The month ends with a man in a cell choosing the harder of two goods, and a room full of people choosing chairs.

Philippians 1 is the most personal page Paul left us, and the passage turns on a verb this lectionary has already used once. Synechomai — I am hemmed in — is the word Luke put in Jesus's mouth on October 22: how I am constrained until it is finished. It is not the language of deliberation. It is the language of a man in a narrow place with a wall on either side, and Paul says it about the two directions his life could go.

And what is remarkable is that both walls are good. This is not a choice between right and wrong. To live is Christ — fruitful labour, he says. To die is gain — kerdos, profit, and far better, in a triple comparative that breaks the grammar trying to say how much better. Neither option is a temptation. He wants one of them badly and takes the other, and gives a two-word reason: di' hymas — because of you.

And notice what he does with his body while he is deciding. Christ will be magnified in my body, whether through life or through death. The verb is the Magnificat's. He is not asking to be delivered; he is asking to be a place where somebody else becomes visible at scale, and he specifies that either outcome will do for that purpose.

The psalm then supplies the appetite, and it lands with unusual force the day after the dropsical man. Yesterday: a body swollen with water, thirsty because of what it had taken in. Today: a doe panting at the edge of a dry channel, thirsty for water that is actually there. Tzam'ah nafshi l'El chai — my throat thirsts for the living Theos. The problem was never the wanting. The problem is what the wanting is pointed at.

And its ache is specific and unheroic: he remembers walking at the head of the procession, in the crowd, in the noise, on the way up to the house. What he misses is not a private experience but a public one, and what he asks is when will I be seen before the face of Theos — the pilgrim's formula, the question of a man wondering when the next festival is.

Then the dinner party, and it is worth admitting how unattractive the advice looks at first. Take the bottom seat so you can be moved up reads like social manoeuvring, and it is drawn from Proverbs, where it frankly is advice about not embarrassing yourself in front of a king.

And then the last sentence dismantles the manoeuvre. Tapeinōthēsetai… hypsōthēsetai. Both passive. You can lower yourself; the raising is done by somebody who is not named and is obviously Theos. Which means the tactic cannot be executed — a man who sits at the bottom in order to be called up has already appointed himself to the top seat inwardly, and Luke's grammar has quietly removed his access to the promotion.

The parable is not about seating. Luke says so by calling it a parable. It is about the one operation in the moral life that a person genuinely can perform, and about the one they cannot.

And it is the right sentence to end a month on. He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly — the same two verbs, spoken by a teenage girl in Luke 1 before any of this began. October has read Job stop arguing, a Persian emperor called messiah without knowing it, a wall with a death sentence on it taken down, a woman bent for eighteen years straightened, a mustard weed in a vegetable patch, and a hen with her wings out over a city that would not come. Every one of them is the same reversal.

And on the last morning, a man in chains who could have gone and stayed, and a room of guests looking for the good seats, and a doe at a dry streambed with its head down.

Tomorrow is All Saints.