Fr. Albert
St. Peter Catholic Church, New Iberia
Satan is your worst enemy. But, after him, you are your own worst enemy. Christ knows this and that is why he seizes this banquet as an opportunity to teach the people about real discipleship. We are selfish and our egos seem to never rest in their quest for gratification. Philosophers and psychologists have long debated whether or not altruism even really exists. Those who think it does notargue that every apparently altruistic act really has some hidden selfish benefit. A good feeling for doing the right thing. A hope that you will be repaid by the people you help. A sense of pride and accomplishment.
Some even argue that the idea of going to heaven for doing good things makes even saintly actions selfish in their own way. Really, if you try hard enough, you might be able to come up with a selfish explanation for just about any action. But this is a kind of circular logic – it asserts that you can find some personal benefit in every action and then claims that that personal benefit must have been the motivation behind it. It reduces the very complicated reality of motivation down to the one explanation it was already looking for.
It’s true, in most cases you can find something that benefits the person doing good for someone else. But that is something very different from proving that that benefit is the reason why they acted. We human beings can be quite messy and we often do things without perfectly understanding our own motives. Usually, we act with a broad mixture of motivations. A person can become a doctor so that he can help people while at the same time making a decent living. Both of these motives are mixed together, but which one is dominant?
Ultimately, the fullest answer to the question about altruism can be found in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. God, who needed nothing and chose to become man, suffer, and die for our sake. Pure altruism, no selfish gain. That same Jesus tells us to be like him and to be his followers. If God can be altruistic and tells us to be so, then it must be really possible. So what do we do about our tendency toward selfishness? Christ has an answer.
First, he directly targets the number one obstacle to being generous and charitable: pride. Pride is the most insidious, the most subtle, and the most powerful force that prevents us from doing any real and lasting good. Even if the end result looks the same, a man who feeds the poor to make himself look good and a man who does it because he actually cares about the poor are accomplishing different things. One is moving towards eternal salvation, the other toward eternal loss.
So, Christ tells you to face your pride head on. Pick the lowest place at a banquet. The banquet serves as a parable and its lesson can be applied anywhere. Make no assumptions about your own importance and train yourself to accept the lowest place. Of course, Jesus means for this kind of self-humiliation to be genuine and not just a clever ploy to get moved up and look good later. With an authentic effort to accept the lowest place, you can gradually root out pride and be prepared for a genuine exaltation at the hand of God, who is not fooled by appearances.
Actively seeking out the lowest place helps you to get short-sighted self-interest out of the way. It prepares you to be more genuine in what you do for others. Hence we see the lesson on who you invite to a banquet. It is a good thing to spend time with people, to give them food, and to show that you are thinking of them. Why is it that Christ says not to invite your friends and family over for dinner? How can this be a bad thing? Well, he is not forbidding you to have a meal with your friends and family. There is nothing wrong with that. But, there is also nothing terribly special about it either. Its fine as far as it goes, but it definitely doesn’t go all the way to the kind of heavenly, generous, and altruistic love that God showed to us and calls us to show. Go ahead and enjoy time with friends and family, but don’t start tallying up those parties as points on your heavenly scorecard. In some cases, courting the rich and powerful might just be a conniving attempt at winning some kind of special favor for yourself and could count against you.
Rather “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Why? Because that is what God does. He invites us to the heavenly marriage feast. We have nothing to offer God, he needs nothing from us, and there is no way to repay him. In order to follow his generous example, we should look for chances to help those who cannot repay us. He is again using the feast as an example because of the context he’s in, but the point is much broader. He is teaching us about almsgiving. Almsgiving was a standard part of the Jewish religion and it’s a standard part of our own. It’s one of the “Big Three.” Christian pray, they fast, and they give alms.
So that’s the two keys to winning the battle against Satan and against yourself: humility and almsgiving. These two allow you to root out selfish motives and actually seek the good of other people. These two traits allow you to become more like God, who is perfectly altruistic.
Of course, it is true that these things do in fact benefit us in the long run. Both the first reading from Sirach and Christ’s teachings make it very clear that God’s exalts the humble and rewards those who give alms. Alms can atone for sins and help to pave the way to eternal bliss in heaven – how is that not selfish? Because being selfish is exclusionary. It puts oneself at the top and everything else after. Humility and almsgiving only help us if they are genuine – if they really make the good of others a central motivation for us. It is the paradox of Christianity that the best thing you can do for your life is to lose it for the sake of the Gospel.
Ultimately, what is good for ourselves and good for others is one and the same: God himself, who is the source of all goodness. It is sin that convinced us to divide goodness into mutually exclusive categories of good for them, good for me. In reality, real charity and real altruism are woven into what is good for us. All that aims at serving God, directly or through our neighbor, is good for both us and them. But what is easily said is not so easily lived.
And so we give thanks for the gift of God’s grace and the guide of his teachings. Follow the practical advice given here. Seriously look for chances to avoid calling attention to yourself, to avoid taking credit, to avoid unnecessary honors. Inviting the poor to a banquet is not just a metaphor – many saints actually did it: St. Louis, King of France, St. Catherine, Mother Teresa’ mother. Beg God for the grace to seriously see almsgiving as an opportunity rather than a burden… to believe that by following this teaching “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”