The Dinner Party With Enemies

The Dinner Party With Enemies--August 2, 2018

"On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.  Just then, in front of him, there was a man who had dropsy. And Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees, 'Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?' But they were silent. So Jesus took him and healed him, and sent him away. Then he said to them, 'If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?' And they could not reply to this." [Luke 14:1-6]

Before the miracle, there is an even more telling wonder here in this scene. Jesus deliberately engages with people he disagrees with... and he is able to be both civil and direct at the same time.

This really is a wonder, at least compared with a day and age like ours, in which we are so hesitant even to have a conversation with people with know we disagree with.  Ours is a day in which it can feel like every force around us wants us either to yell at either other or to run away to our own little secluded cloisters of like-mindedness where we will never be challenged by people who think differently.  Fight or flight--they are our most ancient, even animalistic impulses, and they are still the most popular options today in our culture.  Either get into a shouting match, or walk away and find some other people who already agree with you who will simply reinforce what you already think.  

And, of course, never... never... deliberately put yourself in a situation where you might have to share a meal and table fellowship with someone with whom you disagree!

We are being taught more and more to withdraw from honest, good-faith discussion with each other these days... and of course, making it worse, we are being taught to blame "the other side" for being the unreasonable ones.  It's never me and my "side" that is uncomfortable with honest discussion--no, it's them!  And so we are taught to close the vicious circle in on ourselves--we don't talk to others with whom we are likely to disagree, and we don't do it because we are convinced that they are the ones who can't be civil and have a serious discussion.  How perfectly, terribly, circular!  And what a monstrously effective way to inoculate ourselves from ever having to actually engage people who think, believe, or act differently--as long as I don't have to sit at table with them, they will always remain a faceless "them," rather than people with names and possible reasons for why they think and see the world as they do.  The temptation is always to see the worst in "them" and only to see the best in ourselves... to attribute the best possible motivations to our own actions, to grant the most wiggle room or benefit of the doubt for people we already like, and to attribute the worst spin on the actions of the ones we see on the other side of the table.

But notice here, before we even get to the healing that happens in this scene--notice that the setting is Jesus going to a dinner party.  Again.  Except this time, the party isn't with the riff-raff, the outcasts, and the notorious "tax collectors and sinners" like we considered yesterday.  In a sense, that's actually the easier crowd for Jesus to associate with.  At least the people who are treated as outcasts and sinners aren't choking on their own self-righteousness.  The Respectable Religious Crowd--the Pharisees and Sadducees and the like--however, they are a lot harder for Jesus to associate with, because they are so busy convincing themselves they are right that they can't listen to anybody else, and certainly not this nobody of a rabbi from Nazareth who is always going to "bad people's" parties.  By this point in Luke's Gospel, Jesus has had more than a few scrapes already with the Respectable Religious Crowd, and they have already cast themselves as Jesus' enemies.  They don't like what they see as his cavalier attitude toward the Law (including, as you can see from this episode, the law of the sabbath). They don't like his unchecked, unauthorized power to heal and save.  They don't like his reckless table fellowship with the unacceptables. They don't like the fact that he just doesn't seem to be afraid of them or concerned for his own reputation.  And they don't like the way that he seems to be able to see right through their outer shells to get right down to their souls.

The Pharisee party clashed time and time again with Jesus, and Jesus clashed right back with them.  They disagreed on what the law meant, what God's Reign looked like what to expect the Messiah to be like, and what mattered most to God.  And yet, wonder of wonders, here is Jesus, headed to one of their houses for Sunday dinner (well, sabbath dinner), knowing full well that this was heading into a room full of people who didn't like him and disagreed with him.

And yet... Jesus went anyway.

This is critical.  This is vital.  This is the gaping hole in our public discourse in this day and age.  Jesus is able to go right into a situation where he will have to share table fellowship with people who at best are suspicious of him and at worst are looking for ways to corner him into saying something they can use against him, and Jesus goes right into that room with his head held high, able to look everyone in the eye with grace and with truth.  Jesus is the grown-up.  My heavens, we need models of such grown-ups these days.  We need models and examples--or rather, we need to rediscover that Jesus has done this already right here and offers us resources for practicing it ourselves--of how to be a mature adult who can have an honest conversation with people you disagree with, stick to your convictions, but also not resort to childish name-calling or "what-about-ism". Jesus goes to share a table--and remember as we said yesterday about Levi the tax collector, that sharing a table with someone in an ancient Near Easter culture is to offer friendship and social equality to them--with people who think Jesus is all wrong about nearly everything he says.  And yet Jesus doesn't flinch, doesn't run, doesn't dodge, and most certainly doesn't retreat to a friendlier crowd where he can just bad-mouth the Pharisees behind their backs. Jesus doesn't run back to Capernaum or Nazareth to have a rally with his friends and supporters when it becomes clear that this is a potentially hostile room he's walking into.  He is the consummate grown-up. He goes, he is civil, and yet he can also stick to his convictions about the sabbath and insist on healing the man in front of him.

That takes a mixture of courage, grace, humility, and honesty that I know I fail at balancing in my own life.  I know the same fight-or-flight impulse that is running rampant in our culture.  I know the same temptation to want to only talk to people I already know will agree with me. I know the temptation to a sort of tribalistic us-versus-them thinking.  I know the pull of just writing "them" off because they disagree about X, Y, or Z, and from there to just demonize them.  And I know the equally powerful pull of running away or staying silent.  But the more I consider what Jesus does here, the more I find him poking at me to keep going back into those difficult situations with difficult people... and maybe even to examine where I have been difficult, too.

Notice here that at no point does Jesus give up on his convictions--he is certain that the sabbath law was never meant to prevent healing people, and that it is right to heal the man with dropsy just as it would be right to rescue a person or an animal from a well on the sabbath day.  Jesus doesn't have to apologize for that conviction, and he doesn't have to pretend he doesn't think that way.  But neither does he have to be a jerk, a coward, or an agitator. He doesn't have to call names or exaggerate what the Pharisees think or stand for.  He holds his own, but he doesn't have to attack those with whom he disagrees--in fact, he responds to their difference of opinion by bringing life (healing the man with dropsy) rather than lobbing wild accusations or childish insults.

I wish there were more examples of that kind of maturity around that I could point to, for my own sake, for my children's sake, and for the sake of the body of Christ in my neighborhood and community.  There are precious few.  But there is Jesus... there is indeed Jesus.  And today perhaps Jesus is enough to begin a countercultural practice of grown-up conversation.  Perhaps Jesus is enough to show me what it could look like to sit, as the old psalmist put it, at a "table in the presence of my enemies," without running away or getting into a fist fight.  Perhaps Jesus is enough to show us an alternative--a third way, if you will--beyond fight or flight.

Before we even talk about the miracle of a healing, Jesus has done something profound and powerful, just in the act of sitting down at a table to share a meal with people he doesn't agree with.  May such wonders happen among us today.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage, the grace, the humility, and the honesty, to share tables even with people we do not like or with whom we do not agree, and to be grown-ups in conversation together.