Trinity 11

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews.

‘He took his seat at the bottom of the table, by her ladyship's desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish nothing greater.’ So writes Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, of the honour accorded to the obsequious clergyman Mr Collins, on being seated next to his patron and hostess, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Dinner tables have long been the site of social distinction and differentiation. Who is invited and who isn’t; where you sit; what your place is in the real or imagined social hierarchy; whether you know the expected norms of behaviour; whether your attendance lays a reciprocal obligation on you to issue a return invitation to your host…

In today’s Gospel Jesus is at dinner in the home of a leading Pharisee. And he is not a particularly well-behaved or polite guest. First he tells a pointed parable about people scrambling for seats of honour after watching his dinner companions jostling for position. Then he tells the host that he’s invited all the wrong people anyway.

Jesus has form in upsetting the social conventions of the dinner table. Already in Luke’s Gospel he’s been criticised for the company he keeps and the hospitality he accepts. A tax collector throws a great banquet for him and he accepts the honour, rather than refusing and keeping himself pure from such polluting company. A sinful woman of the city comes to him while he’s having a meal in another Pharisee’s house, and rather than rebuking her and sending her away, he accepts the offering she pours out and rebukes his host. He seems not to know or not to care that eating with tax collectors and prostitutes reflects badly on him, or that a respectable rabbi would exercise a great deal more caution about who he breaks bread with.

The laws governing food and table fellowship in Judaism were one of the key ways in which the community maintained a distinct identity. They were part of what it meant to belong to the people of God. Meals had theological as well as social significance. In the garden of Eden, in God’s presence Adam and Eve are free to eat of all the trees of the garden except one. At Mount Sinai, Moses and the elders of Israel see a vision of God: they behold him, and eat and drink. The Psalmist sings of being fed by God, and the prophet Isaiah’s vision of restoration after exile is of a great banquet provided by God. Eating and drinking together were not just necessary things to do to stay alive. They say something important about creation and covenant, about who God is and who his people are.

For the Pharisees, being God’s people involved separation from those who were not God’s people. That included Gentiles, but also fellow-Israelites who were found wanting in some way – usually because their poverty or illness or circumstances or history was a sign that they were sinful, and not among the blessed. Table fellowship reinforced who was in and who wasn’t, who were among those who would eat and drink in the Lord’s presence, and who would not be counted worthy. Policing who else was at the table was a way of making sure you kept your place, in the covenant people of God and in society more generally. Inviting someone to dinner created an obligation on them to invite you in return. It was a way of networking, of gaining or maintaining social influence or standing.

Jesus doesn’t tell the Pharisees that they’re wrong to think that meals have a theological character. Nor are they wrong to think that who they eat with says something about who they consider their equals. They’ve just misunderstood the theology, and who their equals are.

For Jesus, meals are a sign of the kingdom of God. The new creation, the new covenant he comes to make through his life, death and resurrection are enacted through how he behaves at the table.

Gone is the understanding of hospitality that says you invite people who will invite you back. Instead he tells the gathered Pharisees that they should be inviting those who have no hope of ever repaying the favour: precisely those people – the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind – whom the Pharisees normally shun. Gone is the obsession with purity that refuses to break bread with those considered unclean: Jesus doesn’t hesitate in going to the party thrown in his honour by a tax collector. Instead, in the new creation, under the new covenant, people from every race and language will eat together. Pharisee and tax collector will eat together. The hedge fund manager and the beggar without two coins to rub together will eat together – if they will just accept Jesus’ invitation. The promise of the kingdom is not an exclusive guest list but a bigger table.

This is hard for the Pharisees to hear. Jesus agrees with them that who you break bread with says something important about who you think is your equal. He just expands the guest list so that their equals are not just the influential, well-respected people just like them, but the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. This way of viewing others will require a real adjustment on the part of the Pharisees. It says that all their efforts to secure their position by their piety and their works do not, in the end, guarantee them a place at God’s table. They are equals not because of their virtue or position, but because God created them in his image, and loves them to eternity. They could come to God’s table blind, lame, crippled or poor and be just as welcome. And the condition is simply accepting the invitation to come and eat with Jesus.

This requires adjustment for the poor, the blind, the lame and the crippled, too. They’ve been used to being excluded, told they don’t belong, that there are certain tables at which there will never be room for them. They come knowing what the usual rules of table fellowship and hospitality are, and that they won’t be able to offer a return invitation. They need to get used to thinking of themselves differently too: as those whom God wants at his table, whom he honours with an invitation, who are equal to those they’ve always been told are their betters.

And the poor, the blind, the crippled and the lame have something important to teach the Pharisees. Which is that at God’s table hospitality is not a means of enforcing social hierarchies or expanding networks of obligation. We all come to God’s table empty-handed. We come not because we have impressed God or laid an obligation on him, but because he loves us and invites us and wants to sit and eat with us.

Jesus’ table is a sign of the new creation and the new covenant – it’s a foretaste of the heavenly banquet where God prepares a rich feast for his people, and gathers them together across race and language and culture and class, across divides of gender and sexuality and disability and wealth. Here, at Jesus’ table, we learn our true worth, as people made in the image of God, with whom God wants to share his life. That’s true for those of us gathered here around the Lord’s table, and it’s true for those who aren’t yet here, who haven’t heard Jesus’ invitation, or who have supposed that it’s not for them. Jesus wants them there. His table is not complete until they are. And as he says to the Pharisees who are already sitting at the table: go and invite the others. The table is laid, the feast prepared, but there are still empty spaces around the table. For them to be filled asks us to be a people who invite others, who rejoice with Jesus in the company he keeps, and whose fellowship really is a foretaste of the kingdom.

Who would Jesus think is missing here? What would he say about the ways we order our community life, and how we treat one another? What does our fellowship say about the God we worship? When it comes to it, whose table do we think this is? Ours, or his? And if it’s his, is there room for all those Jesus invites to his feast? Because if there isn’t, we need a bigger table.