the meal … continued
Welcome to the conversation.
I am continuing to follow my thoughts towards Sunday. I have reworked yesterday’s offering - hopefully not serving it up as “re-heat.”
I love food but I don’t love it nearly as much if I have to eat it on my own. eating then simply becomes something I have to do for sustenance, but when I eat with others, food and conversation are a delightful fruit and occupation of a shared meal.
At the moment my end-of-the-day reading is Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, a story set in Italy and simply overflowing with food. And as I have just been to Italy on holiday I very much appreciate the scenes drawn by the author. Rather than laying out in the sun as human barbecues, my wife and I loved to sit in the local cafes, looking out on a lake, with a slice of torte and a drink … and a book to read.
One of the things I had decided to weave through my holiday was to read through Luke’s Gospel. I had been prompted by something I had just read in N T Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus, a suggestion that there are eight meals in the Gospel, so I thought I’d see if I could spot just what they were.
If you read through Luke’s Gospel what you will find are lots of food and meal references. Here’s my best effort at listing the eight: 1) Matthew’s Party (5:27-39); 2) Simon the Pharisee’s invitation (7:36-50); 3) Feeding more than 5,000 (9:12-17); 4) Pharisees and washing hands (11:37-41); 5) Pharisees and healing on the sabbath; 6) At Zacchaeus’ place (intimated - 19:1-10); 7) The Passover (22:1-23); 
(sorry for the emoticon here, it should say “eight” but it won’t go away) the meal in Emmaus. Notice the seventh and eighth meals, leading Wright to point out the link between the “week” of Genesis creation and the new creation in Luke: ‘the week of the first creation is over, and Easter is the beginning of the new creation. God’s new world order has arrived.’
The reason these meals are so significant for us comes into sharper view when we follow N T Wright’s argument that Jesus was replacing the temple with a meal, his ‘own alternative symbol, the kingdom-feast, the new exodus feast,’ and that ‘Those who shared the meal with him were the people of the renewed covenant, […] Grouped around him, they constituted the true eschatological Israel.’
I share these things with you because I’m beginning to prepare a message for Sunday and thought I’d jot them down in my blog. The worship service I’m involved in is the beginning of something new for a new beginning of a church - a shorter service followed by a communal meal, and I have more than an inkling that this is going to be something important for the congregation, to the extent of possibly defining a significant part of who and what this God-community is meant to be.
Running through my thinking about all of this is an icon which has made a big impact on my life, alternatively called The Hospitality of Abraham and The Trinity Icon, by Andrei Rublev (see above). The icon represents the three travellers received as guests by Abram and Sarai in Genesis 18, traditionally thought of as God visiting the elderly couple.
I have loved this icon ever since being introduced to it some seven or eight years ago, for in it I know God is welcoming me to his table to spend some time with him, to be. Notice the space at the table in the foreground. That’s my place, and that’s your place. Recently, it has become my breakfast table, the first place I sit at the beginning of my day. For others it may be a supper table, or a welcoming table for some other time of day. God wants to spend time with us.
The thing about it is that although Abraham welcomed the three strangers, it is the strangers who become the host! This is the thing about a number of Luke’s meal passages. Jesus is the one who is invited to the table but it is he who becomes the host, most notably in the eighth meal, in Emmaus. At Simon the Pharisee’s home, it is actually the woman who gatecrashes the meal who, perhaps unknowingly, becomes the host, until Jesus points out that this is what she is doing.
I don’t know if this is getting to you, but it’s getting to me. What kind of kingdom is this, that invites the stranger and then allows the stranger to become the host?
What does this mean for the people who are coming to the meal on Sunday? Dare they become welcomers of strangers and then invite these strangers to become their hosts? Surely it’s their church? Surely you have to be there for many years to “get your feet under the table” before you can something like this can happen?
I have found these stories of meals to be highly subversive. Some of the most amazing kingdom moments were lived out in meals. One meal holds the unique and crowning glory of Jesus’ ministry … in a meal!
(I share a small table with God in the morning but he also invites me to share a huge table with many others.)
More than simply eating food together on Sunday, this meal holds the promise for a group of people as a living picture of God’s table, a table of kingdom closeness, an icon, or window, into the greater reality of the stranger-God who has visited us and who has become the host of life.
Are we hungry yet?
Brian McLaren shares this thought: ‘I think this is what happens to all of us when we feel a pull toward God. Not many of us, I think, feel really excited about attending church or singing religious songs or stopping snarky comments or disciplining ourselves to pray. What we feel is that some music is missing from our lives, and we need it; we can’t be fully ourselves as we hope to be without it,’ (Finding Our Way Again).
Do we hear the music? Are we hungry yet? Perhaps they are the same thing. It’s not church we want, it’s to be fed at the table of God, an open table, where everyone can find love and forgiveness and wholeness and purpose.
And how do we become that kind of “church”? That is an exciting question.
What do you think?
