Continued.

The Institution of the Lord’s Supper

In understanding the meaning of Jesus’ table fellowship, we find that it is tied to the forgiveness of sins. Furthermore, it is tied to the eschatological banquet because those who eat and drink with Jesus and his other dinner guests will get to eat and drink with them in the Kingdom of Heaven. As Jesus told His disciples:

And you are those who have stood by Me in My trials; and just as My Father has granted Me a kingdom, I grant you that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Luke 22.28-30).

But here we must be careful not to ignore the complexity of Jesus’ eschatological message. In the two versions of the Parable of the Wedding Feast we find two different horizons in view. On the one hand, in Luke’s account, the resurrection is probably in view (14.14). In Matthew 21.33-22.14, however, the Wedding Feast is much more imminent. The Table of the Kingdom of God will be a new covenant community in history which replaces Israel as defined by the Temple in Jerusalem, for Jerusalem is soon to be surrounded by armies (Luke 21.20) and the Temple destroyed (see above). In Matt 8.11-12 and Luke 13.22-30 (both quoted above) the situation is more ambiguous–perhaps purposefully so.

This brings us to the institution of the Lord’s Supper (Matt 26.26-29/ Mark 14.22-25/ Luke 22.17-20) where Jesus promised the disciples that they would eat and drink at His table in His Kingdom (Luke 22.28-30). When passing the cup Jesus uttered an oath: “For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the Kingdom of God comes (Luke 22.18/ Matt 26.29/ Mark 14.25). When did this happen?

After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon hyssop and brought it up to His mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit (John 19.28-30/ Matt 27.48/ Mark 15.36).

In an important sense, Jesus considered the Kingdom to have come while He was still on the cross. It was before His death that he broke his fast and tasted the fruit of the vine.

From the data we have been given about eating and drinking in the Kingdom, we see eating and drinking in the Kingdom means (1) eating and drinking in some special way after Jesus has made atonement for sins on the cross, (2) eating and drinking in some special way after God has destroyed the Temple, and (3) eating and drinking with the righteous after the resurrection.

Of course, the question that needs to be answered for situations (1) and (2) is: What is the “special way” of eating and drinking which counts as eating and drinking in the Kingdom? The Gospel accounts make that question inescapable. The only likely answer they seem to provide to that question is the institution of the Lord’s Supper (Matt 26.26-29/ Mark 14.22-25/ Luke 22.17-20/ 1 Cor 11.23-25). The Lord’s Supper is the continuation, albeit in a special way, of Jesus’ practice of eating and drinking with sinners on the basis of His willingness and ability to forgive their sins. A place at this Supper is a foretaste and promise of a place at the resurrection of the righteous.

TO BE CONTINUED

The question has been discussed: which is prior, faith or repentance? It is an unnecessary question and the insistence that one is prior to the other is futile. There is no priority. The faith that is unto salvation is a penitent faith and the repentance that is unto life is a believing repentance –John Murray (Redemption: Accomplished & Applied p. 113).

Obeying God is often contrasted with trusting him.

There are good reasons for this. Many people have thought (and still think) of God or of themselves in such a way as to entirely pervert the concept of obedience to God.

We misunderstand God by sometimes thinking of him as someone who we could put in our debt for our good works, as if these could possibly benefit God. The ultimate end of this view is paganism like that which the Apostle Paul had to confront in his own day: “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is He served [literally: “healed”] by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things” (Act 17.24, 25). Like a panhandler who goes up to a car stopped at a traffic light and begins spraying and wiping off a windshield that is already perfectly clean, we act like God owes us because we are such good people.

Sometimes we come to our senses and realize that there can be no bargaining with an infinite God who made us and sustains us every moment. What does he need from us? Nevertheless, since God is a gracious loving God and made us for that reason, we see some hope that he will continue to take care of us and bring us to a glorious future.

This is a good beginning, but it always gets sidetracked by how we misunderstand both God and ourselves. This double-edged misunderstanding involves underestimating the wickedness of our evil deeds and overestimating the purity and value of our good deeds in the sight of a pure and holy God. Going back to the analogy of the windshield, we’re wiping an already clean windshield with a vile and filthy rag with nothing but urine in our spray bottle.

