Let's Eat!

Once discovered, the table ministry of Jesus reveals not only His love and compassion for sinners and nobodies but the scandalous love He so often displayed to the downcast and lost. Nowhere in the New Testament is the privileged position of turkeys, nobodies, and marginal people on the fringes of society disclosed more dramatically than in Jesus’ ministry of meal sharing.

Today, because of our love affair with religious works a paradox exits for us. It is the very real danger that our good works, our “spiritual investments” our “meal” planning and all the rest of it, begins to construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our spiritual self-worth.

Our spirituality becomes a by-product of all our hard work. Once we enter into this trap complacency replaces sheer delight in God’s unconditional love.

Our doing becomes our very undoing.

In modern times it is scarcely possible to appreciate the scandal Jesus caused by His table fellowship with sinners.

Being invited to share a meal from an Orthodox Jew saying “I would like to have dinner with you” is a metaphor that implies, “I would like to enter into friendship with you.”

In first-century Palestinian Judaism the class system, was enforced rigorously. It was legally forbidden to mingle with sinners who were outside the law: table fellowship with beggars, tax collectors (traitors to the national cause because they were collecting taxes for Rome from their own people to get a kickback from the take), and prostitutes was religiously, socially, and culturally taboo.

Thankfully someone forgot to tell the Son of God that He was breaking the law.

It did not escape the Pharisees’ attention in the least that Jesus meant to befriend sinners and the lost. He was not only breaking the law, He was destroying the very structure of Jewish society. “They all complained when they saw what was happening. ‘He has gone to stay at a sinner’s house,’ they said” (Luke 19:7). But Zacchaeus, not too hung up on respectability, was overwhelmed with joy.

Grace visits the unacceptable, the unlikely, the needful, the sinner and much to our confusion grace also visits the proud, the powerful, the wealthy, and the unexpected.

Grace sits down with us, shares a meal, enjoys our company, expects nothing, becomes closer than a brother and when the meal is finished, grace cleans up after us time and time again.