22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (August 31, 2025)

We’re heading into September and a scenario that is a familiar rite of passage. It’s lunch time on the first day of high school. You’re a freshman or an older transfer from another school. You don’t know anybody! With a bit of trepidation, you hold your tray of cafeteria food and look around the large dining room. Where will you sit?

Over on one table are a bunch of tough looking guys who must be on the football team, joking around with each other. At another table are a bunch of trendily dressed girls who are excitedly sharing what they did over the summer. Down by the other corner are a bunch of bookish-looking kids who can probably write out the quadratic equation on a classroom whiteboard with their eyes closed. And then there are the skater dudes in their beanies and grunge attire. This cafeteria is an undiscovered country!

If you sit with the football jocks, they’ll laugh you away. You would feel so out of place with the talkative girls. The nerds and the skaters would give you dirty looks and maybe toss some insulting zingers at you. Again, the question: Where will you sit? You wouldn’t feel comfortable with any group, but if you go off to a corner and sit by yourself you risk looking like an outcast and a loner.  

That brings us to today’s Gospel. Jesus continues his teaching from last Sunday by sharing a parable about the social dimension of the Kingdom of God.

He told a parable to those who had been invited, noticing how they were choosing the places of honor at the table. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not recline at table in the place of honor. . . Rather, when you are invited, go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, ‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’ . . . For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. . .

At first glance, this sounds like practical etiquette advice. But Luke gives us reason to believe that he does not want us to read the text quite in this way. 

Then he said to the host who invited him, “When you hold a lunch or dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment. Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind – those who in the culture of the Roman Empire and of Israel at the time were outcast and ignored. Luke is railing against those particularly in leadership who, in their ambition to rise up in stature, step over or step on those less fortunate. This is a not-so-veiled attempt on Luke’s part to criticize the social structures of his day that abuse power and authority at the expense of the forgotten and the oppressed. In this Gospel, Jesus gives us a challenge: Who do we invite to the table of the Lord?

The message today is for us to humbly see others and ourselves as God sees us. Our systems of worldly standing don’t matter to God, who calls us to break out of them. The Eucharist is a foretaste of the heavenly Kingdom where everyone is invited to sit together at God’s table: The rich and the poor. The powerful and the powerless. The famous and the forgotten. The football jocks, the trendy girls, the nerds, the skaters and YOU.