Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14
One sabbath when he went to dine at the house of a ruler who belonged to the Pharisees, they were watching him.
7 Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he marked how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, 8 “When you are invited by any one to a marriage feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest a more eminent man than you be invited by him; 9 and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. 11 For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
12 He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. 13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Julie Andrews is famous for her many remarkable talents. But among those her know her best, she is also remarkable for the disciplined way she structures her life. She was doing what all the time management experts preach long before they came along. Once a friend of hers said, “Isn’t all this regimentation kind of a cage?” to which Julie Andrews replied, “Some regard discipline as a chore. For me it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.”[1] The same behavior, but two radically different interpretations.
The same might be said for this morning’s lesson from Hebrews. On the one hand, it looks like just another list of rules to follow – odd coming on the heels of the sermon from last week, which was all about breaking rules in favor of people.
But if you look at from a “Julie Andrews” perspective, it looks more like this passage is really about the freedom that comes from loving others in the way that God in Christ loves us.
But before we get to all that, we have to take a step back and talk a little bit the Epistle itself. Hebrews is what the New Testament scholar E. F. Scott called “the riddle of the New Testament.” When it was written, what its intended audience was, and who wrote are questions that have gone unanswered for nearly two thousand years. The very first list of “sanctioned” New Testament books, called the Muratorian Canon, doesn’t even mention it. The great scholars of the second and third centuries, Clement and Origen, loved it, but weren’t sure if it should be included as “official Scripture.” Other early scholars and leaders either don’t mention it or question whether it belongs in the Canon. But by the time of Athanasius in the mid-fourth century, Hebrews was definitely accepted as a New Testament book. Yet even Martin Luther, over a thousand years later, was still not too sure about it.
As to when it was written, and to whom, the internal evidence from the letter itself indicates that it was written for a group of second-generation Christians, who had received the gospel from those who had personally heard the Lord. They were not new to the faith; they had a long history; some of their leaders had been martyred, though none of them had (yet); but they had suffered such indignities as the looting of their goods. It seems plausible that it was written to a small group of educated Christians in Rome, or at least somewhere in Italy.
As to who wrote it, Origen famously remarked: “Who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews only God knows for certain. Three major candidates have been proposed over the years: Barnabas, the disciple; Apollos, whom we remember was active as a preacher in Corinth at the same time Paul was there; and the great German scholar Adolf von Harnack proposed that it was co-written by Aquila and Priscilla in Rome.
But, as William Barclay writes in conclusion to the introduction to his book on Hebrews: “To us, the author must remain a voice and nothing more; but we can be thankful to God for the work of this great nameless individual who wrote with incomparable skill and beauty about the Jesus who is the way to reality and the way to God.”[2]
So much for the background.
The Letter to the Hebrews is all about access to God. To the author of Hebrews, religion is what opens doors and removes barriers to God. And, unlike others of that day and age who sought to gain access to God by means of gnosis, or secret knowledge, the author of Hebrews found in Christ the one Person who him (and us) into the very presence of God. If the author would have summed up his letter in one statement, it would have been “Let us draw near.”
Drawing near to God through Jesus Christ meant following what Jesus Christ taught with might and main. The first sentence in the passage sets the stage: “Let brotherly love continue.” Other translations say: “Let mutual love continue.” Either way, this tells us that these people were already following Jesus’ command to “love one another as I have loved you.” They had gotten the message and were doing their best to follow it. So it seems to me that saying “let mutual love continue” is more of a word of encouragement than it is a rule.
That’s the way it is with rules sometimes – they’re really more what we today might call “best practices,” guidelines, or procedures. The admonitions in today’s lesson are descriptions of the marks of the Christian life, five essential qualities without which faith ran cold.
Again, the first, and most important, was love. But not just love, mutual love. Early Christians were champions in this regard – a Greek orator named Aristides once described the followers of Jesus Christ to the Roman Emperor Hadrian like this: “They love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother.” This was remarkable in that day, but I am happy to say somewhat less remarkable today, because of people like us who, like the people the Letter to the Hebrews addresses, also follow Jesus’ command.
The second mark of the Christian is hospitality. The Jews, Barclay tells us, listed six things which were important both in this life and in the life to come, and at the top of that list was this: “Hospitality to the stranger and visiting the sick.” The Greeks even gave their chief god Zeus the title “Zeus Xenios,” or “Zeus, the god of strangers.” Hospitality was extremely necessary for Christians of that day, and no less so for us today. Christianity is the religion of the open door.
The third hallmark of the Christian is sympathy for those in trouble. Tertullian wrote in his work The Apology: “If there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s church, they become the nurslings of their confession.” Aristides also said of the Christians: “If they hear that any one of their number is imprisoned or in distress for the sake of Christ’s name, they all render aid in his necessity and, if he can be redeemed, they set him free.”[3]
Whenever we do someone a good turn, we are doing nothing less than the Will of God.
The fourth mark of the Christian is purity. Nowadays, that term brings with it an awful lot of baggage. I think that, for us today, it boils down to what our motivations are for doing what we do. If we always keep in mind how another person – no matter who that person is – can do right by us, if we treat them fairly, if we treat them honorably, and if we follow the words of that benediction and hold fast that which is good; render to no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak; help the afflicted;
honor everyone; and love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit – we’ll show that fourth hallmark in our own lives.
The last sign is one that might seems a little strange: Contentment. It think this one basically means that, if we recognize that we belong to God, there’s not a whole lot else that we need. Setting goals, working hard, achieving success – these are all fine things; but contentment comes from the knowledge that these fine things do not produce contentment, but are products of it. When we know, deep down in our hearts that, no matter what, we always have the presence and the help of God, we realize that nothing that the world can give us can ever improve on that. That’s contentment with a Capital “C”!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/julie_andrews_129112
[2] Barclay, William, The Letter to the Hebrews, The New Daily Study Bible, © The William Barclay Estate, 1976, 2002, Louisville, Kentucky, Westminster John Knox Press, pp. 10-11
[3] Quoted in Barclay, William, The Letter to the Hebrews, The New Daily Study Bible, © The William Barclay Estate, 1976, 2002, Louisville, Kentucky, Westminster John Knox Press, p. 226