THE TABLE JESUS IS SITTING AT
Repentance
is simply being honest about your life and beginning to take responsibility for
it. God cannot do much with us until we decide to be honest.
Who does not like to
be honored? Even if modesty keeps us from saying so, we all like to be honored.
In fact, we need to be honored. To be psychologically and emotionally healthy
we need a measure of positive recognition and respect from other people. It is
natural, then, to want to be honored. Shakespeare wrote, "If it is a sin
to covet honor, I am the most offending soul."
It becomes a problem
when we forget that honor is something that must be conferred. You cannot claim
honor for yourself; it must be given or acknowledged by someone else. Jesus
offers some wisdom on this subject and on the danger of taking the seat of
honor prematurely. He went to eat in the home of a leading Pharisee, and He
watched as the guests sought out the prominent places. He said, in essence,
"When you go to a wedding banquet, don't make the mistake of saying,
'Look, there are some empty seats at the head table. Let's go sit in
them.'" There are few things more embarrassing than to be found sitting in
a seat that belongs to someone else.
During Jesus' time,
there were well-defined, carefully maintained hierarchies of power and
prestige, like monarchies and rulers - something like a social chain of
command. People had designated places and each one knew his spot. But Jesus concluded
His advice with these words, "For everyone who exalts himself will be
humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted" (Lk 14:11).
Later, Jesus would display His teaching for the disciples in a dramatic way. On
the night of His betrayal He would leave His central place at the Passover meal
and move around the table, from one to the other, washing His disciples' feet.
All this has little to
do with table manners, of course. Jesus is offering a principle of life. He is
speaking of how life works. Expressed negatively, it means this: Life won't
work - that is, will not be what it was created to be - with one's self at the
center of everything. Maybe this is what is wrong in our world. People are
trying to conduct the business of living in a way that doesn't work.
We are Christians and
we claim to follow Jesus. If we are honest, however, we have to admit that most
of the time we're taking the same road through life as everybody else. Our
chief goals, like our neighbors', are success and security. The problem isn't
that these are bad or unimportant. The problem arises when these become our
primary goals and life is all about "me."
Success and security
can become such priorities that life ends up revolving around me and my own
self-interest. Life, as the Creator intended it to be, won't work that way.
When we are at the center of the universe, even God will have to orbit around
us! Sometimes, weather we realize it or not, this is precisely what we expect
God to do. Oftentimes, we have great difficulty seeing how self-centered we are
so it would hardly occur to us that this is what keeps us from experiencing the
joy we seek. We keep looking for happiness from our positions on the thrones of
our lives. We assume the place of honor, then, wonder why life is so
unfulfilling.
Repentance is
necessary. When we are called to repent, our first reaction might be
defensiveness. It's like being asked to admit you are a bad person whether you
believe it or not. That isn't the point at all. The point is honesty.
Repentance is simply being honest about your life and beginning to take
responsibility for it. God cannot do much with us until we decide to be honest.
Don't you sometimes feel the world is dying for want of honesty? Yet, because
we are either stubborn or afraid, or both, we seem determined to defend
ourselves against the truth about ourselves. We will try to justify ourselves
to our dying breath. Being honest would mean facing realities we've spent years
avoiding.
You can't have a
quality relationship, or true intimacy, without honesty. The risk of being
honest is love's absolute prerequisite. This is why Jesus calls us to,
"Repent." The essence of sin is the infantile self-centeredness we've
been talking about. Sin isn't primarily the things we do. It is the inward
condition that is manifested in the things we do. Sin is putting ourselves in
the places of honor and insisting that we deserve to be there. When we have
seen the truth and repented of it, however, something incredible happens. We
are invited to a table where all the seats are places of honor!
The table Jesus is
sitting at...