Jesus didn’t please anybody, it seems. He was always breaking the rules and spreading out the table. —Richard Rohr
Father Richard considers how Jesus’ eating habits challenged the religious and cultural norms of his time—and our own:
Jesus didn’t want his community to have a social ethic; he wanted it to be a social ethic. Their very way of relating was to be an affront to the system of dominance and power; it was to name reality in a new way. They were to live in a new symbolic universe. This radical idea is given in a simple clue found throughout the Christian Scriptures—one that biblical scholars overlooked until only recently: Jesus’ presence with others at table. That theme is so constant in the Christian Scriptures that scholars today see it as central to Jesus’ message. Jesus never appears to be pushing what we call social programs. He is much more radical. He calls us to a new social order in which we literally share table differently!
The mystery of sharing food and a common table takes place on different levels. First, there’s the unifying idea of sharing the same food. Then, there is the whole symbolism of the table itself: where we sit at the table and how the table is arranged. Together, the food and table become a symbol of how our social world is arranged. Once we rearrange life around the table we begin to change our notions of social life.
That, I believe, was Jesus’ most consistent social action: eating in new ways! In the midst of that eating, he announced the reign of God and talked in new ways. Usually, on his way in or out of a house, he encountered those who were oppressed and eliminated from the system. A great number of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms take place while he’s either entering a house to have a meal with someone or leaving a house just after having had a meal with someone. He redefines where power is on many different levels at the same time. Religious power is, for one thing, mostly exercised outside the Temple and synagogue.
It’s necessary to calculate very carefully what was lost and what was gained as Christianity developed. The church moved from Jesus’ real meal with open table fellowship to its continuance in the relatively safe ritual meal that became the Christian Eucharist. Unfortunately, the meal itself came to redefine social reality in a negative way, in terms of worthiness and unworthiness.
That is almost exactly the opposite of Jesus’ intention. To this day, we use Eucharist to define membership in terms of worthy and unworthy. Even if we deny that is our intention, it’s clearly the practical message people hear. Isn’t it strange that sins of marriage and sexuality are the primary ones we use to exclude people from the table, when other sins like greed and hatefulness that cause more public damage are never considered?
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, 2nd ed. (Franciscan Media, 2022), 81, 83, 84–85.
Image credit and inspiration: Anastasia Chervinska, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Abundance is a table always set, where the meal awaits with quiet grace and there is always enough for all who arrive.
Story from Our Community:
I am part of a wonderful LGBT+ worship community called Open Table Liverpool in the UK. Many of us have read the Daily Meditations for years. More recently we now have a monthly gathering at a town pub which we call “A Pint with Richard Rohr.” Every month, we gather to reflect together on the past four weeks of meditations and our individual and community practice of contemplative prayer. It is such a deeply rich gathering of diverse folk from many Christian traditions and none, sexualities, and genders and we look forward to many more years of journeying together.
—Warren H.
