Today’s Readings challenge us to a different life-style, based on forgiveness, love, faith, and humble living, the following of Jesus, peace-making, and the service of others. Jesus censures the pride of those, in today’s parable, who take the seats of honour at a Feast, and then he tells us always to take the least honourable seats.
In other words, he is asking us not to be proud, and to recognise that we stand before God with empty hands, and that all we have, and have achieved, is more by the grace of God than by our own efforts. If we “conduct our affairs with humility,” as the First Reading advises us, we allow God to love us, and live in us. Only then will we make a difference in our world. Only then will we become the image and likeness of God’s goodness and mercy shining forth in our world.