Christ the King Sunday, November 25, 2007
Great Feasts With Jesus

Luke 9:12-17
Luke 11:37-41
Luke 24:28-31
Luke 23:33-43

How was your Thanksgiving?  Lots of food? Families? Friends?  We had a good time at our house, my grown up daughters came to visit. They hadn’t seen each other for a year so it was fun to watch them catch up with each other. There is still way too much food in my refrigerator but I guess that comes with trying to figure out how to align traditions with actual appetites.

There is a lot of food in Luke, the Gospel we have been reading from this past liturgical year. So it seems fitting that we take one more look at the Jesus and food this last Sunday of the lectionary year – which this year also with good fortune falls on Thanksgiving Weekend – the kick off of the Holiday Season which will continue to involve  lots of food, dinner parties and festive occasions – at least if the TV commercials are to be believed.

Jesus seemed to like parties. He kept showing up for the good times.  Apparently he wasn’t too picky about who he hung out with either. Respectable religious leadership sniffed, “Tax Collectors and Sinners” – known reprobates – drug dealers and lobbyists for the tobacco industry. But who could blame him – Dinner parties was the main form of entertainment for the powerful and the elite – the ones who had food which wasn’t everyone. It was the way to see and be seen, to display your status, maybe move up a bit in the world, meet some folks who could “help you out” or find someone you could help out and then ratchet up a debt in your favor which might be useful sometime in the future. Everyone who could wrangle an invitation participated in some form of the grand dinner party. It’s not surprising that Jesus would want to be a part of the scene.

I’m not sure what Martha Stewart or the Food Network would do with the ancient Greco-roman dinner party scene. It is a bit different then what we think of today because for one thing, no one sat in chairs – not at the dinner party. Maybe in the back room, maybe at informal family meals but the big do involved couches. Couches with people lying on them. Couches with slaves serving food and mixing up the wine.

If you want to go classic, then you go with the arrangement called The Triclinium .  You might consider taking notes in this part because this is a room décor you might want to keep in mind when you start planning your next Toga Party. The Triclinium has essential three platforms around a central open space. Each platform is slightly tilted with the higher end pointing toward the center. Three guests recline on each platform cushioned with pillows and cloths and other comfy stuff. Each seat has position of higher or lower ranking honor attached to it so that any fool walking into the room could immediately identify who is the top dog in the group.

I have no idea how people ate food while laying down. It seems very messy to me but maybe they just skipped the soup course.

This is a society where honor is very important. There are financial consequences for not only yourself but your entire family if you slip in status so it is worth walking out the door if you don’t like your seat. 

Once the guests are settled, they are served food and wine and are expected to make pleasant conversation. Sometimes entertainment such as a flute girl or a juggler is provided. Sometimes a serious intellectual discussion ranging across deep philosophical concepts takes place. Sometimes a lot of wine is consumed and… well… apparently one of the drinking games involved trying to hit some target of the diner’s choice with the dregs of your wine cup. It was very competitive and sometimes people didn’t get very drunk because they were too busy throwing their wine rather than drinking it and sometimes…well… let’s just gentle close the door on the Triclinium room now. We can clean up the mess in the morning.

Jesus was a lousy dinner guest, or maybe he was one of the best – because he tended to be a bit controversial in his choice of dinner conversation topics.  Controversial? Okay – maybe ”Challenging” would be a better word. How about “Uppity?” Okay, downright pain in the neck. On the other hand, you knew your guests would be talking about your dinner party for weeks to come if that Jesus fool showed up. 

Even so, you know a dinner party is off to a bad start when – as we read in Luke 11 starting with the 37th verse, “While Jesus was speaking” Jesus was teaching the crowds somewhere in public, presumably the town square or the synagogue or Starbucks, “While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee invited him to dine with him, so he went in and took his place at the table. “ Sounds innocent enough so far…. “The Pharisee was amazed to see that he did not first wash before dinner.” Oh… now the trouble begins. Not washing before dinner isn’t just blowing off the little sign in the men’s room – nope, it’s a serious breach of ritual behavior, of doing what God has asked God’s people to do and already the Pharisee – a Jew who is just trying to do the right thing according to his faith as he sees it – its thinking the whole thing might be a big mistake. Because not only does whom the Pharisee eat with reflect well or poorly on him – you know, the kind of company you keep and all that – but also there is now clearly risk of even more serious breaches of purity yet to come. This is potentially dangerous. “Then the Lord (Jesus) said to him (apparently still laying on the couch, waiting for food), ‘Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? So give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you.” And Jesus keeps on going from there for several more paragraphs. I’ll let you read it for yourself, its actually quite righteously In-your-face. Now Luke doesn’t tell us if Jesus sticks around for the dinner or if he is pointedly refused service but Luke does report in verse 53 that “When Jesus went outside, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile towards him …” And who could blame them?

