Proud Cardinal Beaton.
Cardinal David Beaton and Archbishop Gawin Dunbar were both proud men in sixteenth century Scotland. One day they had to enter a church together and each claimed precedence. A war of words ensued. Soon their retainers were at blows, tearing each others’ fine clothes, swinging their crosses as weapons and even rolling upon the ground like boys in a school-yard fight. The spectacle of religious leaders scrapping for pre-eminence brought mockery on the church they represented.
It was this attitude of pushing oneself forward which Solomon was at pains to warn against.
Jesus, who came as a lowly man among the lowly, gave a similar warning to the haughty religious leaders of his day, although he applied the principle not just to the royal court, but to more mundane social situations.
Possibly his idea was formed through reading Solomon. Here is what he said, “When you are invited by any man to a wedding, don’t sit down in the highest place, lest a more eminent person than yourself is invited by him and the one who invited both of you says to you, ‘Give this man place;’ and you begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place; then when he who invited you comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher:’ then you will have respect before those who sit at dinner with you. ”