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2008-03-18 issue:

Radical meals

Editorial

by Gordon Houser

Print Article

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.—Luke 24:30-31

Day by day … they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.—Acts 2:46

Eating together in a group marked not by kinship but by a common commitment to Jesus Christ is a radical act announcing that God’s kingdom has appeared and is coming.



In her book Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, Reta Haltman Finger argues that “Jesus [practiced] a radically inclusive commensality [sharing food] as a key tactic in announcing and redefining the kingdom of God.”

Many may not care much about scholarly consensus; others may wonder about what “radically inclusive commensality” is.

We don’t think about the fact that 90-95 percent of Palestine’s first-century population were rural peasants. And while we may spend little of our day thinking about where we’ll get our next meal, “for a society with a subsistence economy, how food is obtained, shared and eaten becomes a very high priority,” writes Finger.

We may look on that early Jerusalem community mentioned in Acts 2 as an idealized form that’s no longer relevant to us, but people then did not see eating as a leisure activity. People depended on one another, particularly their relatives, to survive. As Finger writes, “Nobody in that culture would have been able to survive without the support of a community or kin group.”

What makes Jesus’ eating practices—and those of the early church—so radical is that he and they ate not just with people in their own social group but with people outside that group. Jesus was criticized for eating with outcasts, with tax collectors and sinners. The early church accepted at their tables “women as well as men, people of all classes, and even the former enemies of Jesus,” writes Finger. That, in a nutshell, is radically inclusive commensality.

We do not live out this practice very faithfully. As Finger writes: “We generally live with socioeconomic equals and give a tiny percentage of our income to charity. The poor remain ‘the other.’ ”

This also has implications for Communion. “The Eucharist (also called bread-breaking or the Lord’s Supper) was celebrated in the context of a communal meal at which everyone, poor and less poor, ate,” Finger writes.

We’ve lost this practice of eating together. In the Eucharist, our relationship with God has come to predominate, and we’ve neglected our relationship with one another, eating together across social boundaries. In John’s Gospel, Jesus commands his disciples at the Last Supper to love one another, a command we mark on Maundy Thursday.

Without necessarily eating our meals together as a church every day, we can eat together more often than we do. We may also try to find ways to combine Communion with a common meal.

My own congregation has grown through some people making the effort to invite others to their table. People have begun attending worship after sharing food with church members in their homes. Meals can still be a powerful way to be missional.

In our culture of private dining and eating on the run, such deliberate eating together with other followers of Jesus is a radical, countercultural act. Potlucks could become new means of missional activity.

If we learn to eat together across racial and economic lines, we will come even closer to the vision of God’s kingdom, which covers the globe and includes people from every tribe.—gh

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