Trying to claim that we can obey God “enough” to stay in his favor is a perversion of the idea of obedience as it is found in the Bible. Only Jesus, God’s own co-eternal Son, made like us in all respects except for sin, could obey God in a way that was consistently pleasing to him. We are called not to trust in our own attempts to win God’s favor or be “good enough” to remain in it, but to trust in God through Jesus to continually forgive us, to adopt us as his very children, and so to bring us to everlasting resurrection glory.

This future of immortality is doubly undeserved. First of all, God made us for no other reason than his own grace toward us, so that all his promises of greater exaltation are as undeserved as was our original creation. Second, because we have offended God by our evil thoughts, words, and deeds, we deserve a very different destiny. God shows some infinitely greater grace by giving them the faith to trust in what he has done in Jesus and thus declaring them part of his forgiven family.

Nevertheless, even though faith and obedience can and must be contrasted with one another in such contexts, the fact remains that the Bible does not always oppose them to each another. Luke can describe the process of conversion as “becoming obedient to the faith” (Act 6.7). Unbelievers who will face wrath are “those who do not obey the gospel” (Second Thessalonians 1.8; First Peter 4.17). Believers can show “obedience to your confession of the gospel” (Second Corinthians 9.13). “Faith without works is dead” and cannot save anyone (James 2.14) so that “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2.24). Paul testifies that his evangelistic commission is to bring the nations to “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1.5; 16.26). And this only scratches the surface of merely the New Testament, let alone the whole Bible.

As the Westminster Confession rightly sums up the Biblical data: the faith that justifies is an obedient faith, it is “is no dead faith, but worketh by love.”  “Dead faith” is a claim to believe while being disobedient but real faith is obedient.

The fact is that, once we get rid of the perversions briefly mentioned above, faith and obedience are virtually the same thing. The author of Hebrews has no problem stating that the Israelites in the wilderness died because of “unbelief” or “disobedience”–practically treating these two words as synonyms (3.18, 19). Indeed, he tells us that Jesus is salvation “to all those who obey him” (5.9). Likewise, Paul thanks God for the Roman Christians, “that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness” (6.17, 18).

In trying to understand all this, we should meditate upon Psalm 111.7: “The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy” (Psalm 111.7). All God’s precepts are trustworthy. How can one possibly believe that God’s precepts are trustworthy and not seek to obey them?

Because God is a faithful God who makes promises to us through Jesus Christ, the same faith by which we trust him to forgive us and glorify us also motivates us to obey his commands. When we go “another way” we show we are not trusting him or what he says to us.

Our faith is weak and thus our obedience is marred every moment by sin. Christians sometimes fall into great scandals. Nevertheless, God’s promises are trustworthy and it is impossible to respond to them without taking action. Indeed, to respond is to take action. If someone thinks he has sinned too much for God to forgive him, so that he does not repent and return, he is refusing to believe in God and the Gospel by refusing to obey his command in the Gospel to repent and return. The only real faith (however imperfect) is an obedient faith, and the only real obedience (however impure) is a believing obedience.

Continued.

The Water that Divides

As special as it was to eat and drink with Jesus, it by no means counted as a formal, automatic declaration that one was a member of the Kingdom. Jesus Himself warned some that they would be cast out of the Kingdom despite their presence with Him at the dinner table: “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’” (Luke 13.26-27). What was it then which indicated that one ate and drank with Jesus, not as an enemy nor even as an inquirer, but as a quest?

And when He had come into the Temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to Him as He was teaching and said, “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority? But Jesus answered and said to them, “I will ask you one thing too, which if you tell Me, I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John was from what source, from heaven or from men?” And they began reasoning among themselves saying, “If we say ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the multitude; for they all hold John to be a prophet.” And they answered Jesus and said, “We do not.” He also said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things” (Matt 21.23-27/ Mark 11.27-33/ Luke 20.1-8).

Three out of four Gospels record this question about John’s baptism as the way Jesus shut up the priests and elders about His authority. All four Gospels record John’s baptism as the inception of Jesus’ public ministry (Matt 3; Mark 1.1-11; Luke 3.1-23; John 1.15-34). Obviously, Jesus’ opponents needed to be willing to cast doubt on John’s testimony to Jesus’ authority if they were going to question Jesus’ authority.

