Continued

Stories Around the Dinner Table

Jesus said much more about food and drink. Of course, a meal is an obviously pregnant metaphor and the bare fact that Jesus used such a metaphor is probably not enough to persuade many readers that there was a link between His practice of eating and drinking and His stories and teachings about eating and drinking. Thus, the first stories and teachings we should consider are those specifically tied to Jesus’ dinner etiquette. In other words, we need to start with parables about eating and drinking which Jesus tells while eating and drinking or in response to accusations about his eating and drinking.

Luke 14 and 15 record for us two events where Jesus’ actual practice is closely tied with his stories and teachings. In 14.1-6, Jesus is invited to the house of a Pharisee for a Sabbath meal. He starts a controversy by healing a man in front of them all. After that, Jesus first rebukes the pharisaical guests for vying for the places of honor at the table (7-11). Then He goes on to advise them to stop inviting fellow members of their social caste to their homes for dinner, but rather to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” (13). Such dinner guests will bring one a reward at “the resurrection of the righteous.” (14).

At the mention of the resurrection, a fellow guest with Jesus exclaims “Blessed is everyone who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God” (15). This allows Jesus to launch into what is traditionally called “The Parable of the Wedding Feast” (Luke 14.16-24/ Matt 22.2-24). Here Jesus tells a parable of the future with obvious parallels to his present practice. When his invited guests refuse to come, “a certain man” (16) invites “the poor and crippled and blind and lame”(21) as well as those from far away “in the highways and along the hedges” (23) to come to his wedding feast, vowing that “none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner” (24).

Jesus’ message is rather hard to miss. He is inviting everyone to his feast but not everyone is responding to His invitation. His feasting is somehow tied to the eschatological feast when everyone “shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God.” Those who want to dine in the Kingdom at the resurrection need to practice for it now by reaching out to the blind, lame, crippled and poor (14, 21). If they humble themselves in this way, God will exalt them, but if they think themselves too exalted to associate with such people at the table, then they will be humbled (11).

This same theme message is amplified in chapter 15: “Now all the tax-gathers and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. And both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’”

Jesus responds with several parables. For our purposes we will concentrate on the first three. Jesus tells a story about a lost sheep and then a story about a lost coin. In both parables the finder of the lost one calls to all around to “Rejoice with me!” (6, 9) And in both parables the point is that there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents (7, 10). Thus, the message of Jesus seems to be that he is rejoicing in repentant sinners because that is what is going on in Heaven among the angels.

However, with the third parable of the Lost Son, Jesus gives a more complicated analogy. No doubt his hearers were expecting another repetition, but Jesus slips in a stark variation. Now there is not merely a lost son but two sons of whom the one who is never lost is in danger of being lost forever. The elder son who never left home complains bitterly that his father,

Look! For so many years I have been serving you, and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a kid that I might be merry with my friends; but when this son of your came, who has devoured your wealth with harlots, you killed the fattened calf for him (29-30).

Obviously the older brother represents the Pharisees and scribes who are meticulous (they think) in keeping all of God’s commandments. Furthermore, the younger son not only represents the sinners and tax-gatherers, but stands for Jesus himself in the way he is accused of keeping company with sinners. Even more so, the father in the parable represents Jesus by welcoming prodigals with a lavish feast and pronouncing them alive from the dead. By promising people perceived as immoral the Kingdom, Jesus was giving God’s wealth to “harlots” in the eyes of the Pharisees.

This brings us to the main elaboration on Jesus’ message revealed in this parable: This is obviously no longer an allegory for how the angels act in heaven and which the ministry of Jesus is emulating on earth. No, the feast going on in this parable is taking place on earth where the “elder brother,” the Pharisees, can see and hear it. In the parables of the lost sheep and coin, God’s reclamation of a sinner involved rejoicing in Heaven; in the parable of the lost sons, the rejoicing is done by Jesus on earth. Jesus is actually welcoming sinners home by what he is doing. He is representing God and is sharing with them the inheritance of the Kingdom. In seeing Jesus do this, the Pharisees are seeing the God Whom they claim to worship and serve welcoming repentant sinners.

Thus, it is not prima facie possible to separate Jesus’ parables about the feast of the Kingdom from his own ministry of eating and drinking with people, on the basis of forgiving their sins. In some way, Jesus’ eating and drinking is tied to that eschatological banquet which will take place at the resurrection. If you want to be at that Table, Jesus is telling his contemporaries that they need to be willing to dine with Him now, and with all the additional guests whom He invites.

