A Counterintuitive Stance
Luke 14:7-11 NKJV
7 So He told a parable to those who were invited, when He noted how they chose the best places, saying to them: 8 "When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him;9 and he who invited you and him come and say to you, 'Give place to this man,' and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, 'Friend, go up higher.' Then you will have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you. 11 For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
If you were a Pharisee, you invited Jesus to dinner at your own risk. Jesus did not sit quietly and observe what was going on. He had a spiritual perspective coupled with a distaste for pride. In our verses for today, Jesus is invited to dinner and watches how the Pharisees jockey for the best seats. He had already healed a man before dinner, which just happened to be on the Sabbath, and now He had some more wisdom for the Pharisees.
Since they were picking out the best seats for themselves, Jesus offered some new thoughts on what they should have done. Jesus said they should have gone to the lowest seats or the least desirable seats at the dinner. If they took the best seats, they ran the risk of someone more honorable coming in and being displaced by the host. Then they would have to suffer the indignity of having to take a lower seat in front of everyone else. Jesus shared the Kingdom of God's way of seating. Choose the lowest seat, and then the host could ask you to take a better seat.
I don't believe that dinner seating was the ultimate goal of Jesus sharing this parable. The bigger lesson here was the principle of exalting yourself versus allowing the Lord to exalt you. Exalt yourself and be humbled. Humble yourself and be exalted. This is such counterintuitive wisdom. The tendency in man is to exalt ourselves. An old phrase was you have to toot your own horn, or it shall not be tooted. More modern equivalents would be "Build your personal brand." "Visibility equals opportunity." "Own your impact." Social media adds "Main Character Energy" and "Flexing." Just the mere fact that there are so many variations of shameless self-promotion indicates that picking the best seat has been with us for a long time. This is the nature of man. But not the nature of the new man, the one united with Christ.
I remember that at a church I attended, there was special seating available for the prayer partners in the first two rows of the church. They wanted the prayer partners down at the front. The thing I observed was that it created an environment where being asked to be a prayer partner and sit down front became a coveted badge of spirituality. The seats became a place of pride more than a place of convenience. This disturbed me to the point that when we started The Ark Church, I completely abolished special seating. You can't look at our services and determine who the spiritual people are. And no one is fighting to be in the first two rows.
In our flexing brand-building world, God's Kingdom still operates the same. The proud get humbled, and the humble get exalted. And it's God, not man, doing the exalting.