just like the Pharisees your eyes tend to drift to the best seat in the house, the place of utmost honor.  But it doesn’t work that way in the kingdom of God . For in the kingdom of God we don’t have any credentials on our own that make us worthy of anything.  In fact, our sinfulness means we shouldn’t even be there at all.  The honest heart led by God the Holy Spirit realizes that our entire position in creation and in salvation depends entirely upon God.  It is what we call “Grace.”  It is God’s invitation, not our worthiness, that puts us at the table.

            I remember learning this one day when I was visiting a shutin, one of those veteran saints who always seem to shine with a humble Godliness even if they cannot walk as well as us or talk as well as us or think as sharply as they once did.  One of the shutins I thought of with this sermon was a little woman down in Terryville named Martha Lassy. When I visited her while I served that Church during one of her pastoral vacancies I was always awed by her deep humility and love of the Lord.  But no more than the one time I said to her, “Martha, one day I know that you will be a diamond in the crown of Jesus Christ up in heaven.”  She looked at me and said with her little German accent, “Oh, Pastor, if only I could be His footstool that would be enough for me.”  I felt about two inches tall that day because so often I have convinced myself that I must be getting such a spectacular place in heaven for all I have done for Jesus.  If only like Martha I could learn to say and believe that if only I could be a footstool for the Lord that would be heaven.  Maybe someday by God’s grace I will grow to that point!

            And Jesus said that such humility should also exist in the way we treat others.  No one at that dinner long ago felt that sick man with Dropsy had any place there. But Jesus did. Jesus got up from the table and welcomed the man and sent him home clean and healthy.  I often ask where I would have been that day.  Would I have joined the Pharisees in being disgusted at this swollen diseased man and utterly rejected him as being unworthy?  Would you?

            Think of Jesus.  He was God with all of God’s glory.  But He humbled Himself to save you.  He humbled Himself and even went to the shame of a cross to save you, after first becoming man for our sake.  And He did that because man’s first sin was the sin of pride, the sin that said to Adam and Eve: “Hey, you deserve to be like God!”  And the reality is that when Jesus the host today invites all of us to come to His table in the feast called Holy Communion, He can find no more poor, spiritually crippled, lame or blind man than me to come, or perhaps you.  Try to imagine when you and I come today to the communion rail.  I kneel at the rail dressed in a white robe before you all. But any of you here today knows that under that white robe I am dressed entirely in black.  That’s the way we all are before God.  He gives us Jesus’ white robe of righteousness to wear to cover our spiritual poverty, our spiritual disability, and our spiritual blindness, and even our blindness to a brother or sister in need of Jesus’ love and compassion as much as we do.

            Jesus was right.  It is one thing to be kind and to do good to those who can bless us back.  But the mark of the redeemed is to be kind and compassionate to someone who can never repay you.  I think of those folks in Kenya whom all of you have loved.  Whatever you have done out of love for them is something that they can never repay you at least not in a materialistic way.  But when you can love and give in the way you have given you have really done it for Jesus Who calls them His brothers and sisters.  And when you can love people like this or the other “diseased, unclean” people of our world maybe we will win them by such love to the side of Jesus. 

            As the Lord said, our reward comes later on in heaven.  And when we hear our Savior say to you, “Well done, Good and Faithful!” it will be worth it.  But to be honest, on that day I think the only thing I might say in reply is:  “Lord, you were the only good One.  You were the only faithful One.”  But because of His grace and mercy to sick people like us, swollen with our own pride and unclean by our own arrogance, He will still say, “You are forgiven.  Now come up and take a higher place for all of eternity – with Me.”  And that will make it worth it.

            Be humble. Humility is the way of Jesus- and it is a good way to live life.  It protects you from all the mistakes that pride causes you and me to commit.  And it helps us follow in the footsteps of a Savior Who was so humble for us. Amen.