A Table and a Promise
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
“Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Do we have any English teachers or grammar stans with us today? “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” This is a sentence no English teacher can abide. Why? The dreaded passive voice. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Why couldn’t they recognize him? Well, we don’t know because the passive voice obscures the reason for their inability to see Jesus right in from of them. These two disciples had walked with Jesus before, learned from Jesus before, spent the day with Jesus before and yet their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Why? Luke does not tell us and his grammar is no help here. But can we speculate just a little? Maybe Jesus looks a bit different after the resurrection. Perhaps the experience of the terrorism of the cross and the glorious resurrection of his body meant that he wasn’t immediately recognizable. Maybe they just weren’t ready to see Jesus again. Despite his promises to return, did the cross seem so definitive, so conclusive, so irretrievably deadly that they couldn’t imagine that the executed Jesus would be standing before them. Did he look like he always did, but they simply were not expecting, at all, to see him? Were they so deep in grief and loss that they missed Jesus standing right in from of them?
Or maybe, just maybe, was Jesus wearing a Zorro mask? Maybe he comically changed his accent to something ridiculous? We just don’t know because this frustrating sentence does not give us an answer. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him. I read this and wonder where is my red pen so I can fix Luke’s broken grammar!
But Luke’s mysterious sentence is the beginning of a powerful story, a story that can change us, teach us the shape of God’s grace anew today.
We have to remember that Jesus loved, loved to eat. At the beginning of Luke, we learn that some called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard. Apparently, these are insults, though it makes me want to hang out with Jesus more! Jesus is always eating but never eating by himself. He eats with those filthy, treacherous tax collectors, those dirty, undesirable sinners! But he also eats with the powerful. A Pharisee named Simon invites Jesus only to have a sinner woman crash the party. And at that meal, Jesus lets “that” woman touch him! Jesus feeds 5000 men plus an untold number of women and children in the middle of nowhere. Jesus invites himself to eat at Zacchaeus’s house forever changing how his neighbors see this misunderstood tax collector. Jesus eats all the time apparently! But why?
You see, meals in antiquity were not just interruptions in one’s day to fuel one’s body. Meals were social moments, political moments. Meals were moments when you learned where you belong and where you don’t. Meals were about relationship and community and, too often, about exclusion. Meals were powerful symbols, that is.
And this is still true for us, isn’t it? Take a moment and think about the greatest meal you have ever had. Ponder it. Picture it. Imagine it.
What came to mind as you pondered this meal? In my experience, we are far more likely to think about people and places than things we ate. That is, I should ask, who do you think about and where were you more than I should ask what did you eat. I imagine some of you remembered family meals at the holidays, surrounded by the folks you love and the traditions that shaped you. Some of you remembered a special trip to a new place. You remember who was at these meals, especially when these folks are no longer with us. Maybe you remember a hard-won meal after a marathon. Maybe you remember a meal that changed your life. Behind all these powerful meals are powerful stories.
Because meals are places of belonging for us and for Luke alike. Food feeds the soul and our relationships as much it feeds our stomachs. Meals matter and thus it is no accident that Luke’s Jesus spends so much time eating with all the right kinds of people and all the wrong kinds of people alike.
So, we join the disciples again on the road to Emmaus. These two disciples are distraught. They enunciate what I count as the saddest, perhaps most tragic bit of Scripture. Luke records that when Jesus asks them about their conversation, they stand still, looking sad. And they respond, “We had hoped…” We had hoped. We once hoped but no longer do so. We had hoped, but our hopes were dashed. We had hoped, but these hopes were crushed on a Roman cross. We had hoped, but now we sit in despair. Perhaps you know this feeling all too well. It feels fresh in my mind. Sometimes it feels like hope is a fool’s errand when our prayers float away like wisps of smoke in the air. Hope sometimes feels naive when the world keeps disappointing day after day. Hope sometimes feel like a ready path to despair when it feels like every step we take is accompanied by two big steps back. The disciples stand there in their despair, in their hopelessness, in their grief. Can you feel yourself on that road of despair today? Perhaps you can.
If so, notice what these forlorn disciples nonetheless do. Though they had lost all hope when they saw their friend die on a vicious cross, they nonetheless try to offer hospitality to this stranger who warms their hearts in the way only one other person had. They say to this new friend, come and stay with us. They offer to host him for the night. But then Jesus, their old friend, flips the script as he so often does. He becomes the host. He takes the bread, he blesses it, he breaks it, he shares it with his friends.
And then, only then, their eyes were opened. They didn’t recognize Jesus when he was teaching them or walking next to them stride by stride in the middle of the day. They didn’t recognize his face, his voice.
They didn’t recognize him until Jesus did the most Jesus thing he does in the Gospel of Luke: he took bread and shared it with his friends.
I’ve become convinced that if Luke had chosen a picture of the gospel instead of 24 chapters of writing, he would have placed before us not a cross or a Jesus preaching from a mount or a Jesus ascending into heavens. Instead, Luke would have drawn for us a big table, wooden and worn and homey. Around that table would have been all kinds of different chairs, space for all kinds of people. And piled on that table would be mounds of delicious food, food we ate at our grandmother’s table, that food you imagined just a moment ago. But there would also be some strange food, food you don’t recognize. Food with smells that you can’t account for. Foods you can’t begin to imagine how you would begin to eat. But at that table such strange food is a delightful curiosity, a dish that makes you wonder who else is sitting at this table. When you look to your left and to your right, you see people you’ve loved and lost, people you’ve never seen before but love at first sight, people you wouldn’t have thought would make it through the pearly gates. And that table, that table rings with delight and laughter and joy.
And one more thing: this table has no end. There is always one more chair to pull up. The invitation list is open. This table is for all. No exclusion. No reservation needed. Payment is not accepted because the table is open and free and bountiful. As I once read, “When you have more than you need, don’t build a higher fence, build a bigger table.”
As I wrote this sermon, I thought about our house, the one my wife, my two children, and I have co-created. I thought about the meals we ate. I understood something finally that my body and my heart had already felt. My spouse, Holley, is an extraordinary cook and baker. My family of origin introduced her to the joys of Puerto Rican cooking. Platanos. Mofongo. Arroz con gandules. Pan sobao. And she, being the extraordinary cook she is, learned how to make these dishes because, yes, she loves the food but also because she loves me and the land that made me, the food that nourished me. When she cooks in this way, she is a guest in someone else's story. Why? Because she loves. Me along with our half white, half Puerto Rican children and the land that helped make us a family.
And the love goes both ways. Holley’s family includes a strong Italian heritage with the best of its traditions. including the tradition of Sunday gravy or as it was known in Holley’s family: sauce. One word carries so much. I love sauce. I love gravy. When I eat at that table, I am a loving guest in someone else’s story, and the world all of sudden gets bigger.
A warped theological imagination has fed us a lie. We own the table to which we invite others. We are perpetual hosts; others are perpetual guests. Hospitality is something we give, rarely something we receive. We imagine ourselves as those who might house someone fleeing danger; rarely do we imagine ourselves as the refugee, the migrant. Simply put, that imagination forgets what it means to love.
But Jesus wants to free us from this colonial imagination, liberate us from its narrow constraints, its binding chains. Jesus wants to set a new table before us. A table where the food never runs out. A table where this is always one more chair. A table where I am ever a guest to others, ever a host to the same.
That table is set before you. Jesus begs you to sit, eat, delight, live.
The meal has only just been set. The ink on the invitation is not yet dry. Your chair is waiting. The chair next to you is open. And our call to love our neighbor, to be in community with the stranger, to taste anew God’s transformative has just begun.
