Come Home to the Table... (Luke 13:22-15:32)

“My most treasured moments are those I spend with my family, and none are so vivid as the ones involving food. The mixture of playful family fun and the unforgettable smells, tastes, and textures come together to form distinct memories that I will cherish forever.” Padma Lakshmi (Gourmet, May 2005, pp. 28, 62)

There is just something about sharing food around a table that draws people together. The power of the table is indescribable really. Sharing a meal together is a religious experience. Please don’t get me wrong. I know that there are numerous cases where the table has been more destructive than unifying, but this is a struggle with our own humanity. At its best, the table is a place where all of the senses are engaged with the food and the company in ways that destroy the barrier between the physical and the spiritual. Why else would the father throw a celebration banquet for his lost son? At its worst, the table is a place where our prejudice and callousness reinforce the oppressive structures of society, religion, and the world around us. Why else would the elder brother scoff and groan in his piously agitated disbelief when he heard the celebration music coming from the father’s banquet hall?

This has always been the case. In Jesus’ world, “to welcome people at the table had become tantamount to extending to them intimacy, solidarity, acceptance; table companions were treated as though they were of one’s extended family. Sharing food encoded messages about hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and crossing boundaries…. As a consequence, to refuse table fellowship with people was to ostracize them, to treat them as outsiders.” (Green, Theology of Luke, 87).

In our texts this week Jesus reminds us that our table is not only a place of welcome, but one of celebration. The table must be open to all. It is at the table that the kingdom of God is visibly breaking into the world. From our tables in our homes, to tables at restaurants and in school cafeterias, and, most importantly, to the table of the Lord’s Supper, when we come together we should open ourselves to radical hospitality, to inviting and welcoming all to come and eat, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Jesus challenges us to invite not our friends and family, but the prodigals, those who are hurting and the broken by their own choices. When they come, when they pull out their chairs and take their place at the table, we should rejoice. It is not really a choice that we have. When lost sons and daughters return home, communal celebration is a divine necessity (15:6-7, 9-10, 22-23, 32). Then, in our very midst, the kingdom of God will explode into the world among us. That is what I call a truly religious experience.

Like the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ parable remains open. We do not know how the elder son responds to his father’s appeal. The story remains open with endless possibilities. Luke dares us write the rest of the story with our own lives. As those in the church, the pious, we are the elder sons and daughters. The celebration music blares in the background. Will we pull up a chair at the table? Or will we continue to grumble outside, muttering to ourselves, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15:2)?