Abstract
Hospitality and Hierarchy
Formal Japanese dining is wonderful, and I have enjoyed it for many years, but it took me a while at first to appreciate that, in Japan, hospitality comes hand-in-hand with hierarchy. I did indeed once sit at the middle of one of the wings of the low table, only to be escorted (of course, with meticulous politeness), further down towards the end, reserved for the younger people, women, and perhaps foreigners, too: a good lesson in humility. Since then, I have always sat at the bottom end of the table, and nowadays tend to find myself being elevated as a result. If only I had followed Jesus’ advice to the guests at the Pharisee’s house.
His words, though, are more than instructions in etiquette. They form a parable which stretches in two directions: firstly, backwards, in reference to Jesus’ Incarnation, and secondly, forwards, to the judgment at the end of the ages. For like the guest who goes down the ranks of the dining table, the Word descended to abject humility by becoming flesh as he did, in that self-emptying of glory that the New Testament calls kenosis; and it is by such emptying of the self, descending lower than others, that the Christian may share in the exaltation of Christ’s glorious Resurrection and Ascension.
Jesus has advice to the host, too, reinforcing the call to humility. It is not enough simply to be the humblest guest: one must also welcome the humblest guests—the poor, the crippled, the blind—just as Jesus himself dined with the despised of society. There is a risk here of reducing Jesus’ teaching to a set of moral values, and possibly pie-in-the-sky ones, at that. What we must not lose sight of is the spiritual import of the parable. While the service of the poorest is indeed a seriously meant moral exhortation, it is so because it leads to blessing and resurrection. Not, however, as a system of reward for good deeds, but because such behaviour conditions the soul against the sin of pride recounted by ben Sirach. Blessed are the humble because of their humility, not as a reward for the actions it inspires.
One must be humble to be exalted. This deep paradox mirrors the paradox at the very centre of our faith, the paradox Incarnate of the God made man, and it causes a considerable spiritual difficulty: how can one be truly humble if it is for the sake of exaltation? Is this not a false humility? It is not altogether dissimilar to the Buddhist quandary, that to reach enlightenment, one must divest oneself of all desire, even the desire for enlightenment itself. So, true humility must empty itself even of the desire for exaltation. Humility is alien to the self-centred striving, self-reliance and self-promotion of those who are confident enough to thrust themselves forward “into the king’s presence”, as Proverbs has it, and so make gods of themselves.
If humility is the opposite of self-reliance, then it must instead entail reliance on others; and so, we return to my observation of Japanese hospitality and its connection to hierarchy. There are guests, and there are hosts. Jesus calls each to a certain model of humility fitting to their role. The writer to the Hebrews tells them to remember and imitate their leaders, their hosts, you might say. Perhaps being a guest is only the first lesson in the school of humility; humbler still the host who has learnt such humility that he seeks not his own exaltation at all, but the exaltation of his guests.
Whenever we hear about meals in the Gospel, we should be alert to connotations of that focal Christian meal of the Eucharist, and surely that is so here. It is at once the Sacrament of the Incarnate Lord’s humility, as he empties himself into humble bread and wine, descending even to be the food of sinners; it is the Sacrament of his hospitality upon which we are called to rely entirely, trusting not in ourselves but in the grace that it bestows for our salvation; it is the Sacrament of his hierarchy, the Church, in which those who are entrusted to preside at the table are called to see themselves as servants of all, and to offer Christ not for their own salvation, but for that of the faithful and for the good of the whole world. So has God wonderfully ordered the feeding of his people with the finest of wheat and honey from the rock which is Christ himself, for the continuance of interdependent, mutual love.