Jesus Humbled Himself For Our Exaltation

17th Sunday after Trinity

September 18, 2016

Luke 14:11

Jesus Humbled Himself For Our Exaltation

In the name of the Father and of the ☩ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!

⁸“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. ⁹If 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 least important place. ¹⁰But 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. ¹¹For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 14:8-11)

This is good advice, isn't it? Don't sit in a seat that isn't yours. In a time when everyone is encouraged to feel entitled to whatever chair they won't, a little humility might go a long way.

But this advice isn't limited to the lips of Jesus. Solomon, whose wisdom came from listening to Jesus, wrote down this advice 1,000 years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem:

⁶Do not exalt yourself in the king's presence, and do not claim a place among great men; ⁷it is better for him to say to you, “Come up here,” than for him to humiliate you before a nobleman. (Proverbs 25:6-7)

This advice is timeless. It was true in 1000 BC, it was true in Jesus' day, it's still true today.

To Jesus' original audience—a group of Pharisees—this advice was meant to rebuke them. His description accurately got what they did. They craved attention; they wanted the best seats. The younger Pharisees tried for the places of honor and were sent down. But the older Pharisees had learned the wisdom of Solomon and grasped how to get good seats by taking the lowest places. It was a good trick and it probably worked.

This is why Jesus said at another time:

²“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. . . . But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. . . . ⁵“Everything they do is done for men to see . . . ⁶they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues . . . ²⁸In the same way, on the outside [they] appear to people as righteous but on the inside [they] are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matthew 23:2, 3b, 5-6, 28)

We are no better than Pharisees, young or old. We might appear righteousness to others and we might even begin to believe our own propaganda. But we must confess that on the inside we are full of wickedness.

We wickedly covet attention. And we pay attention to where others sit and we judge them. In our fairness-obsessed culture where we sit doesn't seem to matter much anymore. But we still care about who's getting attention.

For example, when we visit others Lutheran churches, we complain when none of the members of the church says hello to us. We crave attention, but we also know that we should try to appear the opposite. So we try to piously pass off our obsession with attention as evangelism. We claim, “Well, if they don't greet me and aren't overtly friendly to me, then they must not care about evangelism.” We should stop pretending and using imaginary strangers; we're coveting attention and when we notice it going to others, we become peevish and upset.

Or when our ideas at home, school, work, or church don't get the attention we think they deserve, we become dissatisfied. When our plans don't play out as we thought, we become irritated and we complain to ears that are eager to hear gossip.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Christ, have mercy on us!

Lord, have mercy on us!

And He does. Indeed His parable about picking the lowest seat at the banquet is best fulfilled by Him. Listen to Paul's description of Jesus and compare it with Jesus' story.

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

⁶Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

⁷but made Himself nothing,

taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

⁸And being found in appearance as a man,

He humbled Himself

and became obedient to death—

even death on a cross!

⁹Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place

and gave Him the name that is above every name,

¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

Jesus willingly took the lowest place—He became a man! He willingly got even lower—He was nailed to a tree to be punished for the sins of the world! And then His Father, as His Son committed His spirit to Him, came and said in a way: “My beloved Son, move up to a better place.” So He raised up His Son's soul to His right hand and raised Him bodily on the third day.

He who humbles Himself will be exalted.

Jesus humbled Himself and is exalted.

Jesus humbled Himself for us lowly sinners and for His sake, we are exalted with Him!

God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Alleluia! Amen!