Message & the Meal: The Forgotten Practice of the Modern Church
Lawrence Garcia
![agapefeast05ql31[1]](http://lawrencegarcia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/agapefeast05ql311.jpg)
The
transformative act of Gospel proclamation has been central to the
Church’s missional existence ever since Jesus began heralding the
arrival of the kingdom following his baptism by John. Now, far be it
from me to dethrone or minimize the centrality of the royal kerygma that
the church has been entrusted with since the Peter’s sermon on
Pentecost, but this is not to say that the church hasn’t largely
neglected the other half of Jesus’ and the early church’s missional
praxis, namely, open table fellowship as the corresponding and tangible extension of gospel preaching.
You see, Jesus combined the
practice of open table fellowship with his kerygmatic preaching as the
palpable reality of the inclusiveness of the kingdom of God. Acceptance
and repentance weren’t merely verbal and cognitive realities, they were
that too, but were combined with the willingness to actually eat with
Jesus and those (often the dregs of society) of whom he also welcomed.
Jesus’ kingdom-shaped meals, then,
became not only the visible reality of the in-breaking kingdom, but in
so doing subverted the normal hierarchical structures that meals around
the Mediterranean regularly exemplified. This, because, it was at meals
(in the old world) where the types—sinners, elderly, adulterers,
imperial colluders, etc.—Jesus accepted weren’t allowed to be equal
participants. But not at Jesus’ parties. J.D. Crossan adds:
The kingdom of God as a process of open commensality (“the rules of tabling and eating as miniature models for the rules of association and socialization”), of a nondiscrimminating table depicting in miniature a nondiscrimnating society, clashes fundamentally with honor and shame, those basic values of ancient Mediterranean culture and society.[1]
Many of the church’s most beloved
parables (one thinks here of the Prodigal Son) were told in the context
of why Jesus “was eating with tax collectors and sinners.” Both the
message and the meal then were vital to Jesus’ ministry and we border on
an ignorant docetism, even neo-Gnosticism, if we separate the two. The
church was never supposed to offer a mere salvific gnosis, but proclaim
in word and meal the open acceptance of the estranged sinner by God and
his Christ.
This means, at the very least, that the
church needs to begin to do more than preach the Gospel, we need to
begin opening our homes as an extension of the message we herald before
the world. It will not be enough to tell them they are accepted, we must
by God’s grace offer open-commensality that will be used by God as an
extension of his own kingly table. N.T. Wright sums it up well:
Once again, therefore, the challenge comes to us today. Christians, reading this anywhere in the world, must work out in their own churches and families what it would mean to celebrate God’s kingdom so that the people at the bottom of the pile, at the end of the line, would find it to be good news. It isn’t enough to say that we ourselves are the people dragged in from the country lanes, to our surprise, to enjoy God’s party. That may be true; but party guests are then expected to become party hosts in their turn.[2]
Thus, the church, as those who by grace
are commissioned to extend the Messianic banquet must re-open the gates
of kerygmatic hospitality; it is not merely our task to tell them they’ve been welcomed by Israel’s God, we must serve them so that they can taste it too! And it will not be enough to tell them they are invited into God’s house if we do not first invite them into our very own.
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