Trads, try not to scorn me but we use the new-fangled three year lectionary in the missions, which means today's Gospel was Luke 14:1, 7-14. Here, Jesus is at a feast held by a ruler of the pharisees and he gives, on the face of it, a simple warning against pride.
When you're invited to a wedding feast don't go for the seat of honor lest you're cast down in shame to a lower place. Instead, go for the lower place and be invited up. He concludes, "He who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
How that must have stung in such exalted company. Woe to you pharisees! You tithe and go for the seats of honor at the synagogue, you make long prayers and while you're at it devour widow's houses. "Ye are as graves," spiritually dead.
We can imagine the dinner party's host shifting uneasily as he's served five star from his slaves, and we can also imagine the Savior holding the man's gaze, eye to eye. The Word pinning the darkness to itself, and of course the pharisee can't complain; God abhors the proud, they are repellent to him, the Law and Prophets make this clear. Our Lady exults, "He has cast down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek." But why are the proud so egregious in the eyes of God?
Because they're ugly in themselves. "Look at me, I am so very, very important," said the junior British Army officer, fresh out of Sandhurst. to the platoon and the world. I know, a certain arrogance goes with the trade, but still, no one likes that man, not me, not you, not God. Again, pride is the start of sin, a well-head of wickedness. What evil will a proud, self-obsessed, exalted man not commit? More seriously, this deluded, luciferean attitude of heart and mind, of soul, is idolatrous.
The proud man sets himself up against God, he's forgotten "it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves." And therein lies disaster, you cannot go against God, reality itself, and stand. The math doesn't work. What a warning to the pharisees, what a warning to our present age.
Are we not at the xenith, the pyramid peak of rebellion against God? What would the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist look like if was a person? Hideous thought. I tell you, its head would be so swollen with self-importance that it couldn't fit through the door posts of the narrow gate which leads to the marriage feast, to heaven.
Caveat in mind, what a blessing that the people of the missions and all over the world came together in humility to worship God, to adore Christ as their sovereign King and Lord, to hear his revealed Word and be nourished by the Sacrament of the Altar in which we find union with the one perfect sacrifice of our Savior.
May God give us the grace to go out into the world and invite the "maimed, the lame, the blind," all those wounded by sin, to the Feast, to the heavenly banquet, even as we ourselves have been invited by the author and perfecter of our faith.
Ad Maiorem,
LSP
