The Feed

One of my favorite theologians and thinkers is a colleague and friend of mine named Andrew Arndt. His thoughts on “inversion” deserve to be read and heard by everyone and I have asked his permission to share them with those who visit this site. A long post, but well worth your time…

Inversion, part I

To me, one of the most compelling narrative sequences of the entire Bible occurs in Luke 14. The stage has been set in the preceding paragraphs of chapter 13, where Jesus has just recently spoken of (a) who is going to “take their place at the feast in the kingdom of God” (apparently not those who thought they would), and (b) the tragedy that is about to befall Jerusalem. Chapter 14 combines both of those themes in eloquent prose, and challenges we who consider ourselves “insiders” with a stunning inversion.

The chapter opens at a table. “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to EAT in the house of a prominent pharisee, he was being carefully watched.” Knowing that every little move was under careful scrutiny, he does something both deeply compassionate and symbolic. He heals a man. On the Sabbath. This is a problem for the pharisees, but strangely, they have nothing to say to him about it. So he throws the gauntlet down again, after he “noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the TABLE”, saying,

“When someone invites you to a wedding FEAST, do not take the place of honor (the “firstplace” in Greek – see 13:30 for some prior last/first language), for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this man your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the last place (again, see 13:30). But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Fair enough. But then the diatribe heightens.

“When you give a LUNCHEON or DINNER, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and you will be repaid. But when you give a BANQUET, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed (keep that word in mind). Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

These are pretty strident words. In two short paragraphs, Jesus has totally invalidated any kind of pandering for power, status, or upward social mobility. When you’re invited to a FEAST, take the last place. And when you give a FEAST, invite the last people.

Somehow, these words get lost on one of those at the table, who, after hearing about resurrection of the righteous and their recompense for a life faithfully lived blurts out: “Blessed (that word again) is the man who will EAT at the FEAST in the kingdom of God!”

Indeed.

But who actually is going to be at that feast? It apparently is not who the man supposed.

To answer the question, Jesus tells a story about a man who threw a BANQUET. He sent servants to go and fetch those whom he had invited. One after the other they turned him down. One had a field to inspect, one had oxen to try out, one had a new wife to attend to … all too preoccupied with their own affairs to respond to the invitation.

So the man, not to be shamed by his disinterested guests, does something radical. He invites a certain group of people instead to come and eat with him. That group? “The poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (see v. 14) and angrily asserts to his servant that “my house will be full! I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my BANQUET.”

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight, Jesus. When we’re invited to a banquet, we need to take the lowest place, shirking the whole warped quest for upward social mobility. And when we give a banquet, similarly, we need to invite the lowest people–the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame … if we do this, if we humble ourselves so far as to fill our houses with the disenfranchised of society and renounce the entire demonized social order, we will be blessed … right along with that very same group of people–the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame–who themselves will be the very ones to be given the places of honor at the feast of the kingdom of God.

In other words, our eating at that feast, depends on our posture towards the disenfranchised, who, Luke unequivocally asserts, WILL THEMSELVES EAT AT THAT FEAST.

Luke illustrates this again in chapter 16–the parable of the rich man and lazarus. What’s interesting is that in that passage, where Jesus’ polemic against wealth and his assertion of God’s preferential treatment of the poor continues, it is SIMPLY ASSUMED that lazarus, the poor begger who sat at the gate and longed to eat even some crumbs from the rich man’s table, is “in” Abraham’s bosom, and that the rich man is “in” Hades. Why is the rich man in Hades? Because of his posture towards lazarus, the poor man. He had not repented … and neither had his rich family. In the end, the last were first and the first were last. A stunning inversion took place that defied all of the rich man’s expectations.

Some observations:

(1) It is beyond doubt from the teaching of Jesus that we who occupy anything higher than the absolute lowest rung of the social ladder are in a perilous position.

(2) Our entrance into the kingdom of God, our truly becoming “children of Abraham”, apparently depends on our repentance … which is MORE THAN A MERE MENTAL GYMNASTIC (as we are so prone to make it in our evangelical altar-call culture). It is a real turning, a real posturing ourselves differently as we live life in this world. But posturing ourselves differntly towards who? Towards Jesus? Well, yes of course. But the question must be asked, how do we, as middle class Americans, posture ourselves differently towards Jesus? Jesus’ own answer is unambiguous: by posturing ourselves differently towards the poor, for it is they, apparently, who will inherit, with no qualifications as far as the text is concerned, the kingdom of God. Jesus’ encounter with Zaccheus illustrates this well – “Look Lord, here and now I give half my possessions TO THE POOR, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay him back four times the amount.” Jesus says, “Indeed, salvation has come to this house, for this man too, is a son of Abraham.” Repentance, devotion to Jesus, looks like justice for the poor.

