Celebrative Dining
I was reading The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity by Greg Garrett (2023). I learned that late in his life, Baldwin left an unfinished play entitled The Welcome Table. Baldwin was of course appealing to an old phrase in African American lore and practice of a table of food that welcomed all to eat without reference to any qualification. Baldwin wrote of a possibility to come of a place where “brotherhood, sisterhood, love, and unity could be actively and visibly embraced.” African American singing of the Welcome Table was a way of hope and defiance, refusing the long history of deprivation, disadvantage, and abuse.
That title by Baldwin, with its appeal to an old practice, set me to thinking that eating may be a venue for welcome and inclusion or a site for exclusion and elitism. The Bible teems with references to eating as a way of abundance, unity, and peaceableness. The image of the “feast” is an embodiment of God’s future as it permeates scripture and as we may practice every day. Among the celebrations of good, abundant inclusive eating, the following occurred to me:
-In Exodus 16 the slaves escaped from Pharaoh’s Egypt complain about the lack of good slave food (vv. 3-4). In response the lord of the Exodus sends manna, bread beyond their explanatory categories (vv. 13-21). The manna is a narrative exhibit of the capacity of the creator to provide ample nourishment in the most dire circumstance. The only restraint on this ample bread is that it belongs to the entire community; it cannot be stored up as surplus, a limitation quota quite in contrast to the “storehouses” of Pharaoh who specialized in stored surplus. (See James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017) wherein the storage of grain is seen to be the basis for the accumulation of centralized power.) The God of manna makes it possible to live without stored surplus, because it is bread given daily, that is, “daily bread.”
-Our most familiar Psalm celebrates the claim that God sets a table of good food for us even in circumstances of hostility:
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies (Psalm 23:5).
Thus provision of a table or food is cited as an embodiment of God’s “goodness and mercy.” The trope is reiterated in Psalm 78. In its recalcitrance Israel asked whether God could act for them in the wilderness:
They spoke against God, saying,
“Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
Even though he struck the rock so that water gushed out and torrents overflowed,
Can he also give bread,
or provide meat for his people (Psalm 78:19-20)?”
In response we are told:
He rained down on them manna to eat,
and gave them the grain of heaven;
Mortals ate of the bread of angels;
he sent them food in abundance (vv. 24-25).
The food-giving capacity of the creator God extends into areas beyond the reach or control of Pharaoh.
-In Isaiah 55:1-3 the poet addresses exiles who live in despair. They have no money and need food. It is on offer… free, without money, without price. God does not traffic in the quid pro quo insistences of Babylon:
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy (v. 2)?
The bread on offer which is the bread of emancipation and homecoming is free; it is good; it is rich. It invites a delight that is sure to counter the despair of exile. Food is a harbinger of God’s good future for the displaced.
-Perhaps the ultimate articulation of a lavish feast in the Old Testament is a feast when death has been swallowed up:
On this mountain the lord of hosts will make for all peoples,
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear (Isaiah 25:6).
The poetry is loaded with terms of extreme generosity:
rich food/ well-aged wines…
rich food, well-aged wines.
This feast for which Israel has waited now invites them to gladness and joy. The world ends in a feast!
-In Luke 13:22-29 Jesus remonstrates against the complacent who will be excluded and sent away. But then, to the contrary there will be a wondrous feast of welcome:
Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some who are first will be last (vv. 29-30).
Jesus offers an image of a great gathering to a counter-banquet for all parts of creation. All are welcome who have walked through the “narrow gate.” But a look at the guest list for the counter-banquet holds a radical surprise. Now social hierarchy is inverted. The ones most welcome are “the last” who now are welcomed as the first. This feast of welcome is an alternative to the common practice of “this age” with its ordering of exclusion.
-In Luke 14:15-24 Jesus responds to a query about who will “eat bread in the coming kingdom,” who will join in the ultimate banquet of God’s goodness. In the parable, the usual guests are invited; but they all refuse, sending their RSVPs. They do not have time for or interest in such ultimate food, preoccupied with lesser matters of property and marriage. The Lord of the Banquet is angered at their refusals. He gives a banquet nonetheless, and issues an invitation; this time he invites those who are not usually included in the guest list:
the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame (vv. 21).
He asks the socially disqualified. They are compelled to come to the banquet. This ultimate banquet is a contradiction of all of our conventional habits of banquets for the rich, the successful and the beautiful. God’s favorite crowd is constituted by the socially unacceptable. It is no wonder that at the outset of Luke’s gospel mother Mary can sing:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53).
According to Luke, the good news is a radical social inversion.
