The ugliness of thinking highly of yourself

Sermon for Trinity 17

Ephesians 4:1-6  +  Luke 14:1-11

There’s plenty of ugliness in the world, as you know. We’re confronted with it every day, whenever people are involved. That’s not to say there’s no beauty in the world, or that everything everyone does is always ugly. But there is an ugliness that infects all men, including Christians, no matter how well it may sometimes be hidden. It’s an out-in-the-open ugliness we encounter in today’s Gospel, in both parts of the Gospel, an ugliness that Jesus exposes and tries very patiently to correct. It’s the ugliness of thinking highly of yourself.

Now, you know that the Pharisees were Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day who were famous for thinking highly of themselves. So it really comes as no surprise that that ugliness came out again while Jesus was attending a Sabbath supper at the home of a Pharisee, with other Pharisees and experts in the law also in attendance. Luke tells us that they were “watching Jesus closely,” not to learn from Him, but to see where they could catch Him in a sin in order to cancel Him, if at all possible, because, by this time, Jesus had gathered many disciples, and had shamed the Pharisees on several occasions for their sinful behavior and their false teachings.

There was a man there at the supper who suffered from dropsy, a painful swelling in the arms or legs, which was often a sign of heart failure. Jesus had miraculously healed many diseases before this. And some of those healings had taken place on the Sabbath Day, the day of rest. And each time Jesus had healed on the Sabbath Day, the Pharisees and other Jews had gotten very angry, both at Him and at those who dared to be healed by Him on the day when they were all supposed to be resting. In chapter 13 of Luke’s Gospel, right before the chapter of today’s Gospel, the ruler of a synagogue (the “head of a Jewish church”!) had yelled at a woman who had been suffering for 18 years, because she dared to be healed by Jesus on a Sabbath day.

So rather than wait for their accusation, Jesus decided to ask them first: Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Actually, it was. The commandment prohibited doing “work” on the Sabbath day. But what kind of work was meant? If you read the Old Testament, even Isaiah 58, which we just considered together this past Wednesday, it’s clear that the kind of work that was prohibited on the Sabbath Day was work that was done for a person’s own benefit, working your job, your farm, your kitchen, your yard, etc. Good works to help a person’s neighbor—even good works to help a needy animal!—were never prohibited. Not by God, at least. And the Jews all took care of their animals on the Sabbath Day.

But, for some reason, the experts in the Law remained silent. They remained silent, because they knew they couldn’t cite a single passage from Scripture to prove that healing someone was a violation of God’s commandment. While Jesus, on the other hand, could cite plenty of passages that showed that God wanted certain works to be done on that day, for honoring God and for serving the one in need. So they couldn’t say it was unlawful, and yet, in the ugliness of their pride, they refused to say it was lawful.

So Jesus healed the man and let him go. But He still wanted an answer from the experts in the Law. So He asked again, Which of you, if your ox or donkey fell into a pit, would not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath day? They all would! Anyone would! They’d help an animal on the Sabbath Day, but they wouldn’t approve of their own flesh and blood being helped. Why? Because they took pride in their resting on the Sabbath Day. What’s more, they took pride in being the Sabbath police, condemning others for not being as obedient as they were. And, to top it all off, they couldn’t stand having Jesus expose the ugliness of their pride. They claimed to be defending God’s law, but did they really care what God wanted? No. Did they care at all about what was good for their neighbor, for their fellow Israelite? No. If they had cared about what God wanted, they would have searched the Scriptures, where they would have found that love for God and love for neighbor were front and center, would have found that God’s commandments exposed their pride and condemned them for it, would have found that they needed atonement to be made for their pride, that their only hope did not lie in how well they rested on the Sabbath, but in the mercy of God toward ugly, prideful sinners like them.