Indeed, Jesus was quite certain that many of His generation who thought they were going to be invited to the Kingdom banquet, would not make the guest list:

And He was passing through from one city and village to another, teaching and proceeding on His way to Jerusalem. And someone said to Him, “Lord, are there just a few who are being saved?” And He said to them, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence and You taught in our streets’; and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from Me all you evildoers.’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth there when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves being cast out. And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at table in the Kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last (Luke 13.22-30).And I say to you, that many shall come from east and west, and recline at table with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 8.11-12).

Notice that “the sons of the Kingdom” are “cast out” from the Table. There is a sense, it seems, in which Jesus is acknowledging that His hearers are presently at the table in the Kingdom. Pressing the details of these parables (if these are indeed parables; I take the reference to a “narrow door” and “knocking” to be metaphorical enough to be labeled as such) may be considered unwarranted by some readers, but I trust I can substantiate my claim by pointing out the context and details of the parable of the wedding feast in the Gospel of Matthew.

According to Matthew, Jesus told a different version of the parable of the Slighted Wedding Feast. In this case, for example, Jesus spoke not of “a certain man” but of “a king.” The reasons for this intensification of the parable is not hard to understand: Jesus told this second version in the middle of His final conflict in Jerusalem. Indeed, the parable appears on the heels of the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Matt 21.33-46/ Mark 12.1-12/ Luke 20.9-19). In that parable, Jesus tells of a “vineyard” which is at first given to some tenants but then taken away from them. Jesus concludes: “Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and given to a nation producing the fruit of it” (21.43). It is obvious from the context that this taking away of the Kingdom involves the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt 23.34-39; Luke 13.33-35; 19.41-44) and the Temple (Matt 24.2/ Mark 13.2/ Luke 21.6). This threat of the wrath of God is made devastatingly clear in the parable of the Wicked Tenants, and each Gospel points out that the Pharisees understood that Jesus was prophesying their doom (Matt 21.45/ Mark 12.12/ Luke 20.19).

Thus, when we read in the parable of the Wedding Feast that, when the people refused to come to the king’s wedding, he “sent his armies and destroyed those murderers, and set their city on fire” (Matt 22.7), it is impossible to deny that Jesus is referring to the destruction of Jerusalem which will take place within a generation (Matt 23.36; 24.34). The rulers in Jerusalem and other Jewish leaders, whether Sadducees or Pharisees are regarded by Jesus as invited guests to the Feast. In this, Jesus and the Jewish leaders are in agreement: they both believe that the Jewish leaders have access to the table. But Jesus claims they are going to lose this access because they have despised the host who invited them. “The sons of the Kingdom will be cast out” (Matt 8.12). As we will see when we look at the Old Testament background to Jesus’ ministry, He presupposed that Israel’s special privilege was table fellowship with God, but that privilege was being taken away from those who had been thought worthy of it and was being given to a class of people within Israel who had not been found worthy of it before.

Obviously, my argument here is that eating and drinking had special significance for Jesus in respect to the Kingdom and the forgiveness of sins. One way to confirm such a theory is to see if it explains other details in the Gospel accounts. In the revealing of Judas as the betrayer of Jesus, I believe that we find confirmation of my thesis:

Jesus therefore answered, “That is the one for whom I shall dip the morsel, and give it to him.” So when He had dipped the morsel, He took and gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. And after the morsel, Satan then entered into him. Jesus therefore said to him, “What you do, do quickly” (John 13.26-27).

If dining with Jesus is the special place of fellowship in the Kingdom and the forgiveness of sins, then it would also be the place where rebellion against God would be judged most severely and would count as a most serious offense against His grace. That is exactly what we see here. The dinner table is where Judas is delivered over to Satan.

To reiterate: Jesus ate with people known to be sinners in the face of fierce opposition. He did this on the basis of His own ability or authority to forgive sins. He claimed that, as God’s representative, his invitation to dine was an invitation into the Kingdom of God. Realizing these basic facts gives us a great deal of help in understanding the meaning of the Lord’s Supper instituted by Jesus on the night that he was betrayed.

Before considering the Lord’s Supper, however, we must consider another aspect of Jesus’ ministry:

TO BE CONTINUED