Eating together as enacted grace (Luke 5) #2
In a famous essay, anthropologist Mary Douglas (who died earlier this year) shows how meals represent differing levels of intimacy and acceptance.[1] She notes, for example, the difference between invited for drinks (where the only food is small, non-sticky food that can be eaten with your fingers) and invited for a meal. ‘Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honoured guests. The grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance.’[2] She wrote in the 1970s so the etiquette is changing and, of course, it differs between cultures. But common to all cultures and all times is that meals represents what Douglas calls ‘boundary markers’. They mark the boundaries between different levels of intimacy and acceptance.
Douglas goes on to provide an analysis of Levitical laws about food and sexual purity that has proved influential in understanding their rationale. The details need not concern us. The key this is that Douglas argued that they were not random tests of commitment nor primitive health regulations, but concerned boundary-maintenance. ‘It would seem that whenever a people are aware of encroachment and danger, dietary rules controlling what goes into the body would serve as a vivid analogy of the corpus of their cultural categories at risk.’[3]
What Douglas does not go on to say is that not only do food laws symbolise cultural boundaries, but they create and reinforce boundaries. It is not easy for Jews to eat with Gentiles – even to this day. You could not be sure that were not eating kosher food. More importantly, because you can generally spot a sausage, you could not be sure it had been prepared in a kosher way – different utensils for meat and dairy products, draining of the blood and so on. The effect was to cut off Israelites from the nations. Israelite holiness required separation from the nations. If followed faithfully, dietary regulations inevitably meant Israelites could not enter into the intimate relationships created by eating with others.
By the time we get to the first century Judaism, dietary laws had become still more detailed and created stronger boundaries. The wound at the heart of Judaism was Gentile occupation of the Promised Land. The land promised to the Patriarchs was now occupied by pagan unbelievers. The Pharisees argued that, if the land was defiled and unclean by Gentile occupation, then at least the people could remain clean through ritual purity. So they created an elaborate system of ritual cleansing.
This is the issue at another meal Jesus attends:
When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee, noticing that Jesus did not first wash before the meal, was surprised.
Then the Lord said to him, ‘Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But give what is inside [the dish] to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.’ (Luke 11:37-41)
Notice that Jesus does not wash before the meal. It is a very provocative act. It is the cultural equivalent of refusing a handshake. And then before anything else is said, Jesus says: ‘You’re full of greed. You’re foolish people.’ That is rude! It breaks every culture’s code of etiquette. This is not Jesus meek and mild. This is Jesus spoiling for a fight. Their system of ritual cleanliness stinks! That is what Jesus says. They are like cups, rinsed on the outside, but dirty inside with moulding remains of coffee dregs and lipstick. It stinks. Jesus finds it repulsive.
The reference to the poor is important. When a teacher of the law intervenes, ‘Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”‘ (Luke 11:46) The effect of this ritual cleansing was not only to create boundaries with Gentiles, but also with the poor. They had created a system of moral respectability that only the wealthy could ever hope to maintain. Only the rich and the time and money to do all the ritual cleansing that was required. You cannot do ritual cleansing in a slum. This was bourgeois spirituality. I suspect we do this all the time. Our expectations of clothing, behaviour, literacy, punctuality – are all excluding for the poor. The teachers of the law created a system that allowed them to feel superior. And they lifted not one finger to help.
They had created a system that the poor could never keep and then, instead of helping them, they despised them for it. Jesus concludes: ‘Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.’ (Luke 11:52)
Saul and Pilar Cruz
Saul brought up in evangelical church. Pilar converted through a Bible study he was leading. They started going out. Saul’s Mum was disapproving. Pilar to this day wears high heels, short skirts, well made up – very striking! Then she stopped attending church in the morning (coming the evening). So Saul followed one Sunday morning at a distance. She took a bus across town to a poor neighbourhood. Met an older man and together they held an impromptu Sunday school on the pavement for children from the slum. At one point Pilar went over to Saul, saying she had realised he was following her all along. ‘If Jesus is Saviour then he is the Saviour of these people. And your church is doing nothing to reach them.’ Saul told me: ‘That’s when I knew for sure she was the woman for me!’
They began working with a local church in a poor area of Mexico City. The members of the church were more affluent and came from outside the area in which the church building was located. The church wanted to reach people from the local area and initially welcomed the help they received. The couple began to reach prostitutes and drug addicts, befriending them, ministering to their needs and sharing the gospel with them. Much of the work was funded with their own money. They started to see some of the prostitutes and drug addicts coming to the meetings of the church. The couple were excited about the ways things were developing and the opportunities that were opening up to reach marginalized people. But one Sunday morning they turned up to find the building locked. The members of the church felt they did not want prostitutes and drug addicts corrupting their children. They had decided to move elsewhere without telling the couple. The ministry collapsed overnight. The culture gap between the church and the marginalized had proved too big for the church members.
