As we saw in chapter 4, there was a long tradition of hospitality in Jewish society. Providing food and shelter to traveling strangers was an almost sacred duty that was at first an unwritten code of conduct but was, at least in part, articulated in the Law of Moses.
By offering food to a stranger, a potential enemy was transformed into a welcomed guest under the protection of the host. Caring for the stranger thus became a way of protecting oneself. By sharing a meal together, people showed acceptance, fellowship, and togetherness.
As part of this Middle Eastern culture of hospitality, the Jewish Shabbat meal developed into an occasion when many Jews opened their homes to their fellow Jews. Often, poor people were invited to eat and celebrate Shabbat with them. We see evidence of this tradition in the New Testament, for example when Jesus is invited to the homes of Pharisees on various occasions:[i]
“1 One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. ”
(Lk 14:1)
But by the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had begun to move in a nationalistic direction. They were occupied by the Romans and were in a very tight and vulnerable position. In an effort to keep themselves pure and holy while awaiting God’s salvation, some Jewish groups formulated rules that prevented them from associating with people who were considered “unclean”. It was about these rules, “the Tradition of the Elders”, that most of the quarrels between Jesus and the Pharisees centered.[ii]
The Tradition of the Elders was a set of oral rules on how to interpret and understand the written law of Moses. For example, the Law of Moses states that Israel must not work on the Sabbath, a commandment that is relatively easy to understand.[iii] But on the other hand, the Law of Moses does not define exactly what counts as work, which opens a lot of follow-up questions.
It also says that Israel “are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.”[iv] Even this commandment is relatively easy to want to follow but becomes more difficult in practice when one begins to think about what exactly is clean or unclean.
Because the Law of Moses does not always define exactly what certain commandments mean, the people used to come to Moses with their follow-up questions, and Moses then had the right to judge what was right and what was wrong. When Moses’ workload became too great, this task was delegated to the leaders of the people.[v] When the leaders answered the people’s questions about how best to follow the Law of Moses, they were said to “sit on Moses’ seat”.
These explanations of how to interpret and understand the Law of Moses were passed on orally and were called “The Oral Torah”, “the Tradition of the Elders” and were eventually also written down in the Mishnah and Talmud.
The most zealous saw these additional oral rules as a kind of wall around the Law of Moses to minimize the risk of violating the Word of God. But Jesus often got into trouble with the Pharisees when he thought they were following these extra rules at the expense of the real rules, when they abrogated Scripture to follow their oral tradition.[vi]
The Pharisees were particularly strict about food rules. As many as 229 of the 341 rules of the Pharisees concerned mealtime fellowship in one way or another. The Pharisees saw the home’s dinner table as a kind of substitute for the temple altar. Just as the priest had to sanctify himself before the service, the Pharisee had to sanctify himself before the meal. The food had to be properly prepared, and the guests had to be clean.[vii]
But even though the Law of Moses did not forbid associating with “gentiles”, the Pharisees avoided associating and eating with them because they were considered unclean according to the Tradition of the Elders. The concept of “Gentile” has its background in the fact that the people of Israel were not allowed to associate with the seven nations living in the land of Canaan when Joshua invaded.[viii] The two terms “gentiles” (goyim in Hebrew) and “strangers” (gerim in Hebrew) are virtually synonymous.
When Jesus is invited to the home of a Pharisee on a Sabbath and sees how the Pharisees only invited friends and distinguished guests, he is outraged and criticizes the Pharisees for this and urges them to invite poor people who cannot be invited back:[ix]
“12 He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. 13But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.””
(Lk 14:12-14)
By trying to build a wall around the Law of Moses by excluding the Gentiles, sinners and poor from their meals, the Pharisees built a wall between themselves and the strangers whom God wanted to invite to the Lord’s Supper.
But this unbiblical wall Jesus had no qualms about reaching over. Examples of this can be found when Jesus meets the Roman officer, a person who was considered unclean in a double sense because he was both a gentile and a symbol of the hated Roman occupying power:
“5 When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him,6 “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” 7And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” 8But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” 10When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. 11I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 13And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment.”
