beauty. (t)ruth. god.

Here is a short paper for NT Class on how three passages of changed my understanding of why we eat at Shalom Group.

Why We Eat: New Testament Meals and Today

The week before our first class meeting I recently began having a small group, called Shalom, of people meet at my house on Tuesdays to discuss what it means to faithfully follow Christ and be held accountable in that mission. Our first meeting had 8 people, with only 3 returning the next week. Slowly throughout the semester that group of 3 from the first meeting has most recently turned up as 12 people crammed into my small living room on Tuesday evenings. One practice we sought to establish early on was that of eating together every fourth week. In beginning this process I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt. A week before our first class assignment was due I asked Rob which of the three topics would be most helpful for a group and he instantly responded, “Meals.” The following is my assessment of how the three passages used in my papers, helped form my understanding of meals and how that relates to my home group.

The Feeding of Five Thousand

Out of the three passages, this is the hardest to relate to the way we practice meals at Shalom, but it is intrinsic to why we meet. While I believe in the miracles of the gospel, up until doing the paper on these verses I had very little use (or understanding) of the stories of feeding large amounts of people. At the most basic level it meant that Jesus was God over material things, thus he could make bread and fish multiply. Not really a good point for preaching, but it worked. After doing the assignment I began to understand that this passage is not just about a God who has the ability to multiply bread, but also as a story that illuminates more about who the person of Christ is, and in particular to Luke’s telling, how this event is linked to the messianic confession of Peter.

In doing research for this assignment a couple of themes became clear. The first was Luke relating Jesus to Moses, something I had never explored before. In Exodus, Moses is seen as the prophet who provides food in the wilderness at the hand of YHWH. This leads to each of the gospels presenting Jesus as a new Moses, however, Luke goes a step further. Luke Timothy Johnson believes because that with is lesser emphasis on the twelve in Mark’s gospel, Luke’s editing is motivated by a desire to show not only Jesus as the Moses who feeds his people in the wilderness, but also Luke is attempting to show the Twelve as the tribes of Israel, and Jesus as the their leader before he heads toward Jerusalem.[1] This reality is drawn more clearly because Peter’s confession immediately follows it. Another aspect was the liturgy of ‘taken, blessed, broken, and given.’ Fred Craddock even suggests that the Greek for ‘broken pieces,’ is the same name used for the Lord’s supper in the Didache.[2] This passage also serves as a sign to Jesus’ disciples that true power doesn’t rest in the Denari or money, but rather in the Lord.

In the end, however, we at Shalom must always remember when we gather together and break bread that we do in fact worship a miraculous God, who is confined to our limits, and who illuminates into our presence that he is God overall. In Luke’s gospel it should be noted that the final meal shared is not at Passover, but a meal where the resurrected Christ shows up miraculously in the breaking of the bread in the presence of confused and defeated disciples. Christ can indeed appear in the midst of our meals, and in the end that might be our greatest hope.

The Parable of the Great Banquet

After the first assignment I felt that I gained not only significant insight to the nature of meals, but also into what it means to read the gospels as a cohesive narrative. This is why I was so disappointed with the commentaries because of the narrow lens they read this parable through. It seemed as if each commentary interpreted the parable without attentions to its place in the narrative.[3] Just reading the parable within the context of Chapter 14, shows much more going on than what the parable suggests. The chapter begins with Jesus addressing people to banquet a certain way, and ends with a discussion of the cost of discipleship. In the middle falls this parable, which read out of context appears only as an eschatological promise. Yet read within the context, Jesus radically speaks to how we should eat in the here and now, and I think directly draws this to the cost of following him.

Yet for our group at Shalom this parable speaks of inviting those who we would not have thought of into eating with us. It means that the Kingdom of God is actually present in this event, and that if we are willing to follow Christ we will begin to eat in this way. Embodying this kind of radical invitation in my home has meant actually being open and vulnerable to these people I didn’t choose, and also lead to another dimension for our worship together. Halfway through the semester I began volunteering at the Stop, Drop, and Role center of the Seattle Mennonite Church. On the Thursday evenings I volunteer I normally show up to 15-20 homeless people already gathered in the lobby, and I go to the kitchen along with several of them and begin to cook. Sometimes it is a Turkey, other times left over chicken, but I spend an hour preparing a meal with those who I would never have come in to contact without making myself available. I then serve them, do the dishes, and head out back to my home. While one night is hardly a radical practice it has begun to open holes for God to come into my life and change my eating patterns. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “Salvation is how God transforms our sinful tables into his salvation feast with those who you would not have expected or invited.”[4] For Shalom it is necessary that we begin to allow for that transformation to take place.

1 Corinthian’s and Abuse of the Banquet

Last semester I wrote an entire paper on the issue at hand in 1 Corinthian’s 11:17-34, but it didn’t begin to practically take place until we began eating at Shalom, along with my volunteering at the SDR center. While one commentator wrote this about the Corinthians, “Corinthians who are abusing the Lord’s Supper have minimized or lost the basic Pauline sense that the life of faith is a life of community”[5] it could equally be said about the church we live in today.

One of the primary issues present in this text is “the problems of a socially stratified community.”[6] Those who are abusing the supper have “privatized their faith” and “lost any sense that love as the right relation to others is the proper and necessary expression of their faith as the right relation to God.”[7] While we are able to put 2000 years between us and the text it is not hard to see how these issues stand in relation to our world. What Paul does is remind the Corinthians of what the cup means, and the relationship between how a community eats together and its health (literally). We live in a tragically fragmented society and it is our hope at Shalom that we can begin to reconnect the pieces of our lives into a more cohesive whole that radiates the reality that Jesus has risen from the dead.

When we began Shalom it seemed like a good idea to eat together. It would give me a break from leading the discussions, allow for some regular conversation, and allow us to display some hospitality. While those realities still remain, I have come to a fuller understanding of why we eat together. We eat together to remember trust in Christ, to display his ability to show up in the unlikeliest of circumstances, to proclaim the messianic confession with Peter, to invite those into our lives who might not otherwise, to be transformed, to proclaim, and to take care of those who we share our lives with. If salvation in some way takes the shape of who we make our lives vulnerable too, then the practice of eating is an area of our lives that must be joined with the reality of the Crucified and Risen Christ.

Word Count 1525

Bibliography

Craddock, Fred B. Luke. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991.

Culpepper, R. Alan. “Luke.” In New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in 12 Volumes, by ed. L. E. Keck, 1-490. Nashville, TN: Adingdon, 1995.

Dunn, James D.G. 1 Corinthians. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. Sacra Pagina: Luke. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.

Nolland, John. Luke. Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1993.

Sampley, J. Paul. “The First Letter to the Corinthians.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, by et al. Leander E. Keck, 771-1004. Nashville, YN: Abingdon Press, 2002.

TNIV Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006.

Willimon, William. Who will be Saved? Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008.

[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Sacra Pagina: Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991) 146-149.

[2] Fred Craddock, Luke (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991) 137.

[3] To be fair, I did not use the Johnson commentary on this assignment, so that might have been better.

[4] This quote was on the back cover of William Willimon, Who will be Saved? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 200 Back Cover.

[5] J. Paul Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, by et al. Leander E. Keck, 771-1004 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 934.

[6] James Dunn, 1 Corinthians. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 77.

[7] Sampley, 934..