John’s baptism is evidently important to all the Gospel writers. What is especially significant for our purposes, however, is that we are explicitly told that who got baptized and who didn’t get baptized by John for the most part were identical to those who would and would not eat with Jesus as His guests. After asking about where John’s baptism came from, Jesus went on to tell a parable:

“But what do you think? A man had two children , and he came to the first and said, ‘Child, go work today in the vineyard.’ And he answered and said, ‘I will, sir’; and he did not go. And he came to the second and said the same thing. But he answered and said, ‘I will not’; yet he afterward regretted it and went. Which of these two did the will of his father?” They said, “The latter.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax-gatherers and harlots are getting into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax-gatherers and harlots did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him” (Matt 21.28-32).

Indeed, in the same passage where Luke records how Jesus’ enemies called Him “a glutton and a drunkard” he tells us how two different groups responded to Jesus commending John as a prophet: “And when all the people and the tax-gatherers heard this, they justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by John” (Luke 7.29-30). The same people who were willing to eat with Jesus were those who had been baptized, whereas the same people accusing Jesus of being “a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners” (Luke 7.34) were those who had refused baptism.

We already looked, above at how Jesus responded later in Luke’s Gospel to the accusation that “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” (15.2). However, we stopped at the parable of the Prodigal Son. The argument between Jesus and the Pharisees continues into chapter 16:

Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things, and they were scoffing at Him. And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is high among men is detestable before God. The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since then the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached and every one is forcing his way into it” (vs. 14-16).

Now here we do not have an explicit mention of baptism, but it is quite obvious that, if we interpret this verse in light of the overall context beginning in chapter 15 and the statements in Luke 7.29-30 and Matthew 21.28-32, Jesus must be referring to how people responded to John’s ministry of baptism. In rejecting it, the Pharisees rejected the Kingdom. In being baptized, “every one”–that is the “sinner” (15.2) or “the people and the tax-gatherers” (7.29)–forced their way into it.

The importance of John’s baptism in regard to who got to eat and drink in the Kingdom and who did not is also demonstrated in the story of Zacheus. Like many other incidents, this story involves the offense of dinner company: “And when they saw it they all began to grumble saying, “He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner” (Luke 19.7). Though baptism is not mentioned in the account, Luke tells of the salvation of Zacheus (19.8-9) with an eye toward John’s ministry of baptism:

And Zacheus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor,And the multitudes were questioning him, saying, “Then what shall we do?” And he would answer and say to them, “Let the man who has two tunics share with him who has none; and let him who has food do likewise” (Luke 3.10-11)

and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.”

And some tax-gatherers also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Extort no more than what you have been ordered to” (Luke 3.12-13).

And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too is a son of Abraham.

He therefore began saying to the multitude who were going out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with your repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham” (Luke 3.7-8).

By baptism John was forming a new community which would escape the wrath to come–a new Israel which would possess the Kingdom. The true sons of Abraham were those who received John’s baptism and thus followed him in recognizing Jesus. Those who consented to baptism and what it signified were given a place at the table with Jesus and the promise that they would keep their place in the fullness of the Kingdom.

As further evidence for the revolutionary nature of baptism, it is interesting to note that, as soon as Jesus learns the Pharisees have discovered that he (through his disciples) is baptizing more people than John, He feels compelled to flee the area (John 4.1-3). Like Jesus dining with “sinners,” baptism was felt to be a subversive practice by those in various positions of religio-political leadership in Israel.

To conclude then: The practice of baptism in the ministries and John and Jesus is tied to Jesus’ dining habits in that both were tied to participation in “the Kingdom,” primarily included the same group of people (“sinners,” “the people,” “tax-gatherers,” “harlots,” etc), and both were tied to eschatological blessing (escaping the wrath to come, eating bread in the Kingdom, etc) and the forgiveness of sins necessary for such blessing. Indeed, as we see in the way baptism points to the true “children of Abraham” and the meals demonstrate who is truly in the Kingdom, I would argue that both point to the formation of a new Israel–which will hopefully become even more clear when we look at the Old Testament background of Jesus’ ministry.