(Mt 8:5-13)
Jesus marvels at the Roman officer’s great faith and alludes to the future heavenly feast[x] when people from all corners of the earth, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages will participate.[xi] Jews in Jesus’ day looked forward to this messianic feast when they, as God’s chosen people, would celebrate and eat food with the patriarchs. But they did not expect that a Roman Gentile would also be able to join in!
Jesus then shocks his Jewish listeners by further claiming that those Jews who by their unbiblical ideals of purity exclude Gentiles from the kingdom of God will themselves be excluded from the kingdom!
In contrast to the Pharisees’ exclusion of poor, outcast and marginalized groups from the Jewish Sabbath meal, Jesus reaches over the Pharisees’ wall and invites all these outcast groups to the heavenly feast. He conversed with a foreign woman over a meal,[xii] he invited the Roman gentile to table with Abraham[xiii] and he ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners.[xiv]
Through these encounters, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that there is room at the Lord’s table for both “Jews and Gentiles” (a concept that corresponds in many ways to the Old Testament “natives and strangers” of which we reviewed in chapter 10), both social outcasts and men of power, both pious Jewish women and foreign women. What Jesus did in practice, Paul would later put so beautifully in writing:[xv]
“28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
(Ga 3:28)
But Jesus’ continuation of the Old Testament culture of hospitality as a concrete way of showing love to strangers and offering them fellowship aggravated both the Jewish religious establishment and the early Christians.
A common meal with foreigners would mean that Gentiles were accepted and welcomed into the Christian community without having to become Jews by circumcision, which was unthinkable for the first Christians, who were all Jews. It required a direct address from God before Jesus’ closest disciple Peter could accept such a thing. [xvi]
Through a vision, Peter learns that even Gentiles are welcome into the kingdom of God: “What God has made clean, do not call common.”[xvii] When the Roman officer Cornelius’ servants come to Peter, he welcomes them and “invited them in to be his guests”.[xviii] When he later accompanies them to Cornelius’ home, he finally bursts out: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”[xix]
But even if Peter understood this in theory, the old ways were still there, and he sometimes found it difficult to live up to his new ideals:
“11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?””
(Ga 2:11-14)
Among the first Christians, who were almost exclusively Jewish, it was long unclear whether Gentiles who came to believe in Jesus would have to be circumcised and become Jews to become part of God’s people. Eventually, together with the Holy Spirit, they agreed not to require Gentiles to become Jews to be accepted as God’s people:[xx]
“28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements:29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”
(Ac 15:28-29)
So welcoming strangers and foreigners into a community with both God and fellow human beings by eating together is a biblical tradition that dates back to Abraham. Not only that, but it is also a future tradition that has already begun with the Lord’s Supper.
When we celebrate communion, we eat a meal together as a sign of communion with God and with each other. We are reminded of the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross so that we might become part of the people of God. But we are also reminded of Jesus’ return when Jesus will once again “drink of this fruit of the vine“[xxi] when people “from east and west” will “recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven”.[xxii]
The Lord’s Supper, then, is not only a sad memory of Jesus’ death, but also a foretaste of the great heavenly feast that awaits all believers when Jesus returns. Communion looks back as a memorial of Jesus’ death that became life for us, while the meal also looks forward in longing for Jesus’ return. As we partake in the bread and wine, we also partake in the death and resurrection of Jesus, while already here and now in faith we get a taste of the future heavenly feast[xxiii] when people from all tribes and peoples and languages will participate.[xxiv] The Lord’s Supper is thus a meal where people from all nations, social status and gender are united as brothers and sisters in faith in Jesus. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper thus becomes the concrete expression of the basic tenet of our faith “to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself”.[xxv] Communion is thus God’s response to man’s sin against God and his fellow man, which we read about in chapters 1 and 2.
But, in our modern age, we have unfortunately disconnected the ceremonial commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection from the meal itself. The original Communion was not a ceremony inside a church building where people queued up to see a priest who handed out a wafer to be dipped in a cup of wine. No, the original Lord’s Supper was a ceremony in the context of a meal,[xxvi] something that is obviously evident in the very word “supper”. The basic Greek text of the most common communion text reads “kyriakos deipnon”, which simply means “the Lord’s dinner” or “the Lord’s meal” or “the Lord’s supper”:
“20 When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. 21For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. 22What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.”
