Subversion of the Banquet

Ancient Israel, just like most ancient Middle Eastern cultures, had specified roles that people were expected to play.  These roles were fixed.  There was no social mobility.  If you were born a peasant, you were expected to conform to society's expectations about peasantry.  If you were born a women, you were expected to conform to society's expectations about gender roles.  Honor, in ancient Israel, was not based upon success and moving up the figurative ladder, but instead in accepting one's role and place in the system.  Similarly, shame was found in a failure to conform to your expected place.

This system of honor and shame was played out in the place that one sat in a banquet.  If you were at the bottom of the figurative social ladder, you sat in the lowest place.  If you were at the top, you sat in the highest place.

Jesus' advice for disciples in ancient Israel was to subvert this system by sitting in the lowest place.  In so doing, Jesus was calling his disciples to mirror what God was accomplishing in Jesus.  God, in Jesus, intentionally took upon Himself the form of a servant, the one in ancient Israel at the lowest rung of the social ladder.  In so doing, God, the King of the kings of the earth, revealed both the idiocy and violence inherent in the system itself.  Jesus called on the disciples not to merely act ethically in the system, but to subvert the system and reveal that it was the product of our sin.

Contemporary Western culture has abandoned the notion of stratified social roles.  Western culture recognizes the inherent rights of the individual to move up (or down) on the social ladder.  Honor, in Western culture, is in being at the top of the ladder, and shame is being at the bottom of the ladder.

Jesus' advice to disciples today is the same as ancient Israel.  The system may have changed from one of stratified roles to roles of relative mobility, but the system itself is the product of our sin.  Too often in the Church we think that the role of the disciple is to merely act ethically and with virtue in the system (i.e. to move up the ladder through hard work and virtue rather than fraud and deceit).  God, in Jesus, is calling us to do something more interesting than that.  We are called to subvert the system itself and reveal its idiocy and violence by intentionally taking upon ourselves the form of a servant.  Rather than falling all over ourselves trying to be at the highest seat in the banquet hall, we should be falling all over ourselves to be the servant of one another, taking the lowest place.  In doing so, we model and mirror what God accomplished in Jesus, who took upon Himself the form of a servant.