Your Seat at the Table

Have you ever been out at a coffee shop or a restaurant? You find a table, you settle in, and maybe, just maybe, you engage in a little bit of people-watching. You watch the interactions, you see people meeting friends, you notice the person working diligently on their laptop. It’s a harmless pastime. But then, after a few minutes, you get that feeling. You look up, and you realize you aren’t the only one who is people-watching. Someone is looking directly at you. In that moment, the dynamic shifts. You’re no longer just an observer; you are being observed.

In our Gospel reading today from Luke, we find ourselves in a similar situation. There is a lot of watching going on.

The scene is set on the Sabbath. Jesus has been invited to dinner at the home of a prominent Pharisee. Now, let’s pause there for a moment. We often have a very negative view of the Pharisees. When we read scripture, we tend to lump them in with the high priests, the scribes, and anyone else who opposes Jesus. But the relationship was more complex than that. Some Pharisees warned Jesus of danger, and Jesus likely shared a good deal of common theological ground with many of them. Today, he is a guest in a Pharisee’s home.

But it’s a tense dinner party. Jesus has a reputation, especially when it comes to the Sabbath. The text tells us plainly that “they were watching him closely.” Every eye is on Jesus. Will he break another Sabbath rule? What will he say? What will he do?

But what becomes clear as the story unfolds is that Jesus is also watching them.

He watches as the guests arrive, and he notices how they scramble for the best seats. To understand what’s happening, we need to picture the dining arrangement. It was likely a large, U-shaped table called a triclinium. Your position at that table was everything. It was your social security number, your resume, and your bank statement all rolled into one. The host sat in the middle, and the seats of highest honor were next to him. To be asked to sit there was a public declaration of your importance. To grab a seat of honor only to be told, “Excuse me, that’s for someone else,” and be moved down to the end of the table—that was a moment of profound public shame.

Jesus sees this jostling for position, this anxiety about status, and he tells a parable. He says, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor.” Instead, he advises, “go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’”

Now, we have to be careful here. It would be easy to mistake this for a savvy piece of social advice, a two-point plan for getting ahead in the world. Take the lowest seat as a clever strategy, hoping for a public promotion. But to focus on that is to miss the radical point of Jesus’ message entirely. This isn’t a passage about how to make friends and influence people. Jesus is inviting those at the table—and us—to live in a different reality, a world within a world: the Kingdom of God.

He is asking the guests, the ones with status and influence, to assume a posture of genuine humility. The message isn’t for the servants or the marginalized to humble themselves further; they already live in a humbled state. The message is for those who are clinging to their honor. Jesus says, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” This isn’t a strategy; it’s a spiritual reorientation. It’s about finding our worth not in our seat at the table, but in the one who invited us to the feast.

But Jesus isn’t done watching, and he isn’t done teaching. He turns his gaze from the guests to the host. He challenges the very reason the party is happening in the first place.

In the Greco-Roman world, your guest list was an investment portfolio. You invited people who could advance your career, people who could do you favors, people who could invite you back to their own lavish parties. That’s how you climbed the social ladder. It was a closed loop of reciprocity.

And Jesus blows this system apart. He says to his host, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.”

Instead, Jesus gives him a new guest list. “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”

Can you imagine the silence in the room? Invite the people who can offer you nothing in return. Invite the people who can’t get you into the right social circles, who can’t improve your business prospects, who can’t repay the favor. Invite the people society has pushed to the margins.

The unspoken question hanging in the air is, “Why? If I do this, how will I be repaid?”

And this is the heart of the matter. If we expect repayment in this life, we have our eyes on the wrong prize. Jesus is calling the host, and us, to operate not on an economy of reciprocity, but on an economy of grace. He asks us to trust in God’s radical abundance, to believe that our ultimate reward is not found in the social transactions of this world. Your reward, Jesus promises, will come “at the resurrection of the righteous.” You will have a seat at the one banquet that truly matters, and there, you will know your true worth.

This radical call to hospitality, to fling open the doors to those who are strangers to us, is echoed beautifully in our reading from Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind—they are the strangers at our gate. And in welcoming them, in offering them a seat at our table, we might just be entertaining angels. We might, in fact, be welcoming Jesus himself. As he says in Matthew’s Gospel, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The question for us today is simple, but profound. Who is on our guest list? When we think about who we invite into our homes, into our lives, into our churches, are we operating on the world’s economy of repayment, or on the Kingdom’s economy of grace? Are we jostling for the best seat, or are we looking to see who has no seat at all?

How we live out this call to humility and hospitality might look different for each of us, but the call is the same. It is a call to invert our expectations. A call to stop watching others to see where we rank, and to start watching for the person Christ is calling us to welcome. It is a call to trust that our true value is not determined by our seat at the table, but by the boundless love of the God who invites us all to His heavenly banquet.

Let us go from this place, not looking for the best seat, but looking for the forgotten guest, knowing that in welcoming them, we welcome our Lord.

Amen.