A Meal With Jesus

The excerpt below is from A Meal With Jesus by Tim Chester.

Hospitality involves welcoming, creating space, listening, paying attention, and providing. Meals slow things down. Some of us don’t like that. We like to get things done. But meals force you to be people oriented instead of task oriented. Sharing a meal is not the only way to build relationships, but it is number one on the list.

It’s possible to remain at a distance from someone in public gatherings – even in a Bible study. Meals bring you close. You see people in situ, in life, as they are. You connect and communicate. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver describes dinnertime as “the cornerstone of our family’s mental health.” “If I had to quantify it,” she says, “I’d say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal.” Generous hospitality leads to reconciliation. It expresses forgiveness. Unresolved conflict can’t be ignored when we gather round the meal table; you can’t eat in silence without realizing there’s an issue to address. Paul uses hospitality as a metaphor for reconciliation when he says to the Corinthians: Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one…” (2 Cor. 7:2). Hospitality can be a kind of sacrament of forgiveness.

Marzipan cake. That’s how my friend Chris knew his mother-in-law had finally accepted him into the family. Now every cake she bakes for him is a reaffirmation of that acceptance. It makes the cake doubly sweet. That’s how food so often works. We enjoy food not just because of the taste, but because of the companionship and welcome it expresses. Indeed sometimes we enjoy food despite the taste because of the love in which it’s packaged. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it” (Prov. 15:17).

Many people love the idea of the church as a community. But when we eat together, we encounter not some theoretical community but real people with all their problems and quirks. The meal table is an opportunity to give up our proud ideals by which we judge others and accept in their place the real community created by the cross of Christ, with all its brokenness. It’s easy to love people in some abstract sense and preach the virtues of love. But we’re called to love the real individuals sitting around the table.

“Those who dream of this idealized community,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns, “demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly.” But, Bonhoeffer says, “Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.” So “we enter into that life together with other Christians, not as those who make demands, but as those who thankfully receive…. We do not complain about what God does not give us; rather we are thankful for what God does give us daily.” This means that the disillusionment we experience when we encounter real people with their problems is a reminder that we “can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

Hospitality will lead to “collateral damage.” Food will be spilled on your carpet. You’ll be left with clearing up. Your pantry may be decimated. But remember that God is welcoming you into his home through the blood of his own Son. The hospitality of God embodied in the table fellowship of Jesus is a celebration and sign of his grace and generosity. And we’re to imitate that generosity.

Meals also have the power to shape and reshape community. A person to whom we may have related in one role becomes a person to whom we relate as friend. Serving another changes the dynamics of a relationship. The leader who serves at table is no longer aloof.

Meals indicate social status, and they thereby allow us to transform social status. They’re a microcosm of social reality that we can manipulate. “Food is a social substance and currency. What one is able (and chooses) to serve expresses one’s own position and helps define one’s relationship to others. What you, the guest, are offered is a measure of your standing in the eyes of society and your host.” This is what Jesus is doing in eating with the marginalızed. The marginalized cease to be marginal when they’re included around a meal table. The lonely cease to be lonely. The alien ceases to be alien. Strangers become friends.

We live in a graceless culture. Not a graceless world: every bird-song, every kindness, and every meal is a sign of God’s ongoing grace toward his creation. But we live in a graceless culture of competition in which we’re all trying to get ahead. It’s a culture of insecurity in which we’re all trying to prove ourselves. We hold grudges, envy success, protect ourselves. In the race to the top you either tread on the competition or they will tread on you. In contrast to the God of Exodus 34:6-7, we’re unforgiving and quick to anger. We measure out our love, hold grudges, and get away with whatever we can. Look into the faces of the people on the subway and see the toll the rat race takes on its victims.

In this culture our shared meals offer a moment of grace. A sign of something different. A pointer to God’s coming world. “Life in the kingdom…demands that we adopt a new set of table manners, and as we observe this etiquette, we become increasingly civilized according to the codes of the city of God.” Around the table we offer friendship and celebrate life. Our meals offer a divine moment, an opportunity for people to be seduced by grace into a better life, a truer life, and a more human existence.

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