This
Blog comes from John Frye at the Shepherd’s Nook.
It will teach you how Jesus changed everything.
It will also make you thing long and hard about how you “do
family”.
I hope you read it carefully and prayerfully.
Jeff
When
Jesus broke bread, he broke Israel. With his meal-time habits, Jesus was
boldly speaking a new language and scandalously introducing a new world.
US
American culture has gutted the social significance of daily meals. With
innovative TV dinners and ubiquitous fast food chains, we eat like we
live: with a sound and fury signifying nothing. Occasionally we are
seated at a table with 3 forks, 3 glasses, two spoons and two knives and
we freeze up. This is no ordinary meal. Which fork do we use first? A
china plate with 3 long green beans with a “glaze” on them and a
piece of meat the size of a postage stamp with a purple flower next to
it shows up. We mutter, “Who needs 3 forks for this?” We begin to
fantasize about a happy meal.
In
Jesus’ day a meal was a controlling cultural map.
Who was eating with whom? Where? What? And who was in charge? All this
said something significant about social relationships. An iron-clad
social code was telegraphed. It was what anthropologists call “the
language of meals.”
Are
you one of us or one of them?
Every meal in Jesus’ day was an answer to that question. Meals
portrayed legitimate and illegitimate social relationships. “This man
(read “scum bag”) welcomes ‘sinners’ and eats with them” (Luke
15:1-2). Who was clean and unclean? Who was pure and who was
polluted? Meals answered these questions.
Add
to this Israel’s history with God around meals—complaining about
water and quails—eating and drinking at the golden calf—picking
manna up daily—the periodic holy feast days—staying pure in Babylon
(Daniel and his friends)—you get the picture. In Israel your meal-time
habits showed whether you were close to or far from God. The “Lord’s
Table” was every meal you ate. . . or it was not His table.
Meals
kept tribes together, clans united, families bonded, a nation
identified. Meals were expressions of law-keeping or law-breaking. Right
“eatingness” was really close to godliness.
Enter
radical pastor Jesus and his new code. There’s a startling new table
in town and with it came Jesus’ meal-time, good news message. He was
subversively, non-violently redrawing Israel’s cultural-spiritual map.
He offered new, happy redefinitions of who is pure and who is polluted.
He did not have to say a lot. All he had to do was host a meal and break
the bread and pour the wine. By these actions Jesus literally
broke Jewish society apart, even family members had to chose (or
not) to be in the new social structure Jesus was creating (see Matthew
10:34-39).
Jesus
said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors
and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God
ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness,
and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes
did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”
Jesus
said, “I say to you that many will come from the
east and the west (i.e., despised Gentiles), and will take their
places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the
kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown
outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of
teeth.”
Jesus
said, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you
say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax
collectors and ‘sinners.’”
Jesus,
then, by his meal-time associations reconfigured the kingdom of God for
all to see. He was amazingly courageous and intensely
controversial. I wonder if most of his followers developed ulcers.
“Can you believe what he is doing?” I hear Peter saying to
John. “We are all going to die.”
Every
meal Jesus ate in his ministry was a transformative expression, a here
and now enactment of the presence of the kingdom of God. Grace: amazing,
gutsy, pass-the-potatoes grace.
For more:
follow on Twitter @jefflampl
No comments:
Post a Comment