(1Cor 11:20-22)
The background to this somewhat negative admonition by Paul is that the church in the Greek city of Corinth was behaving badly during the Lord’s Supper. Since there were no church buildings in biblical times, the church would gather at the home of a church member with a large enough house to celebrate worship.
But in a wealthy Greco-Roman home, the fine dining room was relatively small, while the courtyard was much larger. Perhaps it was natural for the host of the house to invite the finer guests up to the fine dining room, while the other members of the church had to be content with eating the communion meal in the courtyard. Perhaps the rich Greeks kept to themselves in the dining room, while the poor Jews were left out in the courtyard?
The ethnic and social boundaries that existed in the society thus entered the church. Those who came to worship together as one people in Christ were divided and discriminated against. Such a division of the church when celebrating communion signaled the very opposite of the meaning of communion; that Christ by his death made Jew and Greek, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female, one in Christ.[xxvii]
The problem was not, therefore, the handling of the external forms of the Lord’s Supper was used, whether a wafer or a loaf of bread, whether wine or grape juice, but that the way in which the church celebrated the Lord’s Supper showed division rather than unity, which contradicts the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. The rich separated themselves from the poor, ate all the food and left the poor hungry, making the body of Christ divided in a ceremony that was supposed to show unity and togetherness.
If the Greek upper classes wanted to eat their fine dinners with each other, they could do so at some other time than the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
Can we today risk handling the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy way? Yes, if we make the Lord’s Supper a marker to divide Christians rather than to unite Christians, if we focus on the forms of the Lord’s Supper at the expense of its meaning, or if we let the poor go hungry from the meal while we have full stomachs.
A proper celebration of communion is a meal where we lift up the bread and wine to remember the death and resurrection of Jesus and all that it meant for our salvation, a meal where everyone can eat their fill, whether we are native or immigrant, rich or poor. A meal where we manifest our spiritual unity despite our possible worldly differences, where we long together for the return of Jesus and have a foretaste in faith of the future heavenly feast where people from all nations and languages will participate.
Just as the patriarchs of old showed hospitality to strangers by inviting them to eat, so Jesus shows hospitality by inviting you and me to the heavenly meal. Just as the Israelites met God through food offerings in the temple, so we meet Jesus through the Lord’s Supper.
So welcoming strangers into the community by inviting them over for a meal is not only nice, but above all sacred. To reach out across ethnic, social and gender boundaries and invite outcast and marginalized people to the heavenly feast is to continue the work of Jesus and to realize the future kingdom of God already here and now on earth, one meal at a time.
You have read a free chapter of my book Friend of Strangers. If you like this book, please consider purchasing the ebook through Amazon. Since English is not my native language, there may be some linguistic inaccuracies. Please contact me if you find any.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
[i] Lk 11:37–54
[ii] Mk 7:1–23
[iii] Ex 31:14
[iv] Le 10:10
[v] Ex 18:13–27
[vi] Mk 7:8
[vii] Mk 7:2–4, Ex 30:19–21
[viii] Ex 23:28–33
[ix] Lk 14:1–24
[x] Isa 25:6–9
[xi] Re 7:9, Ps 107:3
[xii] Jn 4:1–42, Mk 7:24–30
[xiii] Mt 8:5–13
[xiv] Lk 7:34
[xv] Ga 3:28
[xvi] Ac 10:9–23
[xvii] Ac 10:15
[xviii] Ac 10:23
[xix] Ac 10:34–35
[xx] Ac 15:1–29
[xxi] Mt 26:29
[xxii] Mt 8:11
[xxiii] Isa 25:6–9
[xxiv] Re 7:9
[xxv] Lk 10:25–28
[xxvi] Mt 26:26–30, Mk 14:22–25, Lk 22:19 – 20, Ac 2:42–47
[xxvii] Ga 3:26–28