(3) Discipleship, therefore, CANNOT BE REDUCED TO BALD PERSONAL PIETY. It is necessarily social. The rule of God is breaking in. The lowly are lifted, the powerful are being made to fall … and the only way they escape their fall is by repenting of the politics of power by which they neglect and often brutally oppress the poor.

More to come…

Inversion part II – Life re-formatted, re-understood

Admittedly, the last posting on the notion of inversion was terse … so let me try to fill things out just a bit more and perhaps back them up not just in a few isolated pieces of Jesus’ teaching but in a thoroughgoing Christ-ology that can serve to undergird how we understand ourselves as Christ-followers.

In making the point to the Philippian believers that their lives are not to be characterized by the kind of self-absorption and self-aggrandizement that characterizes pagan living, Paul himself makes an appeal to the life and ministry of Jesus, saying,

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Messiah Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be taken advantage of (per Wright, 1992), but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” – Phil 2:5-11

Lots could be said, but I’ll limit my comments here to a few. Paul pulls off a stunning reversal of expectations with merely a wave of the pen. Jesus, the one who was in very nature God, over against the standard behavior of kings and emperors, governors and despots, understood his exalted status not as a thing to be used for his own advantage, but rather as a thing entailing the opposite of what one might expect. Notice that Paul says, “Did not CONSIDER equality with God something to be taken advantage of…” One assumes then that what comes immediately next is an illustration of what he DID in fact “consider” his status to entail– v. 7 says that he ‘ekenosen’, in Greek; “emptied” himself so as to be regarded as nothing, lowering himself as low as taking up the form “of a servant”, and then doing even more–becoming obedient unto death, and more still–”even the death on a cross.” One cannot get any lower than this. The exalted Lord of universe hangs forsaken on a cross, crucified “outside the city”, regarded as trash. And it was IN THE LIGHT OF THIS, (v. 9 – “Therefore”) that God exalted him.

So that the present point is not lost, I reemphasize: Jesus understood equality with God as entailing a pattern of behavior that is COMPLETELY CONTRARY to what we might expect. Equality with God means emptying. Being the Messiah means giving, lowering, forsaking, being regarded as nothing.

It is not just that this was a magnanimous, selfless act by one who could have done otherwise. It is rather something else.

It is a re-formatting of how the Divine itself is understood. To be Divine is to lower oneself. To mimic the Divine then, is to do the same.

And Paul uses that very point to emphasize a style of life for the Philippian believers that mimics the pattern of behavior Jesus displays: a life of self-emptying on behalf of other people, a pattern of lowering onesself in a manner similar to that of the Messiah himself. It is in this style of living that the glory appropriate for the people of the Messiah is displayed: “so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life…” (2:15-16a)

One sees this elsewhere, particularly in 2 Corinthians 8:9. In encouraging the Corinthians to give to the poor, Paul makes a Christ-ological appeal: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Again, the pattern of life of the Messiah was that of emptying, and likewise thus for his people. If they would follow him, they must lower themselves. There is no discipleship, in other words, without emptying, without lowering.

I could go on, but this is a blog and one should beware of the fact that many words weary the soul and of writing blogs there seems to be no end. So here is the conclusion of the matter (for now):

Lowering, self-denial, self-abnegation, self-humiliation, whatever you want to call it, which IS the path of Christian discipleship, can never be (as emphasized in the previous blog) a mere “posture of the heart.” If it is only that it is fake. A mental gymnastic. Or as one of my friends would put it, “An ideological thought experiment”, but nothing more. It must, in fact, be ontological–grounded in reality because it is really undertaken and really done, for God does not just take up a “posture of the heart”–he does something. John writes, famously, “For God so loved the world THAT he gave…” (John 3:16) and then ties this to Christian praxis by saying, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him. Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:16-18).

And to that end the question of the disenfranchised of society comes back to us. If there is no room in our lives for identification with the “least of these”, which will of course include those in our immediate fellowship (as John points out) but extend far beyond it, can we really claim to be walking rightly with Jesus, the one who (according to Matthew 25) so identifies himself with them that to act towards them is ultimately to act towards him?

I don’t think so.

We have some work to do, we comfortable middle class Christians. To buy into the notion that the blessed life is one of unbroken upward mobility it seems to me is contrary to the entire course and manner of Jesus’ life.

What if the blessed life was a life of downward mobility? A life where, though opportunity for upward ascent is available, is nevertheless not taken advantage of, but given up for something greater?

How would this influence how we think about purchasing houses, buying cars, using technology, investing for retirement?

Perhaps it would invert it.