Faithful Feasting: “Jesus Welcomes Sinners and Eats With Them”
Luke demonstrated with meticulous detail how Jesus Christ welcomed sinners, healed the sick, fed the hungry, and preached good news to the poor. In Luke’s gospel of the good news to the poor, salvation has both a spiritual and a social dimension. One of the ways that Jesus demonstrates that social dimension of the good news is through the practice of faithful feasting.
Luke’s gospel follows a ritual rhythm based on Jesus’ breaking bread with others. “In Luke’s gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal,” writes Robert J. Karris. What do we make of this? If Jesus is interested in interventions that facilitate power shifts, the in breaking of the kingdom, then why is he so often caught between feasts? Ought Jesus be attending more fully to the face-to-face showdowns of power, teaching and authority, as with the exorcisms and healings? Why is breaking bread with the other so integral to his prophetic ministry?
The act of feasting, for Jesus, is a transformational improvisation upon both the act of exorcism and the act of healing, taking the old song of division and jazzing it up to inspire the embodiment of a prophetic egalitarian community. Jesus’ meals with sinners and tax collectors subvert the cultural hierarchies of his day (Mark 2:16). In this way, Jesus wields a more radical power and authority than other religious teachers, and can not only critique the seemingly staid places of power and oppression in society but also effect real change in them.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus often invites those rejected by the world to join him for a meal. Since Jesus sees value in people whom the world sees as without value, he improvises and crosses the established boundaries of Jewish ritual meals. The people whom the Jewish laws deem unclean and sinful are precisely the people Jesus came to save.
Jesus’ parable of the great dinner illustrates his commitment to eating with those on the margins of society (Luke 14:15-24; Matt. 22:1-14). In this parable a rich man invites many guests to come to a dinner party, but they all make excuses for not being able to attend. So the rich man asks his slave to go out on the streets and invite “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (Luke 14:21). Through this parable, Jesus is calling his followers to feed the poor with generosity and respect: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind” (14:12-13). These people of low status in the society are the ones Jesus is encouraging his followers to focus their ministry on. Eating with the least of these is a radical act of hospitality.
Jesus’ feasts are subversive encounters. He intentionally eats with people of all walks of life, especially the poor, marginalized and disinherited. His encounter eating with those on the margins turns the cultural hierarchy on its head. When Jesus encounters impure people on the margins of society, instead of segregating himself from them, he breaks bread with them. Jesus’ improvisational ethic allows him to constantly insinuate himself into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the poor, transforming those structures to be more fundamentally loving and just. Through exchanging his heart with the rabble of society, Jesus creates the conditions for the great inversion his mother sang about to materialize.
Jesus does not avoid meals with Pharisees, though they wish to entrap him. Instead, he turns the trap they set for him back onto them. He does not deny eating with tax collectors and sinners, but uses the table as a place to imagine what the basileia tou theou looks like from their perspective. When the poor and the sick are gathered in the countryside, he does not disperse them to go and find food, but multiplies the food for them, a jazzlike riff on the manna that kept Israel alive during their wilderness wandering.
Along the highways and byways of Galilee, Jesus’ subversive feasts with sinners and tax collectors facilitate an intimacy with those on the underside. These subversive feasts inspire small, underground communities that are akin to jazz clubs like Smalls in New York City, a small basement performance space with no stage that facilitates an intimacy between the musicians and the audience. In a like manner, Jesus’ feasts with the least of these foster subversive intimacy that is the basis of revolutionary friend ship. By breaking social conformities and eating with people we are not supposed to, we are faithful to the true inclusive intention of faithful feasting—transgression for shalom justice. Faithful feasts are places of creativity and celebration—spaces of hope! What jazz club is staid, dispassionate, repressive or empty? Are they not fonts of musical subversion, intimate fellowship and liberating places of festival?
Jesus eats with both mysterious strangers and dear friends. After Jesus had entered Jerusalem, he gathered his disciples for a final meal. The Twelve gathered, including the one who would betray him. They broke bread together, drank wine, reminisced, laughed and cried. However, there comes a time when coercion loses its strategic value and direct action is required. In this last feast, Jesus lifts up the inverted logic of divine power—kenosis—self-emptying on behalf of the other. Revolutionary power in life is found only in living for something worth dying for, or as Jesus exampled, dying for something worth living for. N. T. Wright writes, “The Last Supper was Jesus’ own alternative symbol, the kingdom-feast, the new exodus … Jesus would defeat evil by letting it do its worst to him.”
Jesus lived his life with vigilance, embodying the kingdom and inaugurating a kingdom of God movement. But this kingdom was not like kingdoms of this world built on gaining more financial power, more military force and more colonial expansion. Christ’s kingdom was based on emptying oneself into shalom justice, emptying oneself into practical pacifism and emptying oneself into neighbor love. During the Last Supper, as Jesus shares bread and wine with his disciples, he says, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me … This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19-20). At this moment of intimacy with his disciples in the Last Supper, we see that at its heart the feast is a ritual where we share our hearts with each other. Through the physical and emotional sustenance of the feast we are prepared for the costly walk of discipleship.
