Who
would you least like to have dinner with?
I ask
because we often have this romantic idea that Jesus really enjoyed dining with
tax collectors and sinners, that he got more out of their company than the
fuddy-duddy righteous legalistic types.
Really? Maybe… but if we confess
that Jesus walked to his cross for us, maybe we can also at least imagine him
sometimes having dinner with someone he didn’t much like. Certainly, when challenged on his choice of
table companions he doesn’t excuse them or say, “I eat with them because they’re
so much fun;” but: “They’re sick; I came to heal.”
James Madison wrote of something he observed in newly independent America, lamenting “A
zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and
many other points that has divided humanity into parties, inflamed them with
mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each
other than to co-operate for their common good.”
The common
good has become something many popes have called us to work for over the last
century. Bl. Pope John XXIII revived the
patristic term and Bl. Pope John Paul II ran with it, calling each member of
the church to solidarity, which he defined as the “firm and persevering
determination to commit oneself to the common good that is to say, to the good
of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”
All,
including the people we wouldn’t want to sit at table with. Jesus’ presence was healing. Matthew, at least, becomes a disciple. Sinless Jesus did not stand in need of
conversion, but we do. Can we commit
ourselves to table fellowship with the sole purpose of bringing healing to our
companions, but alive to the hope of experiencing it ourselves?
Here
in this place, God sets a table, dines with us and sends us out. Let us be so nourished
by this meal with and of God that we can dine with whoever we’d least like to,
and hope for healing.
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