The Oldest Sin
David Orendorff · Luke 14:1, 7-14 · September 2, 2007
Pride is the oldest sin in the book. It was with pride that the serpent tempted Adam and Eve saying to Eve, “You will not die (if you eat what God has forbidden). For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”1 Genesis 3:4-5
That’s the rub, isn’t it? We want to be like god; to be the savior and messiah of our own lives and of the lives of others. When we act upon such a desire we are humbled and we lose the very thing we sought. It is our grasping desire to be like God that removes us from the gentle Garden of Eden.
Jesus points to this messianic desire when he tells today’s parable. It is natural to want the honor and recognition of sitting at the head table. I was at my 40th High School reunion last week and at times I felt that desire. I remember the desire to be at the honored table even as a child.
One of the traditions I grew up was the children’s table. At large family gatherings like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or a Sunday dinner there were at least two tables. One was large, covered with linen, the good plates and the good silver, and was reserved for adults. The other was composed of the leftovers; the leftover card tables and a mismatch of folding chairs; the leftover plates, mostly melmac, and an assortment of utensils. This was the children’s table.
I remember when I no longer wanted to sit with the children. I wanted to be with the big people, the adults. And when my older cousins got to move to the big table I was envious and felt small when I wanted to be big.
John Ortberg’s The Life You’ve Always Wanted is a great book about spiritual disciplines for ordinary people. He opens his chapter on “Appropriate Smallness” The Practice of Servanthood with this information:
Leon, Joseph, and Clyde all suffered from a messiah complex. It was not just a touch of narcissism or a dash of grandiosity. They were three chronic psychiatric patients at a hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, all diagnosed with psychotic delusional disorder, grandiose type. Each one maintained he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Each one believed he was the central figure around whom the world revolved: the three little messiahs.
Psychologist Milton Rokeach wrote The Three Christs of Ypsilanti about his attempts to help these men come to grips with the truth about themselves and learn to be just Leon, Joseph, and Clyde.
Rokeach spent two years working with the men, but change came hard. It was as if they were not sure they could bear to live if they weren’t who they thought they were. They could be very rational in other aspects of life but, as Rokeach put it, they would hold onto messianic delusions “even though they are grotesque, ego-defensive distortions of reality.”
With little to lose, Rokeach decided to try an experiment. He put the three men into one small group. For two years the three delusional messiahs were assigned adjacent beds, ate every meal together at the same job, and met daily for group discussions. Rokeach wanted to see if rubbing up against other would-be messiahs might diminish their delusion - a kind of messianic twelve-step recovery group.
The experiment led to some interesting conversations. One of the men would claim, “I’m the messiah, the son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent here to save the earth.”
“How do you know?” Rokeach would ask.
“God told me.”
And one of the other patients would counter, “I never told you any such thing.”2 John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 1997), 97-8.
You don’t have to be totally insane to play at the foolishness of being messiah. Christine Pisera Naman teaches a kindergarten class in a Christian school.
After teaching a lesson to my kindergarten class on Jesus and his disciples, I was feeling quite proud. It was a model lesson, an A, and included a game, a song and a story.
At the conclusion of the lesson, I opened the discussion to questions. With pride, I looked out at my students’ wildly waving arms. My lesson was obviously a success. Teaching seemed so rewarding. I would now let them shower me with this new knowledge that I had so skillfully imparted to them.
I called on Brittney to respond. Since her arm was waving more frantically than the rest, surely her observation would be that much more brilliant. “Brittney, what do you have to say about Jesus and his disciples?” I asked eagerly.
“Well,” she began, with true kindergarten confidence, “I just wanted you to know that I know a lot about disciples 'cause at my house we disciple everything. We have a special disciple can for plastic, a special disciple can for glass, and a special disciple can for paper. My mom says it’s how we save the earth.” 3 I really don’t know where I got this. I have a photo copy of it.
We practice the desire to be messiah in many small ways as well. In his book 4 for the next three paragraphs I will be borrowing from The Life You’ve Always Wanted, pp. 99-101 Ortberg identifies some of the typical characteristics by which pride seeks to enter and direct our lives.
