27 After this he went out and
saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him,
“Follow me.” 28 And he got up, left everything, and followed
him.29 Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and
there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them. 30 The Pharisees and
their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and
drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 31 Jesus answered,
“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; 32 I
have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.” ~ Luke 5:27-32
My
parents believed in the discipline of eating together. This was put to the test
when my father took a job which required of him an hour commute one-way meaning
breakfast began at 6 am sharp. But they remain resolved – family eats together.
My mom, however, did allow for one concession. You didn’t have to be
presentable; you only had to be present. Looking back, I think quite fondly of
those morning meals. It’s interesting to consider eating together to be a
discipline, even a spiritual one. It hardly makes it in the typical books on
the topic. And yet Jesus’ constant eating with others, particularly those who
were outcasts, was a critical part of his ministry and spirituality. So as we
enter the new year we need to recover the spiritual significance of Christian
eating. Okay, let’s dig in.
1.
Everyone hungers for with. (vss. 29 & 30)
Everyone needs to eat – there
is no circumventing it. Eating is both a delight for many but also a source of fear
for others. For most of us, food is so plentiful that we don’t even think about
it until we miss a meal. Then, look out! In our family we use a word for
someone who is angry because they are hungry – “hangry.” Eating reminds us of
our needs.
We eat to live, of course.
But we also eat to meet many hungers: the hungers of our body, the hungers of
our memory, our hunger for community, and our hunger for home. Food and hunger
are great equalizers – everyone has them. And yet, not everyone experiences
these the same way. Not everyone eats with.
Who does Jesus eat with? “tax
collectors & sinners”
Tax
collectors: In
the Roman Empire, local residents were subjected to a wide array of taxes: road
and bridge tolls, taxes on merchandise, and property taxes. The task of
collecting them was usually given to someone in a geographic area who was not a
native. The system allowed for extra taxes to also be collected to supplement
the tax collector’s income inviting an enormous amount of corruption and abuse.
Add to such financial oppression the ceremonial impurity of having to interact
with Gentiles, not to forget the element of treason for helping a foreign
power, and you begin to get a sense of the immense social and cultural toll the
activity had on an individual.
Sinners: As for “sinner” this was not
simply a personal opinion about someone’s lifestyle; it was a term for those
whose breach of the Mosaic law was known in the community, which excluded them
from the synagogue.
Both kinds were excluded. And
we know who these people are in our world as well. We also know what such
exclusion feels like - it's gut-wrenchingly painful. I recently read of an impressive set of studies that
demonstrate why people experience social exclusion as painful. Both physical
pain and the pain of being left out are processed in the same part of the
brain. Emotional pain, in other words, triggers that part of the brain that
processes physical pain.The first act of the gospel, the first act of a loving God is to come, recline, and eat with the excluded, the outcast, the immoral – those who long for a “with.” Notice that Jesus eats first and then calls for repentance. This is both theological as well as pastoral- Romans 2:4 tells us that God’s kindness aims to lead us to repentance. Radical love invites and accepts first –apart from even knowing people. There is an important cultural piece to all of this – to recline, to eat with someone both demonstrated and created a real bond between diners – both ethically and socially. So Jesus bonds with before he does anything else.
And yet there is another implicit message present in all of this. While all of us hunger for a “with,” all of us are also sinners. Jesus is being sarcastic when he tells the Pharisees that he has not come for the righteous– there aren’t any righteous. The Pharisees’ own failure to understand him, to eat with him, are proof of that.
2.
Religious People often Suffer
from an Eating Disorder (vs. 30)
For Jesus – eating with political, social and moral outcasts was the prophetic ministry of the kingdom – a radical inclusiveness. He was addressing the eating disorder often found among religious people. It wasn’t about being nice but displaying God’s kingdom and true feelings by protesting the eating disorder tradition and exclusive policies of the Pharisees. Policies that were based on scripture! Many of us devour the Scriptures only to later purge ourselves – to fail to ingest them properly – to remember that they point to Jesus who digested the Scriptures properly.
