Jesus, charity and commensality: Extract 2 from Ordinary Miracles

One theme that has run through everything we have done in the short history of our church is this: food. From that first Sunday in Easter 2004 to last week when we ate Jamaican curry, eating together has been central. Lots of our service in the community involves food too: breakfast group in term time, Make Lunch for kids on free school meals during the holidays, weekly food parcels for destitute asylum seekers. 

We have found that sitting around a table together, rather than sitting in rows looking at the back of someone else’s head, deepens our friendships and provides an easy welcome for newcomers.

Meeting as church around a meal table is not a new idea. It’s not a ‘fresh expression of church’, or ‘emergent’ or whatever the latest cool word is. Throughout biblical history, God’s people have met around a table. Jewish festivals are so centred around food that one Rabbi said you could summarise all the Jewish festivals in three brief sentences: ‘They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!’

Indeed, what happened at the table in Jesus’ day was crucial in defining your position in society. If you ate with people of good reputation, your reputation was enhanced. If you were invited to sit near to an esteemed host, you would bring great honour to your family. Your place in the pecking order was shown by who you ate with, and where you sat at at the table. The table was also a dividing line between who was ‘in’ and ‘out’, who was clean and unclean, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. 

Let me put it as clearly as I can. What Jesus did and said around the table was central to all he came to do. Almost every biblical scholar who writes about Jesus’ table habits concludes that they are central to his ministry. If we are to fully understand how the people of Jesus’ day reacted to him, and the message he brought to them, we need to understand about how he used the meal table. 

One writer said that in Luke’s gospel, ‘Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal’ (Karris 2006). This is a bit of a deliberate exaggeration, but makes the point. Jesus eats with all kinds of people, but especially those who are excluded in some way. Tax collectors like Levi and Zaccheus - hated and considered traitors by their own people. Prostitutes, who Jesus said were coming into the kingdom ahead of the religious leaders! (Matt 21:31).

Jesus does all this as what we might call an ‘acted parable’. As well as all the parables he told and the teaching he gave, his very choice of table companions was a powerful message in itself.

Church at its best is a ragtag collection of misfits, feasting together around a table next to a roaring fire, people you would never expect to find all together in one room, except for a miracle!

Jesus’ example of living his life with those on the edges of society is a huge challenge to us not only as churches, but as individuals too. One writer makes a distinction between acts of charity, and what he calls ‘commensality’. Strictly speaking, commensality is to bond together with someone over food and drink, but this scholar uses it to refer to a lifestyle rather than just a one-off meal. 

It would have been common in Jesus’ day to put on meals for poor people as acts of charity, just as many churches do at Christmas today for homeless people. This is not what Jesus is doing here. He is including all these marginalised people not just at the occasional meal, but in his life, at his own table. 

One example could be useful here. I give £20 a month to sponsor a child called Yolanda in Zimbabwe. This is a good and important thing to do. But it isn't difficult. I hardly notice the money leaving my account each month, and it eases my conscience to know I am helping someone worse off than me. But Yolanda makes almost no impact on my life. This is the kind of charity which is useful, but not what Jesus did. The writer I referred to earlier says that this kind of charity is ‘our last desperate defence against the terror of commensality’. 

When all our connections with those different to us are based on the modern idea of charity, we are able to hold people at arms length, whilst easing our consciences that we are making a difference in the world. Jesus goes much further than this, and challenges us to do the same. 

Your church may run a food bank, but who sits around your dinner table? I give money to a homeless charity, but who do I invite to my parties? You might click to sign a Facebook petition about refugees’ treatment in this country, but do you have a spare bedroom you could offer to someone seeking asylum who is temporarily homeless this week? 

Have I ever taken Jesus’ words seriously when he said: ‘When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives…invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed’ (Luke 14:12-13). As always, this is not just something Jesus said, but something he lived out. May he be a challenge to our lifestyles today.