Vanity - This is the tendency to look in mirrors to see if I am looking good. A slightly more advanced form … can also be noticed in us when in looking at new photographs, we pretend to look at the group, but are really checking out how we look in the picture. Vanity is about me before you.
Stubbornness - This form of pride causes us to shun correction. Stubbornness makes us not hear when someone loves us enough to risk anger and rejection with a bit of truth. Granted not every correction is offered with kindness or is even accurate. But an immediate defensiveness to all words of correction prevents good advice from penetrating and makes us almost impossible to live with because since we have no faults, all errors, mistakes, and stupidities, have to be someone else’s fault. Stubbornness invariably leads to blaming and then to shaming. And those who blame and shame eventually find themselves alone and without love.
Exclusion - Of this characteristic Ortberg writes:
At the deepest level, pride is the choice to exclude both God and other people from their rightful place in our hearts. Jesus said that the essence of spiritual life is to love God and to love people. Pride destroys our capacity to love … Pride moves us to exclude instead of to embrace … Pride moves us to judge rather than to serve. Pride means not only that we want to be smart and wealthy, but also that we will not be satisfied until we are smarter and wealthier than those around us.5 ibid. 100
Standing on the outside of Leon, Joseph, Clyde and Christine we laugh. But when we are on the inside, when it is we who want to big, important and messiah, it is not so funny. Standing on the outside of a grasping pride we see its foolishness and futility. But on the inside we are torn with the fear that we will fail, be left at the children’s table and maybe even abandoned.
Ortberg writes:
Aim for the Three Messiahs and you end up playing the Three Stooges - Larry, Moe, and Curly arguing over their place in the Trinity. As we read about this, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The bitter irony is, the very delusion to which they clung so tenaciously is what cut them off from life. To stop being the messiah sounded terrifying. But it would have been their salvation, if they could only have tried. If Leon and Joseph and Clyde could have stopped competing to see who gets to be the messiah, they could have become Leon and Joseph and Clyde. (“Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.”)6 ibid. 98
It is the pride of desiring to be like God that Jesus is addressing when he tells the parable about the seating arrangement at dinner. It is a grasping pride that leads guests to seek the places of honor at a wedding banquet. It is a wounded pride that stings when they are requested to move to a lower place further down the table, perhaps to eat leftovers in the far corner.
Jesus’ parable suggests that when arriving at the banquet, each guest take the lower seat, the more humble place at the banquet and then let the host, if it is to be, raise them up. Rather than raising ourselves with grasping pride, we are to let others to invite us up.
I am fascinated with the word Jesus uses for humility. He contrasts “raising oneself up” with taking the place of the lowest, the tapeinos. The tapeinos are the ones who serve others with their lives. They serve not because they hope for honor or recognition, but because it is their job. The tapeinos are the children, the servants, the day laborers, even the slaves. The tapeinos consider it a privilege to have any seat at the wedding feast. The tapeinos consider it an honor to be called by name. To say hello to a tapeinos is to make their day.
Jesus then invites the Pharisee and his guests, men of education, position and power, to be as one of the tapeinos. To see life not as a self earned privilege which must be gained, but as a gift from God meant to be used in service to others.
The life of servanthood which Jesus teaches is the life to which we are made and called. In letting God be God, and letting God direct us as humble servants, love, peace and joy find us and live in us. We are God’s servants to the world, made to serve each other with compassion and justice. When we do the good things we do, not from a desire to be important, but from the joyous opportunity to serve then we are saved from vanity, stubbornness and exclusion.
When in true humility we serve another we forget about ourselves and shalom become ours and the world’s. In being one of the tapeinos we are set free from grasping pride. In humility we are able to give who we are and what we have as gift, just as it has come to us as gift.
Living as a servant our relationship with God is stronger; our relationships with our family, colleagues and even enemies become holy and whole. Living as tapeinos is to dwell in the Garden of Eden and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Gifted servants of God, may love and joy find each of you in today’s life. Shalom and Amen.