the meal … another serving
Welcome to the conversation.
Once more I have written down some of the thoughts I have been working through towards Sunday.
I love food but I love it most of all when I get to share it with others. I guess I am seeing more and more how I need to receive mealtimes as a wonderfully necessary interruption to the other activities of a day.
At the moment my reading at the end-of-the-day is John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza, which I’m really enjoying because it’s set in Italy and I’ve just been there on holiday. Grisham’s novel, like our own experience of Italy, is overflowing with food. 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 - sunshine, sweet breezes, with a slice of torte and a drink … and a good book to read.
Something I had decided to weave through the holiday was the reading through of Luke’s Gospel. I was prompted to do this by something I read in N T Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus just before my holiday began, a suggestion that there are eight meals in Luke - so I thought I’d see if I could spot just what they were.
What I found were many food and meal references in Luke’s Gospel, but 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) A Pharisee’s invitation and the announcement of the Great Banquet (14:1-24); 6) At Zacchaeus’ place (intimated - 19:1-10); 7) The Passover (22:1-23); and, 
the meal in Emmaus.
Wright asks us to particularly notice the seventh and eighth meals, pointing to a 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.’
Meals are big in the Gospels and the reason for their significance comes into sharper view when we follow Wright’s argument that Jesus replaced the position of the temple in the life of Israel 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 reason I share these things is because I have been preparing a message for Sunday and thought I’d do some reflecting through my blog. The worship service I’m involved in is the beginning of something new for a church facing a new beginning - a shorter service followed by a communal meal - and I have more than an inkling that it is something important for the congregation to the extent of shaping its future. I think the meal is going to be lunch for this congregation in more than one way and I’ll tell you why.
Firstly, running through all my thinking about meals is an icon alternatively titled The Hospitality of Abraham and The Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (see above). The icon has become very special to me in the seven or eight years since I was introduced to it, representing as it does, the three travellers received as guests by Abram and Sarai in Genesis 18, traditionally thought to be God visiting the elderly couple.
Whenever I look at this image I am reminded of how God is welcoming me to his table in order 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 too. Recently, I have been thinking of it as my breakfast table, the place I sit at the beginning of my day. This first “table of God” in a day for me is a personal one.
The second “table of God” I need to sit at in my day is a communal table: when I meet with others who are God’s people, and we enjoy him and enjoy one another. This is lunch - and this is the kind of meal I think the congregation is going to enjoy.
I don’t know about you but I was very much brought up with the idea that it is important to have “three square meals” a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner (or, breakfast, dinner, and tea, if you come from Yorkshire, as I do). I was not allowed to skip a meal by my mother as a child, and now I am not allowed to skip a meal by my wife - C’est la vie! But they are both right, and you may be agreeing with them.
When the meal becomes a metaphor, or an icon, we begin to see how many people are skipping the meals they are invited to share at the table of God. Jesus ate at these three tables - Henri Nouwen noticed how Jesus lived his life through a rhythm or cycle of solitude, community, and ministry - there is the “breakfast” of personal time with God, there is the “lunchtime” of time together in community, and, there is the “dinnertime” of missional tables with God, something we see in one of the meals Luke records, about the banquet house of God needing to be full (Luke 14:23).
I know I can’t skip any of these meals, no matter what I might come up with as an excuse: I know more now than ever in my life, how I need the personal time, how I need the community time, and how I need the missional time, if I am to live this life with God - if I am to live the life that is God.
The kingdom meals open a larger and more beautiful world to us. As I reflect on the icon and on Luke’s recording of a number of meals, I became aware of disruption. Although Abraham welcomes the three strangers, it is the strangers who become the host in Rublev’s icon. Is this artistic licence on the part of Rublev or did he see something more, perhaps how in a number of Luke’s meals Jesus is the guest invited to the table but who then becomes the host, most strikingly in the eighth meal, in Emmaus.
More disruptive still is the meal at Simon the Pharisee’s home, where it is actually the woman who gatecrashes the meal, who, perhaps unknowingly, becomes the host - until Jesus points out that this is exactly what she is doing.
I wonder if this is disturbing you as it is disturbing me: What kind of kingdom is this, inviting the stranger and then allowing the stranger to become the host?
I wonder what this will mean to the people coming to the service I’ll be at on Sunday; I wonder what it will mean to so many churches.
Dare we welcome strangers and then invite these strangers to become our hosts?
Surely it’s our church?
Doesn’t it take many years to “get our feet under the table” - before something like this can happen?
These meal stories are highly subversive. Jesus appears to have little problem incorporating some of the most significant kingdom business in a meal, including the mystery and glory poured into the Passover meal.
As I was thinking through all of this, I read these words from Rick McKinley: ‘Have you ever received communion from a beautiful eight-year-old girl who looks at you with eyes of wonder? “This is the body of Christ, broken for you,” she says, holding up a piece of bread,’ (This Beautiful Mess).
Whenever God’s people come together, there is a choice: we can eat some food together because it’s expedient to do so, or we can come to the table of God and enter into the mystery - where the lonely share a meal with others, where hurts are laid down and healing is found, where empty people are filled to bursting point, and where joyless people find laughter, and above all, were love is spread thickly and freely by the stranger-God who is the host of the feast of life in all its fullness.
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, of love and forgiveness and wholeness and purpose.
How do we become this kind of “church”? Now, that’s a really good, a really exciting question.
What do you think?
