Dining with Jesus

With compassion and acceptance at the core of his values Jesus got a reputation for wild dinner parties. Around the same table would sit a rural fisherman, a one-time leader of the Synagogue, a prostitute, a local bullyboy, a Roman soldier, an immigrant woman from over the border…. Jew and gentile, male and female, strange and familiar…

The Hebraic purity system had strict boundaries in place: “Don’t eat with them, don’t touch that, don’t fraternize with her… Look out or you’ll get grubby… and then you won’t be able to eat with us!” Purity was about rules. Piety meant adhering to them.

For Jesus purity was constituted by what was in one’s heart. If compassion was in one’s heart, then piety meant being hospitable, generous, and willing to suspend one’s prejudices in order to meet with strangers. For Jesus it wasn’t about keeping to the rules; it was about letting love be the measure of all you do.

It’s not that Jesus was into a tolerance that said, “Everything is okay”. It is possible to find verses that infer, for example, that Jesus was opposed to the Roman occupation and unsupportive of bullying and prostitution. At the same time I don’t think it is possible to categorically say that every soldier, tax collector, and prostitute Jesus dined with had renounced the morally disagreeable aspects of their professions.

In other words, at the table with Jesus the agreeable and disagreeable sat together. The sinners and saints broke bread together. The ideas, comments, and chat were not religiously sanitized. I imagine there were some pretty colourful words and some pretty novel views bandied around. The good, the bad, and the grubby were all together.

“What makes a person holy,” Jesus intonated, “is not who you mix with or what they say. What makes a person holy is being true to the God of compassion that wants to include everyone. It’s the words you say and things you do that will reveal that God.”