The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17C)
August 31, 2025
Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Ecclesiasticus 10:(7-11), 12-18
Hebrews 13:1-8
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Those of you who know me well would probably not be surprised to hear me say that I am usually disinclined towards a moral theology that is based on lists of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, lists of what is sinful and what is not. That being said, for a long time, I have been very interested in the seven deadly sins. Historically, the idea can be seen in Greek and Roman moral philosophy. Moreover, as we heard in today’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews, it is a squarely scriptural construct. It appears in a more developed form in the work of the late second-, early third-century north African Latin theologian, Tertullian. (1) Refined in the works of the fourth-century theologians Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian, the list was codified by Gregory the Great in 590 into the seven we know today: gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sloth, vanity, and pride. Uncharacteristically, you might think, I am less interested in the history of the Seven Deadly Sins than I am in their pastoral application for us today.
The Seven Deadly Sins were first brought to my attention in a serious way when I was preparing for my first confession in the run-up to my ordination as a deacon. I had never before made an auricular confession, and my confessor and spiritual director, one of the Cowley Fathers, suggested I spend several sessions in preparation. We did not discuss specifics of what I might say, rather we discussed how I might organise a confession that was to cover more than thirty years, identifying patterns in order to help me going forward. One suggestion he made was to use the Ten Commandments. Another was to order my reflection around the Seven Deadly Sins. I found the latter much more useful. By categorising my behaviour over the course of my life in this way I did see patterns highlighting my vulnerabilities, as I confronted the unsavoury aspects of my life and personality. In fact, if you have had me as your confessor, this is what I will have suggested to you as a valuable tool for your preparation and self-reflection.
Something that became clear to me when I was doing this work was that more than simply being sins we are to avoid, each of the Seven Deadly Sins represents an essential element of life, an aspect that has the power to bring great joy and fulfilment and can, just as easily, send us down a path towards pain and suffering. Far from being wholly negative, I realised that these areas comprise so much of the human experience and need to be seen as possessing both negative and positive aspects. Gluttony speaks to our relationship with food; lust to our sexuality; and greed to our relationship with money. Anger is really about how we react to the vicissitudes of the world around us, to how we channel our passions. Sloth and vanity relate to the ways in which we take care of our bodies and to what we call these day “self-care;” and pride is really about the way we think about ourselves and our achievements. Each touches on something essential about the work of being human, and each is nuanced along a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with the pressures of life.
Where are you vulnerable? Where am I? When considered carefully, we come to see that there are sins that are really of little concern, and others we identify as sore spots where we find ourselves, more often than not, getting into trouble. Some people struggle with anger and vanity; others with sloth and lust; others with greed and envy; and so forth.
It seems particularly apt that at this moment in our national life, our lessons for today focus our attention on the sin of Pride, given that our mayor, our president, and so many other public officials are weighted down by this particular affliction. Over and over, the Scriptures warn us against the sin of pride, and quite rightly. However, like all the other “seven deadlies,” Pride has both negative and positive aspects. The problem is that there is a strong thread of moral theology, both Catholic and Protestant that drills down so much on Pride, that people wonder if it is acceptable to feel good about their accomplishments at all, and bury all those positive elements. Indeed, I have long felt that this attitude has done much to crush people’s spirits and encourage a view of Christians as puritanical, judgmental, and dour. Low self-esteem and the fear that it is somehow wrong to give ourselves credit for the good we have done and for the many positive aspects of our personality is the cause, in fact, of many problems and leads, for example, to gluttony (in the abuse of food and drugs) and lust (in the mis-direction of our sexual desire), just to name two of the other “seven deadlies.” Fear of being seen as prideful has been especially destructive in the case of people struggling with mental illness, especially depression. So I can not say it enough: an important aspect of a healthy and balanced mind and spiritual life is to possess a healthy sense of self-worth as a beloved child of God.
Yet, as I just suggested, we live in a moment in which pride is pulling hard on the fabric of our society, and we see it fraying in so many areas of public and private life. What, then, do we mean when we speak of the real sin of Pride? Now, generally speaking, sins are those decisions we make in which we choose to turn away from the interests of the love of God and neighbour, turn away from God, and seek only our personal self-interest. This is, I think, what we heard from Ecclesiasticus this morning, “The beginning of man’s pride is to depart from the Lord; his heart has forsaken his Maker.” It is pretty clear that it is bad – whatever the details – and that it is punished severely:
Therefore the Lord brought upon them extraordinary afflictions, and destroyed them utterly. The Lord has cast down the thrones of rulers, and has seated the lowly in their place. The Lord has plucked up the roots of the nations, and has planted the humble in their place.
Not only does God punish the prideful with utter destruction, but divine justice insists in a consequential inversion. As Mary says in the Magnificat, “he has cast down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.” Unfortunately, our passage does not give us much more information about what pride actually is.
In our Gospel today, rather than give us a definition of pride, Jesus explains it to us – as he usually does – with a parable, a story that illustrates an abstract idea with an example from daily life that we can all understand. Jesus “went to dine at the house of a ruler who belonged to the Pharisees,” and he noticed how the guests, men of position and wealth, we assume, “chose [for themselves] the places of honour,” and he saw this as, shall we say, misguided. He tells the assembled guests,
When you are invited by any one to a marriage feast, do not sit down in a place of honour, lest a more eminent man than you be invited by him; and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher’; then you will be honoured in the presence of all who sit at table with you.
Jesus is confronting the distinguished guests with their own behaviour, behaviour emblematic of an attitude towards life in general. Pride is not, of course, limited to the rich and powerful. The sin of Pride is a belief that because of some special characteristic – wealth, fame, political power, social rank, being a member of a particular religious or socio-ethnic group, and so forth – that you are entitled to special privileges, special honour, and not just entitled, but you are prepared to seize it. It is characterised by a heightened sense of self and self-importance that may bear little resemblance to reality. Perhaps its greatest and most dangerous manifestation is when pride drifts into the realm of narcissism and that is mixed with real power to affect other people’s lives. This kind of raw pride is something we must confront in both ourselves and others.
In theological terms, the sin of Pride it is putting yourself in the place of God, which is, of course, the Original Sin. It is seeing yourself as better than others and forsaking your duty to your neighbour as a fellow member of the Body of Christ. In this way, it is an insistence on a radical kind of independence that is in its essence un-Christian. For this reason, we must acknowledge as good the sense of pride and accomplishment we feel in the course of our lives, especially in regard to the ways in which our actions have benefited the lives of our neighbours, both the neighbours we already know and the ones we have yet to meet.
At the same time, sinful pride is one of the most dangerous of sins, perhaps because in an of itself it does not look violent to the casual observer. The doing of violence is not a obvious aspect of the sin of pride. We think we can leave that to anger and, sometimes, lust. Without question, however, violence is often the consequence of Pride, especially when combined with power – whether it is the power of a lone gunman sure of his cause, the power that a teacher or mentor exercises over those in their trust, or the power of a world leader with only eyes for himself. In these cases, the consequences are, quite often, catastrophic.
It seems clear to me, then, that it is the duty of every Christians to stand up to the proud “in the imaginations of their hearts.” We must stand up to the proud and their bullying behaviour. We must stand firm for the power vested in us, on God’s authority, to love and be loved, confident – and dare I say, proud in just the right way – that in this work we are cooperating with God in his project of inverting the power strictures of this age, as he brings us ever closer to the realisation of the Kingdom of God.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Feria, 30 August 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume