As we consider all that we have learned about meal practice (social delineations, the symposium portion of the meal, positioning around the table, etc…), continue to position ourselves as first century hearers of the letters of the New Testament in the context of the orally-transmitted Jesus tradition, and remain open to the possibility that the meal tables of the church were of such significance that they were the setting for the reception of important communications such as Paul’s letters, we must be profoundly struck by what comes next from Paul.
Having insisted on the necessity of preferential love and service to one another (remembering the over-arching meta-narrative related to meal practice that stretches across Paul’s letters), Paul writes “However, if you continually bite and devour one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another” (5:15). This use of “bite,” “devour,” and “consume” are clearly meal-table-based metaphors. “But I say, live by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh” (5:16), as the flesh wants to divide and stratify, succumbing to the tremendous separating pressures that demand adherence to the ways of man’s kingdom principles.
“For the flesh,” Paul continues, “has desires that are opposed to the Spirit, and the Spirit has desires that are opposed to the flesh” (5:17a), as the Spirit seeks to make manifest God’s kingdom in self-sacrificial love, while the flesh seeks to preserve self-satisfaction and self-interest, especially in the all-important pursuit of honor and avoidance of shame. Indeed, “these are in opposition to each other, so that you cannot do what you what” (5:17b). With a quick rejoinder that “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (5:18), Paul reminds his hearers about the barrier-destroying confession of Jesus as Lord, as opposed to the barrier-erecting insistence on holding to old and outdated covenant markers that will have nothing more than a deleterious effect on the practices of the meal table that should create unity amongst the body of believers, so that the members of that body (think of Romans and Corinthians) can then carry that spirit of unity, and its love and service, into the world as an ongoing announcement that the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Jesus is Lord).
Once again, the meal must weigh heavily on our thoughts, and especially the symposium, as we then go on to hear “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions, envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing, and similar things” (5:19-21a). When we consider that weight that is carried by the meal table, as it is indeed intended to replicate the “Last Supper,” as a Passover theme-contexted messianic banquet that announces the Lordship of Christ and the kingdom, it is no wonder that we then hear Paul saying “I am warning you, as I had warned you before: Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God!” (5:21b).
Following this, Paul goes into his famous list that is commonly referred to as the “fruit of the Spirit.” Often, this is taken out of its wider context, and is given little more than the context of Paul’s distinction between “Spirit” and “law,” with this semi-contextual de-contextualization supported by the statement that “Against such things there is no law” (5:23b). Happily, based on the knowledge that has been gained by the path that we have been walking, we are able to hear him speaking from within that a much wider context. The idea that Paul has the meal table in mind here in Galatians takes deeper root, as we now hear that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control” (5:22-23a), as a statement upon which Paul expands and elaborates in the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians (the “love chapter”), which, as has been well-demonstrated, is rooted in Paul’s critique of Corinthian meal practice.
With this line of thinking as our frame of reference, it becomes possible, and even probable, that “against such things there is no law” (remembering the boundaries and barriers and divisions of the “works of the law” as covenant markers) receives its elaboration as “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but I will know fully, just as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:11-12). It is as this is understood that we then hear “If we live by the Spirit, let us also behave in accordance with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). Yes, “these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Because of that love, which we first put into practice around our society defining table, “Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, being jealous of one another” (Galatians 5:26).
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