There’s more ugliness in the second part of the Gospel, more prideful behavior on the part of the guests at that Sabbath supper. Luke says that Jesus noticed how the guests, as they arrived, all chose the places of highest honor, the tables reserved for the most important guests. Now, it wasn’t a great crime to do that at a Sabbath supper. But it could be embarrassing, as Jesus will point out, and, more importantly, He sees in that behavior an example, a pattern of how those same people behaved toward God, because they didn’t only think highly of themselves compared to the other guests. They thought highly of themselves before God Himself. And that’s both ugly, and deadly.

So He tells the parable, not of a Sabbath supper, but a of a wedding banquet, as the kingdom of heaven is often portrayed. When you are invited by someone to a wedding, do not sit down in the place of highest honor. Otherwise, if someone more honorable than you has been invited by him, the one who invited you both may come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ Then, with shame, you will proceed to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that, when the one who invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher!’ Then you will have honor in front of all those who are sitting at the table with you.

That’s good advice for attending a wedding banquet, isn’t it? If you just assume that you’re the most important person there, you run the risk of being shamed when the host of the banquet comes and kicks you out of the place of honor. But Jesus isn’t interested in earthly wedding banquet behavior. He’s interested in saving people from sin, death, and the devil, and He knows the danger of thinking highly of oneself when it comes to God.

God invites everyone to come into His kingdom. But how you come in is incredibly important. If you approach God as someone who thinks he deserves recognition, who has worked hard and earned a place in heaven and whom God is lucky to have by His side, if you approach God on your own terms, with your own beliefs, doing what you think is right (regardless of what He has to say about it in His Word), that’s like making a beeline for that place of highest honor. But if you do that, you’re doomed, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, all proud of yourself, and He will tell you to get up and give your place to someone else. And when Jesus says in His parable that you’ll have to go down to the lowest place, what He means is, you won’t have a place in God’s presence at all. You’ll be ushered out of His kingdom into eternal darkness.

On the other hand, if you approach God, as He has invited you to do, as someone who thinks he deserves nothing from Him, who recognizes that he has no righteousness of His own to offer God, who has earned only wrath and punishment from the just and holy God, who only looks to God for the mercy and favor He has promised to poor sinners for the sake of Jesus Christ, who died for you so that you might be accepted by His heavenly Father, if you approach God on His terms, listening to His Word and believing in His Son Jesus Christ, that’s like choosing the lowest place at the banquet. And if you do that, you’re saved, because the Host of the heavenly feast will come in and see you sitting there, where Jesus told you sit, and He will tell you to get up and go to a higher place, to the place of a son or a daughter of God, to a place of eternal life.

Jesus summarizes the whole thing with a saying that’s often repeated in the Scriptures: For whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. To exalt yourself is the way of the Law. It’s to think highly of yourself, as if you deserved something from God. But the Law exposes, not our worthiness, but our sin. As Paul writes to the Romans, by the Law is the knowledge of sin. When you approach God by way of the Law, as the Pharisees and experts of the law often did, your hidden ugliness is exposed every single time. So don’t exalt yourself! Don’t think highly of yourself! Don’t start to think that you’ve earned heaven by your obedience! That is the way of death. Instead, follow the way of the Gospel. The way of the Gospel is to think nothing of yourself, but to think everything of God and His promise to save you through faith in His beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to save you out of mercy, to save you and adopt you and preserve you as His child throughout this life, until you reach the heavenly wedding banquet.

If you’ve been thinking highly of yourself and you didn’t see it before as a problem, then it’s good to have the ugliness of that thinking exposed, as Jesus does in today’s Gospel. Or, if you’re already well aware of that sinful attitude of your flesh and have been struggling against it, it’s still good to have it exposed. Because the Christian life requires a continual humbling of ourselves before God. But that self-humbling, which includes faith in Christ Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer, is always accompanied by the tremendous promise that God Himself will exalt you and lift you up on high. And that self-humbling before God will also result in humility before men, as Paul says in the Epistle, I implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all humility and meekness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above you all, and through you all, and in you all. Amen.