Title: Jesus' Open Table Community
Following the flow of this new search for Pre-Easter Jesus, we showed the concrete picture of the kingdom of God as Jesus practiced free healing and open commensality. you will realize again. Today, we must live by the example of Jesus' practice in our unique circumstances. So today, I would like to receive grace with you while dealing with the problems of Jesus' open table community.
If you look at the parable in the text, the people who did not respond to the invitation to the feast and those who did are distinguished at once. Those who first turned down the invitation to the feast usually have two characteristics. First, they are people who want to leave an economic legacy by buying and selling real estate such as a field or movable property such as cattle. And those who want to attend their own or a friend's wedding. In a word, they are people who enjoy a significant vested interest in Israeli society. They are not interested in God's banquet because they want to continue to enjoy the vested interests of the world. These are the people who refused the Lord's invitation to the feast because they were busy enjoying the world's power, wealth, and honor. Second, they can be seen as Jews who took Jesus' invitation lightly because they had a sense of selection.
Those who accepted the Lord's banquet were different from them. The bottom-up people who had wandered around in the streets or alleys responded to the invitation to the feast. People who were low in class, gender, and status, the people who had no choice but to live in poverty, and the marginalized who had no choice but to live in darkness and hopeless. They were the people of the land who lived alone and uprooted. They must have looked forward to the future of revenge. He may have been a person who had eschatological hopes and wished for the dawn of heaven and earth. In the end, in this parable of the feast, we confirm that the owners of the kingdom of God are the people at the bottom.
Judging from the customs of the 1st century Jewish society, such a feast is truly an unusual event of ceremonies. We should pay attention to this very thing. Considering the cleanliness system and holiness norms that the Jewish society at the time emphasized, enforced, and enforced so much, this banquet is a serious scandal and can be a social nightmare. Why? Let's think about this for a moment.
At the banquet table at that time, unlike ordinary tables, the people who participated in the meal lay down at an angle to share food and chat. But imagine that all sorts of mischievous people gathered together, lying at an angle to each other and enjoying their food. It would be inconceivable for a Jewish religious leader at the time to have a man next to a woman and a Jew sitting next to a Samaritan at an angle, eating and chatting. It was also a disturbing act that disturbed the strictly enforced chastity and class order. To understand this, let's take a moment to look at the characteristics of Mediterranean culture in the first century.
At that time, the ruling culture valued honor and shame. That was one of the pillars of our basic values. It is a shameful act to go out of the public eye, so we had to refrain from doing that shameful act in front of people. It was taboo. It was also kind of. The act of eating together took place within the framework of strict social status relations. By eating together, they confirmed a sense of group belonging and class identity. Therefore, sharing the table was not just sharing food. There were more social, political and economic implications there. It was an honor for people of the same rank and class to lie down at an angle and chat while having a decent meal. And it was a clean and just act.
However, this parable of the feast strongly conveys a challenging meaning that directly breaks this honorable, holy, and chaste norm. By the way, Jesus did not end with telling this parable, he actually put the parable into practice. The Lord ignored the boundaries of class and gender. For this very act of Jesus, the pietists of the time condemned it like this: ?쏝ehold, a glutton and a drinker of wine, a friend of tax collectors and sinners??(Matthew 11:19). Our Bible is too gentle. A greedy person means a glutton, and a wine drinker means a drunkard. Moreover, Jesus became a trader who ate with publicans, sinners, and prostitutes, whom the Jewish religious leaders who considered themselves clean at the time despised. This was always the case in the community at the table that Jesus provided.
Now we must connect Jesus' open table action with our communion service today. Our communion service was conducted by the early church to honor Christ's act of remission of sins. After the resurrection of Jesus, the early church established the ceremony of symbolically drinking the blood that the Lord shed for the salvation of sinners and symbolically sharing the body. Therefore, the Eucharist was an occasion to honor the redemptive act of Christ (Jesus after the Resurrection). It was also linked to going to heaven because sins were forgiven. In the Eucharist service, there is no or faint image of Jesus before the resurrection, especially Jesus who showed the open table community in practice. That's the problem right here.
Real food was served at Jesus' open table, and real people were invited there. There was Jesus' inclusiveness and equality, especially his love, overflowing with compassion. The participants of the table community felt the love of the Lord with their bodies. However, there is no real food in the communion service ceremonial in the institutional church today. There, the figure of Jesus is faintly visible as a silhouette, but it is not clearly visible. That is why, for the past two thousand years, the institutional church has only honored the Christ of faith through the sacrament service. The historical Jesus and his open table community seem to be forgotten. Therefore, today, our church must come to Jesus' table every Sunday and sympathize with his open will and righteous heart. Only then will the church be the branch of the kingdom of God.