On the other hand, if you were hungry because you were poor, Jesus was a great dining companion. Jesus had a way of stretching some fish and bread into a feast for five thousand, not counting the women and children. (Luke 9). He seemed happy to eat in homes without slaves where the women of the house prepared and served the food. He also just fine when they didn’t quite make it into the kitchen but instead sat among the disciples to listen and learn.

So hopefully everyone here had a chance to enjoy a nice Thanksgiving meal yesterday.  There are some really great comedy movies out there based on the horror of the imperfect Thanksgiving dinner but I hope that you all managed to avoid replicating the worst of them. Sometimes family gatherings are tough events because everyone starts to fall back into old patterns even when everyone and everything has changed. Its weird when you are the in-law, the stranger, at least in my experience, because most of the people at the table have years of little rituals that keeps them bonded to each other and its disorientated when strangers like your sister’s college roommate shows up at your family’s table because she doesn’t know about the cranberry rules.

At any rate, Thanksgiving – and the rest of this holidays season – is primarily a family holiday. We celebrate it in our homes and the focus is the moment when everyone sits down at the family table and starts to eat with each other.

Eating together is actually one of the markers of who is inside a particular family and who isn’t.  The Korean word for family comes out of the phrase for “Those who share a common pot.” Think about it for a second – when dinner time rolls around we don’t wonder into random homes looking for food.  There may be any number of places we can go eat as a guest with a little advanced notice but there are actually very few places where we can walk in and pop open the refrigerator without the police being called.

It has been like this for a long time, perhaps since the time civilization began to get organized. If a hunter could only grab a couple of rabbits, then the question of who gets a piece of the stew that night and who doesn’t quickly highlights who is an “insider” and who isn’t. Some argue that the answer to that question is the first working definition of what is a family, more clearly marking those boundaries than sexual relations or birth. It is not safe to assume that all the genetically related people in any given community would automatically get a spoon in the stew.

So, in a society where honor is important, who one associates with, especially eats with – is a marker of one’s family, one’s community, one’s kind.

Here is an example: A long time ago, I used to volunteer at a shelter for street kids in Portland, Oregon. Churches and restaurants would donate food and we served the kids a hot meal, offered them a change of clothes, and in general gave them a safe place to be for a few hours every day. I served them food but I never ate with them. At the time I thought, “well I have plenty of food at home so why should I take their food,” but now I see where I was with-holding,  I was keeping myself safe and refusing table fellowship with them.  I didn’t join their family and I didn’t invite them to join mine.

Jesus would not have had any problems with pulling up a plate of pasta and sitting down at table with the kids. That is what he was doing when he dined with tax collectors and sinners, or the crowd of thousands on the hillside so poor there was only one basket of food among them. And that is a part of what happens when the two disciples encounter a stranger as they walked toward Emmaus a few days after the crucifixion in Jerusalem.  It turns out that the best way to recognize Jesus is to break bread with him, to eat with him. To become family with him. To open up the table to him.  Which, as any Pharisee – anyone with something to lose -  can tell you is a risky thing to do.

The ironic thing is – in this anxious society of honor and status – Jesus had the trump card. He had an honor, he had a status that out ranked everyone, including the Caesar. He was the Son of God, he was – and is - the one who’s very presence makes us all family with each other and through him, we are made family with God.  When we break bread at the communion table, when we drink from the cup that is poured out– we are eating and drinking with each other, with the church across time and space, and with Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our Lord and Savior.

It is such an odd scene to our 21st century American eyes that Luke lays out in the scene of the crucifixation. We know, even without viewing a certain recent rather detailed movie, that dying on a cross is not an easy death. And yet, three men are able to have a conversation among themselves about power and authority and kingdoms and status. “Save yourself,” the soldiers jeered from below. “Save yourself and me,” one of the criminals hanging with him pleads. And the third points toward the radical new thing that we still struggle with today. “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”   What kind of king hangs on a cross? What kind of a king insults the powerful and sits down to eat with the powerless?  What kind of a king is born in a stable and is laid in a manger, a place where animals are fed?  What kind of a king shows up on a road, content to walk along for a few hours in hidden disguise until bread is broken and eyes are opened?

“The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed,” Jesus says back in Luke 17:20-21; “nor will they say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact the Kingdom of God is among you.”

Not in fortified castles, not in grand, symbolic buildings of power and beauty, not defended by armed forces, not riding around in private jets or limousines,  not even in a nice office with walnut paneling. The Kingdom of God rides the bus and sleeps under the bridge even on a cold night. The Kingdom of God walks into our house and pops open the fridge and sits down at our table without so much as a by your leave. The Kingdom of God is a great banqueting feast – and we’re all invited. So pull up a chair or a reclining couch and be humble enough to come to table with Christ the King. 

You know what Jesus said to the third man on the cross? “ Truly I tell you, Today you will be in Paradise.”

Thanks be to God.

Knox Presbyterian Church, Santa Rosa, CA

(c) Anitra Kitts, please contact for permission to use