Dining with Jesus

From our Executive Director, Jim Wood:

We are invited repeatedly in scripture to have intimacy with God, and it is often pictured in the context of a meal. God willing, we will be bringing a series entitled Dining with Jesus.  We will be looking at passages in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus shared meals with others. Over the next few weeks, we hope to look at these meals in a little more detail:

In Luke 5, Jesus does something that is scandalous to many people: He dines with a tax collector and the tax collector’s friends.

Then, in the Luke 7, Jesus is anointed at a dinner by a sinful woman. Again, this is something that just scandalizes his host and other people who were there.

There’s the incident of Jesus in Luke 10 with Mary and Martha. As you’ll recall, even there, Jesus managed to, shall we say, not satisfy the expectations of Martha, who was preparing the meal. Martha was not happy with the fact that Jesus allowed Mary to get away with not helping. And Jesus’ response when Martha was upset about that was not to say, “Martha, you’re right. I’m sorry. I should’ve been more sensitive.”

In Luke chapter 11, Jesus has dinner with a Pharisee again. Jesus manages to insult his host, which most of us would regard as being in poor form. There are those who begin to think that Jesus may just be socially clueless, and that perhaps He doesn’t realize that what He is saying and doing is insulting. A guest at the dinner pipes up and says to Jesus, “When you say this, you insult us too.” And Jesus then turns and reads the riot act to that fellow.

In Luke chapter 14, Jesus delivers a series of lectures on dining etiquette. He’s dining with a Pharisee again, and what He says is a whole series of things that are critical of what He’s seeing happening at the dinner, including the way that the host prepared the guest list. Jesus says, “This is not how it is supposed to be done.” And He talks about the seating chart, the whole thing.

In Luke chapter 19, there’s the story of Jesus’ dinner with Zacchaeus, and there we see again Jesus interacting with folks who were upset that Jesus would dine with a tax collector. He’d already done that back in Luke chapter 5 with Matthew, but now He’s doing it again, hasn’t learned his lesson, and isn’t sensitive apparently to criticism.

Luke 22 tells of the Last Supper, and in Luke 24 we read about a meal on the road to Emmaus. Later in chapter 24 we read of Jesus eating a piece of broiled fish, not because He was hungry but because He wanted to demonstrate for His followers that He really was physically risen from the dead and that they weren’t seeing some sort of illusion.

We hope to look at these more in detail beginning with Luke 5:27-32, Dining with Matthew.