So Saul and Pilar started again. Someone gave them a rubbish tip in a slum area. They built an ‘urban transformation centre’. They did not call a church because of the negative connotations that had for people.
At one point they did a housing project, but when they came to hand over the new homes they realised that couples were not properly married. It meant the women had not legal protection. The reasons people were not married was that it was too expensive. You need various certificates. Plus the cultural expectation was that you have a lavish party.
The teachers of the law in Luke 11 would have wagged their fingers. Saul and Pilar lifted their fingers to help. They started organising collective, community weddings. They married ten or so couples at a time in the community centre. They pulled some favours with a local judge to preside over the ceremony for free, persuaded wealthy churches to buy rings and threw a banquet for the all the community with balloons and cake and all the works. On one occasion one man got married at the same ceremony as his grandparents got married.
Grace turns everything upside down
Come back with me to Levi’s party. Please have some sympathy for the Pharisees. The traitors of the nation and the traitors of God are welcomed by Jesus. Surely this makes a nonsense of any claims that Jesus might have to be from God. Can you see that? Can see how their position makes sense?
Unless … unless God is doing something new – so new it does not fit any of the old categories. Unless God is doing something gracious – so gracious it takes us completely by surprise.
Look at what is happening.
In Luke 5:12-15 Jesus touches a leper. Now if you did that you became unclean. But when Jesus touches the leper Jesus doesn’t become unclean, the leper becomes clean! The untouchable is touched. The outcast is welcomed. This is God’s grace in action. God’s grace has come and it brings transformation. Suddenly it is not uncleanness that is contagious – that is how it was in the old Levitical system. If you touched anything unclean, you became unclean. But with Jesus it is his holiness that is contagious! When Jesus touches you, you become clean.
In Luke 5:17-26 Jesus not only heals a paralysed man, he forgives his sin. And he does so without reference to the temple. Forgiveness of sin at that time was focused on the rituals of the temple. But Jesus forgives with just a word. In one moment and with one word the temple and its sacrifices and its rituals are made redundant by grace.
In Luke 5:33-35 the Pharisees ask why Jesus’ disciples do not fast. The Jews fasted as a humbling in repentance to call upon God to come in mercy to liberate the nation. But what if God was coming in mercy? What is the Messiah had come? What is God’s grace is here, sitting at the table with the tax-collectors?
In Luke 5:36-39 Jesus makes the point explicitly. Something new is happening. Something so new it cannot simply be added onto to the old. You cannot put a patch from a new garment onto an old one. It will tear away. You cannot put new wine into old wineskins. They will bursts. The new thing God is doing cannot be patched onto the old way of things. It cannot be integrated into the temple system. It is not just an amendment to the old ways of thinking. Grace cannot be integrated with self-righteousness and self-importance. It is radically different. It is radically new.
And Jesus’ eating with the tax-collectors is a picture of this new gracious, thing that God is doing.
The exploiters of the nation and the traitors of God are welcomed by Jesus. This is God’s grace. This is grace in action. This is what grace is like. The people on the outside of the party are welcomed into the party.
Look at how Jesus explains himself in 5:31-32: ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ Jesus is like a doctor. Doctor’s surgeries are not full of healthy people. Healthy people don’t go to the doctor and ask to be made ill. You expect doctors to spend their time with the ill. You expect hospitals to be full of people needing medical help. In the same way you should expect a Saviour to be with people who need saving.
Running through Luke’s Gospel is the message that that day will be a day of radical reversal when the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And the meals of Jesus picture that day as he welcomes the marginal and confronts the self-righteous and self-reliant.
The grace of God is radically subversive.
For religious people it turns their world upside down. They think of life as a ladder. Your righteous acts, your religious acts move you up the ladder towards God. what gives you a sense of well-being is your place on the ladder. Nothing makes you feel better than being able to look down on other people and feel superior. Pharisees need tax-collectors; they need tax-collectors to make them feel righteous.
But the grace of God is also radically subversive of the secular counter-parts of religious people. We have a secular version of salvation: it is fulfilment, meaning, identity. We are culture that wants to make it. And we make it through career, through possessions, through physical beauty. Here the image of is a race – the rat race. And you are a loser is you are not successful, wealth or attractive.
[1] Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal,’ Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 249-275.
[2] Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal,’ 256.
[3] Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal,’ 272.
