As has been seen, the issue of table fellowship, and its implications for the community of the church and for its standing as the representatives of the kingdom of heaven, is a crucial and oft-repeated theme of the New Testament writings. We must take the time to consider the fact that the writings of the New Testament, whether we are thinking about the letters penned by a variety of authors or the Gospels and the book of Acts, are composed at definite historical times and place, within or for communities of believers, and as responses to given sets of concerns. When such a set of facts is taken into consideration, the consistent presence of, or allusions to Christian meal practice (whether that of Jesus or of the early church) cannot go unnoticed. Indeed, it must strike us with a jarring force that will serve to shape or re-shape our fundamental approach to Scripture interpretation. This, of course, must be commensurate with a serious and dedicated attempt to grasp the Christian writings from within their own social and historical context, rather than the lazy and unreasonable reaching for meaning that begins with a consideration of our own societal and cultural norms, and the backwards application of worldviews that are concordant with the world that is in our view, upon the first century world in which Jesus walked and in which the writings that make up the New Testament were penned.
In our abbreviated, and certainly non-exhaustive trek through the Gospels, we spent a great deal of time and space presenting the social world of Jesus, while pointing out the seemingly inordinate amount of time that Jesus spent at meals, the seemingly inordinate amount of space and ink given to the record of His time at meals, and historically, the amount of blood spilled and energy expended to defend and propagate these sacred writings that are so infused with stories and instruction related to meal practice. All of this seems to be inordinate only if we are dismissive of the significance of ancient meal practice along with the importance attached to the meal in the early church as being representative of the messianic banquet---therefore enlightening us as to why the Gospel authors went to such great lengths to portray Jesus as being a regular, instructing participant at meals.
Though we skipped over the book of Acts, if we were to spend time in examination of that work, we would find a present though limited concern with issues surrounding Christian meal practice. With Romans, which is almost universally and primarily looked upon as Paul’s grand treatise concerning justification by faith, we come to realize, because we discern that justification is intimately connected with and related to Paul’s concerns with the kingdom of God, that the results of justification are practically worked out at the table. Therefore, because notions of the kingdom of God and of God’s present rule through Jesus are associated with the messianic banquet, we were able to see that any understanding of justification, and therefore what it means to be a participant in the kingdom of God and of what that participation may look like, will eventually concern itself with Christian table fellowship (because of the powerful social forces whose work is on display at the meal tables of the ancient world).
We spent a great deal of time dealing with what, because of the treatment of the Lord’s Supper in the eleventh chapter, become table-fellowship-related issues in the first letter to the Corinthians. Though we spent no time with the second letter to the church at Corinth, because we have been made aware of the issues of the symposium (and though the second letter to the Corinthians may be a compilation of more than one letter), we can sense that Paul did not see the response that he desired, as he practically demands that they become more generous in their self-sacrificial support of their poor brethren, and because we hear him launch into a speech of “boasting” (a regular feature of the symposium), which Paul ultimately defines as foolishness, that simply seems to mock this church (and therefore their continued mis-management of the table of the Lord).
If we were to spend some time in Ephesians, hearing the words of the letter as a first-century hearer that is not thoroughly imbibed in a Christian culture that looked at heaven as the distant isle of the blessed where the immortal soul would go for eternity when it finally sluffed off this shabby and second-rate body and departed from this shabby and second-rate creation, but rather, as a hearer of the good news of the Jewish Messiah that created an expectation of God’s realm of existence coming to earth, of a renewal of creation, and of the resurrection of the body into this creation (just like Jesus), while also operating with a mental construct that took into consideration the looming social structures of the day (banquets), we might hear words such as “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even though we were dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ---by grace you are saved---and He raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, to demonstrate in the coming ages the surpassing wealth of His grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus” (2:4-7), in relation to receiving positions of honor (along with all believers, in equal honor) at the messianic banqueting table. Accordingly, when we read “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast” (2:8-9), and hear those words in conjunction with knowledge of prevalent and powerful social customs, while considering that it is more than possible for the letter to have been audibly delivered to a church body while they shared a meal, together with awareness of the Jesus traditions concerning the humble being exalted (which we find in the account of the meal that begins in the fourteenth chapter of Luke), and then observing that the letter goes on to speak of the unity of Jews and Gentiles, we gain an entirely new awareness of the profundity of this aspect of that which was crucial for the early Christian communities.
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