It's easy to underestimate the role that food played in the ministry of Jesus. We like to dwell on his healing ministry, his teaching ministry, his parables, his miracles, but we seldom stop to notice the fact that eating with others was central to his proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
The people in his day noticed this fact loud and clear. “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” the Pharisees wondered self-righteously (Mark 2:16), and they were asking out of more than just curiosity. He was so renowned for his habit of eating with social outcasts, in fact, that the religious elite of his day called him a “glutton and a drunkard,” because he (in his own words) “came eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34) with the kind people that everyone else had rejected.
The various points we’ve raised about the spirituality of food so far helps to explain the reason why Jesus made the shared meal so central to his ministry, but there is something deeper going on here. In ancient Jewish thought, hospitality was a profoundly moral act, something that revealed what a person was really made of, spiritually speaking. They held up the hospitality of Abraham as their ideal, who welcomed three strangers into his home, fed them, and discovered in doing so that he was sharing table with the Lord himself (Genesis 18:2). Throughout the Old Testament story, in fact, table-fellowship around a shared meal was one of the primary means by which the Jewish people experienced and expressed their fellowship with God. It’s the logic that underlies the sacrificial system of the Book of Leviticus, where most of the sacrifices functioned as a shared meal with the Lord. It’s there in the covenantal theology of the Old Testament, where the shared meal was the means by which Ancient Near Eastern covenants were sealed. And it’s present, of course, in the formative event of the nation, where God liberated the people from Egypt and gave them a shared meal—the Passover supper—to distinguish them as his own.
In ancient Jewish thought, then, there was something profoundly spiritual going on whenever you invited someone to your table. Sharing a meal together was a sign of mutual welcome and acceptance, reciprocal respect and embrace, a way of spiritually identifying with someone else in the strongest possible terms. This explains, incidentally, why the idea of Jews and Gentiles eating together in the community of the early church was such a challenge. When Peter (a Jew) visits Cornelius (a Gentile) in Acts 10, the scandalized Jewish Christians in Jerusalem criticize Peter specifically because he “went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them” (Acts 11:3). In Galatians, there is a fascinating passage where Paul describes the work he had been doing to try to integrate the Jewish and Gentile believers together in the church, and how the shared meal together was the stumbling block. He recounts how Peter (a Jew) was willing to eat together with the Gentiles at first, but when a group of Jewish Christians from Jerusalem raised their eyebrows, he “began to draw back [from the shared meal] and to separate himself from the Gentiles” (Galatians 2:12). Finally we note Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth about an unrepentantly immoral believer. In 1 Corinthians 5 he tells them to expel the immoral brother, and instructs them “not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).
In each of these passages we see how the shared meal functioned in life of the early church, forming the identity of the community, signaling who was included, and requiring the early Christians to spiritually identify with their fellow Christians in the strongest possible terms.
If food is truly spiritual, sharing a meal with another, in the minds of the first Christians, was one of the most spiritual acts of all.
This brings us back to Jesus, from whom, no doubt, the early church got the idea of using a shared meal to shape their life together. Paul’s direction about refusing to eat with the unrepentant sinner notwithstanding, what stands out in sharp relief when we look at the life of Jesus in light of all this, is that he was willing to eat with anyone who would have him, and he welcomed to the table anyone who would come.
We see Jesus eating with synagogue leaders and high-ranking Pharisees; we see Jesus eating with the so-called scum of the earth, the “sinners” and the tax collectors. We see Jesus eating private meals with his disciples; we see Jesus eating with the masses in public demonstrations of the miraculous power of God. Some scholars refer to this dynamic in Jesus’s ministry as his “open commensality.” Commensality is the fancy word for “table fellowship,” and Jesus’s commensality was truly “open,” in the sense that he was willing to eat with literally anyone.
There is a challenge here for the church, I think, especially in this new era we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we are living through a time when pandemic lockdowns have restricted our life-together, and made human contact harder to come by than ever. On the other hand, we are living at a moment in history when marginalized voices and oppressed people groups are speaking up, insisting (rightly) that their lives matter. These realities have created a long to-do list for the church, a full docket of issues that need careful attention, and spiritual needs that need addressing.
It can be hard to know where to start.
This isn’t the only thing that needs doing, of course, and if it’s all we do we probably will have failed in our calling for this moment, but as we’re trying to figure out how to respond to the world we find ourselves in at such a time as this, perhaps the best place to start is where Jesus himself started: by opening his table to any and all who wanted to share bread with him. If we did so, on the one hand, the voices of the marginalized would have to be invited and included and affirmed, just as much as any other voice; this was certainly part of the scandal of Jesus’s open commensality in his day. On the other hand, we would be feeding the need for authentic human connection that we’re all aching with; this was certainly part of the beauty of Jesus’s shared meals, that everyday human beings like us, got to connect physically with him.
But more than that, if we truly practiced the kind of open table fellowship that Jesus modeled for us—taking seriously its significance and implications—I think we would discover that we are becoming the church he has called us to be, and that his Kingdom really is breaking in upon us.
0 comments:
Post a Comment