And ingested Scripture meant that in Jesus’ ministry tables become platforms for prophetic protest. On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South. Over 70,000 people took part in the sit-ins. They even spread to northern states such as Ohio and Nevada and began to address segregated swimming pools, lunch counters, libraries, transport facilities, museums, art galleries, parks and beaches. By facing our own country’s horrible eating disorder of segregation and exclusion the students played a significant part in the history of the civil rights movement.
Eating with social and moral
outcasts is so important to Jesus’ ministry that he will risk its harm to his
reputation – perhaps, like the four African American students at Woolworth’s,
even its violence. Luke 7:34 has people calling Jesus a “glutton and a
drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” More than mere harm to his reputation,
Deuteronomy used this phrase to designate a “rebellious son” and how one should
deal with such a character:
18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid. ~ Deuteronomy 21:18-21
Notice that the criticism of Jesus is directed toward Jesus’ disciples not Jesus himself (vs. 30). Friends, it strikes me that this doesn’t often happen anymore. Oh, it’s true that Jesus is still painted with that brush but the church, his followers, are rarely criticized for welcoming and eating with outcasts. Where are our lunch counters in today’s world? They’re still out there. Maybe we need to care about our reputation a little bit less and notice our frail physique. Our own desire to look good which is slowly starving us to death. Maybe we need to be a bit more rebellious. Maybe our role isn’t to always play the good citizen but to actually be “friends of sinners.”
3.
Let your table be the church.
In the famous sitcom, Seinfeld, we are introduced to the very broken, if not entertaining, Costanza family. In one episode, the elder Costanza talks about a holiday that he invented to challenge the commercialism of Christmas. It’s called Festivus – and hailed by the slogan, “A Festivus for the rest of us.” The odd celebration contains a bare aluminum pole instead of a Christmas tree and “feats of strength” in which everyone has to wrestle the head of the household. The celebration, however, begins with the “Airing of Grievances”, which takes place immediately after the Festivus dinner has been served. In the television episode, Frank Costanza begins the meal, “I got a lotta problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it!”
Jesus wasn’t just eating with sinners – a condescension of the cool kid hanging out with losers. His eating had a purpose. He aimed to heal them. He aimed to have church!
What might it mean that the table is our place for healing? In Jesus’ ministry the table actually reflected the work of the temple – welcome, forgiveness, healing, and hope. When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal. And not just any meal – the most liberating meal in all of Scripture. The Gospel message of Jesus, his radical act of reaching out to sinners, is not mere spiritual metaphor. Redemption, the coming of the kingdom of God, isn’t simply like a meal – it IS a meal. Jesus’ meals, in other words, belong side-by-side with exorcisms, miracles, preaching, and acts of divine healing. And repentance is not the berating of sinners, the shaming of others, or the stern talking to that a parent might say to a child, “Sit up straight. Stop playing with your food.” It’s an invitation to a banquet. The word “repentance” comes from two Greek words, meta (beyond) and nous (mind or spirit), and thus, in its most basic form, it means something like “go beyond the mind that you have.” Jesus, in other words, is urging his banquet friends to change their way of knowing, their way of seeing and grasping who God really is. It meant seeing Jesus as the great physician come to heal us of all our wounds.
Jesus flipped conventional wisdom on its head. The traditional view of the Pharisees was that uncleanness was contagious, but Jesus regarded holiness/wholeness as contagious. Holiness was not something that needed to be protected; rather it was a gift from God – a miraculous power to transform individuals.
In this way, maybe evangelism and salvation are much more like friendship and a party than preaching and worship. Maybe, the love of Christ is to let the other be strange and not reject him or her, to be enfolded in God’s love.
I’d like to end with another feeding story. In Mark 6, we have the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000.
34 When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.35 By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. 36 Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” 37 But he answered, “You give them something to eat.”
This job of feeding is not the purview of pastor’s solely nor merely the miraculous activity of Jesus – I’m a disciple just like you. It’s for all of us. And so now having heard about the prophetic ministry of the gospel, “You give others something to eat.”
