“CHRIST HUMBLED HIMSELF TO EXALT YOU”
Saint Luke 14: 1-11
17th Sunday After Trinity: 27 September Anno Domini 2015
Father Jay Watson SSP
God made Saturday, the seventh day, but God IS Sabbath, rest, IN the God/Man Christ Jesus.
Jesus watches you and knows your inner heart. That alone is reason to rend your chest, cry out in remorse, and repent. If the Santa knows whether you’ve been naughty and nice, which he doesn’t, the Savior knows you’ve been sinful and unclean, and damnably corrupt.
You too watch Jesus (usually looking for some technical way out of compliance). But if you only watch with the eyes in your head you see only a wise teacher, a compassionate physician, and an occasional magician with super powers. Jesus comes into the house to have you eat the bread of Himself, that is, to watch Him with your ears…your eyes of faith.
He tells you a story—a true story—a tale about yourself. Jesus spoke through Nathan to David because the King’s self-pride would have rejected doctrinal propositions in its self-righteous posturing.
You also need parabolic truth because your condescending attitudes and feelings of superiority also reject the straight unvarnished Law most of the time. Oh, you don’t sit in the best of seats, how meek you are. You move to the back of a nave to make room for guests. You sit on the outer-ring of the class room chairs. You don’t presume to “table crash” district, synod, or conference “circles” and are oh-so modest. Your modesty is identical to that of the Pharisees who were modest and deferential so that they could pat themselves on their backs for showing such supreme humility.
The hypocrites the Lord spoke to, they knew the correct answer to His query and He knew they knew. Even evil men, even unbelievers such as the Pharisees or modern pagans know the answer: of course it is the right thing to do to heal and rescue—even on a high churchly day. They “held their peace,” and spoke not, because they hated Jesus.
The Lord knows heathen hate God. The Lord knows the old nature of even His “own” hate God. The hypocrite is always eager to obey man-made laws of ritual and appearance. Pharisees would leave the door open to all strangers and wayfarers at their feasts but really didn’t want any “bad” people to actually come inside. Having a diseased cripple, “a certain man before [Jesus] which had the dropsy” was a mortal affront to them.
The Law, which must be kept perfectly lest the ass of disobedience and the stubborn ox of self-righteousness jump headlong into a pit of fire, was kept. But it was not kept because a hypocrite “tried” to be prim and proper, confessional and rubrical, Republican and ‘Murican, but because Jesus humbled Himself. “Jesus, Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but Who made Himself of no reputation and took upon Himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” [Phps. 2. 5-8] Love is giving and sacrificial. Love enfleshed took on your hubristic and puffed up flesh that it might be pierced and deflated and bled out in the Agnus Dei’s atoning death. The Lord allowed Himself to be laid in the pit of death that all Pharisees and hypocrites might be pulled out with Him, by Him, and in Him when He arose from death on the Third Day at the bidding of The Father; and was elevated to the highest room—the Right Hand of Majesty. “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a Name which is above every Name.” [v.9]
Jesus knows that you, even you, think far too highly of yourself and thus not highly enough (i.e. perfectly) of your neighbor and your God. Jesus places you into the seemingly lowest room of the + Font, the seemingly simple chair of absolution and preachment, and the seemingly lowly Table of Eucharist, that He might come to you as God and Lord and bid you: “friend, brother, sister, come up higher with Me. Eat My Body for you are My Royal body. Sit with Me and IN Me at your Father’s Right Hand. You are exalted in Forgiveness, Life, and Peace.”
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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