Once baptism was officially institutionalized (Matt 28.16-20), and was practiced after Jesus’ ascension, we must ask if it continued to be associated with the new community formed around the dinner table. This would not seem possible, since Jesus was no longer present to eat and drink with people–unless He arranged some new way to carry on His practice of forgiving people’s sins and welcoming them into His presence for a meal.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

Continued

Food Fights

There are plenty of other evidence from the Gospels that this was the case. As soon as the Gospel of Mark reveals the conflict between Jesus and “the scribes” (Mark 2.1-12), he launches into three conflicts over eating (2.13-28). These conflicts vary. One is over whether or not Jesus fasts enough (2.18-22/ Matt 9.14-17/ Luke 7.31-35). Another is over picking and eating grain on the Sabbath (2.23-28/ Matt 12.1-8/ Luke 6.1-5). Moving on to other incidents, Jesus’ disciples did not ceremonially wash their hands before eating (Matt 15.1-2/ Mark 7.1-5) and Jesus Himself would eat with hands that had not been “baptized” (Luke 11.37-38). Worse, Jesus not only thought the conflict over food was an occasion for an attack on the Pharisees (Matt 15.3-9/ Mark 7.6-13; Luke 11.39-52), but he openly taught that the Pharisees were entirely wrong in their dietary concerns (Matt 15.10-20/ Mark 7.14-23).

But these incidents were not the root problem alluded to in the accusation against Jesus, that He was a glutton and a drunkard, “a friend of tax gathers and sinners.” The additional provocation which Jesus gave to the scribes and Pharisees was the company he would keep, especially around the dinner table. Jesus would eat and drink with “many tax-gatherers and sinners” (Matt 9.10: Matt 9.9-13/ Mark 2.14-22/ Luke 5.27-38; Luke 7.36-50; Luke 15.1-2). This was a horrible offense in the eyes of various strict Jews, whether called scribes, Pharisees or lawyers.

Yet when Jesus was asked to explain Himself, His explanation added insult to injury “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick” (Matt 9.12/ Mark 2.17/ Luke 5.31). Jesus was effectively claiming hear to be able to “heal the sick,” that is, to forgive sinners. This is made explicit in all three Gospels. They all record the first incident when Jesus calls a tax-gatherer to be his disciple and then eats at his home just after his conflict over the forgiving and then the healing of the paralytic (Matt 9.1-13/ Mark 2.1-22/ Luke 5.18-39). In eating with these tax-gatherers and sinners, Jesus is indubitably demonstrating the right he had just claimed for Himself to forgive sins. The analogy of being a physician to being a forgiver of sins obviously points back to his claim that because he could heal the paralytic he could also forgive his sins.

Luke records another whole incident in which we again see this power to forgive sins used to explain the company Jesus kept at the dinner table (Luke 7.36-50). In this case, the immoral woman was not an invited guest to the feast, but only because the host in this case was a Pharisee. Though he did not invite her, Jesus welcomed her and made it clear His welcome to her was based on or resulted in his forgiveness of her sins. Just as in the case of the paralytic, the pharisaical guests want to know “Who is this who even forgives sins.”

To anticipate a point that will be made when we look at the Old Testament background, it is impossible to believe that the scribes and Pharisees thought that sins could not be forgiven. That was not the issue. God had provided for the forgiveness of sins through the Temple system. The offense of Jesus was that He seemed willing to bypass this God-given system, as if it was not necessary or as if he was just as much a source of pardon. Thus, He was able to eat and drink with sinners.  The onlookers understood that in some way, as “son of man,” Jesus was not simply proving his own deity but also establishing a new way for people to find forgiveness and thus table fellowship: “When the crowds saw it, they were afraid, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matt 9.8).

TO BE CONTINUED

Continued

1. THE GOSPEL ACCOUNTS

And to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces, who call out to the other, and say, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax gatherers and sinners!’ And wisdom is vindicated by her deeds (Matt 11.16-19/ Luke 7.31-35).

Jesus was controversial at least in part because of his table manners. His ways of eating and drinking caused offense. Indeed, we see here a hint that certain people in Israel believe Jesus is worthy of death because of his dinner habits (Deu 21.20). Eating and drinking appears to be at the heart of His struggle with His contemporaries in First Century Palestine.

TO BE CONTINUED