Ordinary 22

The Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29; Psalm 68; Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a; Luke 14:1, 7-14

As Jesus gives instructions on where dinner guests might consider sitting at table or who should be included on an invitation list for a party, do we really think that Jesus is concerned about etiquette – the Emily Post of first century Palestine? That would be a difficult sell for someone who was considered a glutton and a drunk, which is the reputation the Gospels record Jesus had among some people.

Might Jesus’ teachings today be less about manners than about Jesus’s own ministry?

The Jesus of Luke’s Gospel is preoccupied with eating. More references to eating are recorded in Luke than in any other Gospel. This suggests that meals, banquets, wedding receptions, Sabbath dinners are one of the most important places that Jesus carried out his ministry of teaching and encountering people, particularly the marginalized. In this light it is regrettable that today’s passage omits the healing of a man at this dinner party who was suffering from edema with I expect related heart issues, possibly on oxygen. People with ill-health are often marginalized by our society.

The Jesuit Review, America recently offered an article entitled: Jesus would have hung out in a dive bar—and not just to convert its patrons. Can you picture Jesus sitting at the bar of Hill Street Café? If you can’t, why not? At respectable restaurants you are never elbow to elbow with strangers and patrons who you normally would have not chosen to sit with. But these are the opportunities that Jesus seems to have sought out.

The theologian and liturgist, Nathan Mitchell describes Jesus’ table manners in terms of randomness and argues that the very randomness of Jesus’ table habits challenged the system of social relationships.  Mitchell writes: “It wasn’t simply that Jesus ate with objectionable people – but that he ate with anyone. Consider who Jesus is sitting at table with right now in this room – he ate with anyone. Instead of concern for social rank and order, privilege of place and honour, Jesus’ habits blurred the distinctions between hosts and guests, between people with power and those who are hopeless, between the haves and the have-nots.

Where do you and I fall in those categories?

The Tony award–winning play Oslo by J. T. Rogers, recounts the back-channel negotiations in the development of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. What the play shed light on for me was the power of a shared meal. After hours of negotiating all day, Israelis and Palestinians ate, drank, joked, told stories, and shared details about their families and life experiences. They became ordinary people for each other with the same aspirations and hopes.  The experience of repeated shared meals opened them up to each other and changed them.

Instead of reinforcing the rules of etiquette, Jesus subverted them. Thus the Jesuit composer and liturgist, John Foley writes: “Jesus’ table ministry is an open and persistent practice of eating and drinking with sinners.  It is this unusual and dangerous act of table hospitality which, ultimately led to his death.”

What will happen with Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa, Nicaragua who has been arrested and confined to his residence while five priests, a seminarian, and a cameraman of a religious television channel have been jailed in the notorious El Chipote prison by the Ortega government? The Church is now the lone voice in Nicaragua that speaks out for marginalized people. Foley reminds us that the table etiquette of Jesus has a cost.

The power of a shared meal can change lives. Why do I believe that Jesus would hang out at a dive bar? Why do I go to such places? Not to judge and condemn people. No one is ever changed by condemnation or being told they are wrong. And when we think that some other person needs to change more than we do, we are on very thin spiritual ice. Change happens gradually, over time through genuine relationship. Jesus did not eat with sinners solely to call them to a changed and fruitful relationship. Jesus loved them completely as they were – not who they could be.

With whom do you eat?