Invited to His Supper

Monday, July 21, 2014

Rogelio Zelada - Office of Lay Ministry

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Ezra, a teacher of the Law, has climbed onto the podium raised on the square in front of the Water Gate. A large crowd waits in silence as he carefully unfolds the sacred volume of the Law that he will proclaim for the first time in the history of Israel. That first encounter with the revealed Word impresses and scares the people, who not only recognize themselves as sinners, but also mostly as reneging of so many divine commandments. When the scribe hears the large assembly weeping, he calms them down by reminding them of the importance of that day: No one should be sad or crying before God’s great mercy. As culmination, he instructs them to go eat and to share, to celebrate and enjoy succulent delicacies and delicious wines because that day they had to honor the Lord’s tenderness towards His chosen ones.  

For Israel, the common supper was a moment to implement a delicate ritual that celebrated God’s blessing. Food was the caress with which God blessed his people. It was such a sacred act that it fulfilled hospitality, as does the hastened and delicious banquet that Abraham offers the Lord next to the holm oak of Mamre, or the freshly made fishes and loaves with which the Risen One treats the post-Paschal community by the lake, at the end of John’s text. He calls them from the shore: “Come, have breakfast,”and that partaking is a reflection of all of Jesus’ suppers, shared not only with them, but with Pharisees, sinners, people of little importance and worse reputation, whom He encouraged to join the work of the Kingdom of God, his Father. Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul gave witness of it, and especially of the extraordinary Easter supper that Jesus shared as both greeting and farewell. 

Throughout the entire Gospel, Jesus perplexes both strangers and his own, deliberately ignoring every etiquette of good eating that so concerned the people and culture of the time; a time when, aside from sharing the same values, sitting at the table meant having the same social standing and honor. No one could include at the table anyone of a lesser status or honor, sinners, the sick, or publicans. That is why women, who had no social standing, were excluded from the supper, which was a space reserved for men. Hence the agitation when the woman bursts into the home of Simon the Pharisee and places herself in front of Jesus to wash and pour perfume on his feet; or the restlessness of Martha, who doesn’t know how to pull Mary out of the living room where she is comfortably seated listening to the Master, surrounded by all the men who have come to learn from his teachings. 

The obsessive attention to social honor is a detail that is present in the parable of the guests at the wedding feast for the son of the King. At that time, an invitation to a feast had to be accompanied by a list of the participants, to see if it was convenient or not to meet with those people. Strict etiquette required guests to verify the reputation of the other guests, and it was mandatory to give the traditional excuses to justify refusal: “I got married,” “I bought a yoke of oxen and I must try it,” and so on, which was the polite way of saying that I don’t want to attend or meet with those people — even if it is the King himself who is doing the inviting. 

The Gospel writers do not give us many details about the supper in the desert, or how the 5,000 dinner guests were able to legally purify themselves before eating the bread and the fish in a place where there was no water available for them to wash their hands. That presented a big problem at the time. People had to ask themselves, with whom am I going to eat? How was the dinner prepared? Where should I sit? When participating at a supper, a series of details had to be taken into consideration. That is why Jesus was criticized over and over again in front of his disciples for ignoring the rules: “Your Teacher eats and drinks with sinners.” 

For Christ and his community, the shared table is the sign of the broad inclusivity of the Kingdom of God. Matthew announces that people will come from the North and the South, from the East and the West, from all places and conditions to share in the same banquet of the Lord (Mt. 8, 11-12). It is the Lord who invites us to go out on the streets and the main roads and invite to the feast whomever we find(Mt. 22, 9): the table of Christ and the Church is the place where everyone must feel welcomed and accepted, at whatever level of conversion they find themselves.