-A third feast occurs at the end of the best known of the parables concerning the father and his two sons. The father celebrates his renegade son who has come home:
And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate…We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found (Luke 15: 23, 32).
It is not a surprise that his older son, faithful and dutiful, is offended by such a welcome for the renegade. But that is how it is in the world constructed by Jesus. If good food is the ultimate embodiment of God’s good generosity, then it is to be administered in a way that defies the way we have organized the world. The older brother no doubt speaks for all of us who have worked hard, paid our taxes, and obeyed the law. None of these conventional actions qualifies us for the great feast; what qualifies us is simply need-based dependence upon the goodness of the creator. The older son could not talk his father out of his strange, offensive welcome.
-Finally in Luke, as in all four of the gospels, Jesus gathered his disciples, as his arrest approaches, for a final meal.
Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19-20).
He offers the bread and wine in a somber setting as an earnest promise of the kingdom of God that is to come that will contradict and overthrow all present social arrangements. His disciples are invited to join him in eating and drinking, in their hopeful wait for God’s alternative governance. And of course this remembered meal, offered in a circumstance of dire danger, has become the seedbed of the church’s Eucharist, a meal of sober realism and lavish expectation.
The great culminating banquet represented in the gospel account concerns the two narratives of feeding the crowd.
-In Mark 6:30-44 (Matthew 14:13-21, Luke 9:10-17, John 6:1-14) Jesus feeds a hungry crowd of 5000 men. The narrative has no commentary about how Jesus evoked such food; it simply attests the capacity of Jesus to provide ample food with a singular abundance. The phrasing of the narrative of course reiterates the verbal sequence of the Eucharist:
He took, he blessed, he broke, he gave.
These are his recurring dominical actions. The outcome is an over-abundance of twelve baskets of bread, enough for all the tribes of Israel. He is, in his role as creator, the lord of abundance who readily and generously overrides the desperation of the world. This is indeed Bread for the World!
-This narrative action is reperformed in Mark 8:1-10 (see Matthew 15:32-39). The verbal actions vary slightly:
He took, he gave thanks, he broke, he gave.
This time 4000 people; this time seven baskets of surplus bread. This time the lord of creation has yet again performed abundance that belongs to a world ordered by and for the creator.
This wondrous sequence of texts of course has all over it the fingerprints of the Eucharist. It is stunning that this “innermost sanctuary of the whole Christian worship” is a meal named “thanks”! The church has long known that “thanks” is the only appropriate response in a world where we live solely by God’s good gifts. “Thanks” is an acknowledgement that we are on the receiving end of life from God, and so the four verbs (he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave) become the hallmark of our faith and of our life. This recitation is counter to any seductive notion that we are in any way self-made or self-sufficient. Gratitude is the glad recognition that our lives are grounded elsewhere than in our qualifications, our properties, or our accomplishments.
Thus in my own church tradition, the United Church of Christ, the introduction to the Eucharist reiterates the invitation of Luke 13:29:
This is the joyful feast of the people of God. Men and women, youth and children, come from the east and the west, from the north and the south, and gather about Christ’s table (United Church of Christ).
The table is all-inclusive. It is indeed a Welcome Table. This open-handed invitation is counter to the long-running practice of almost every church tradition of “fencing the table” in an exclusion with varying degrees of rigor, so that the gifts of bread and wine (body and blood) are on offer only for the “qualified.” But that welcome formula derived from Luke, contradicting all exclusions, is tilted exactly toward the “unqualified.” The practice of that table is a remarkable alternative to the common habit among us to protect good food, i.e., good jobs, good housing, good education, and good health care, from infringement by the unqualified.
Before we finish, we may notice a very different practice of food that is reserved only for the “qualified.” I could think of three such instances in the Bible, but there are surely more:
-In I Kings 4:22-23 it is reported:
Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty cors of choice flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, one hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fatted fowl.
The royal table was marked by luxury and extravagance. It is clear that the table was designed only for the royal family and the royal entourage. Not only were ordinary people denied access to that luxurious table, they were variously pressed into slavery or state service in order to produce the wealth that made the table possible. Those who ate at the royal table had no compunction about their privilege that was grounded in an unjust exploitative, economic enterprise. The common people were severely taxed to support the royal self-indulgence. (See the narrative of a tax revolt in I Kings 12:1-9). Of course that injustice-cum-indifference has a strangely contemporary ring to it, as we continue to practice an economy that moves all the bread and wealth and life toward the few, bread, wealth, and life generated by the many who live on subsistence wages.
-Daniel 5:1-4 reports a lavish royal feast. The guest list included “a thousand of his lords,” “the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines,” and no one else. The feast was served in vessels of gold and silver. It was fully appropriate that those at the feast should praise “the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone,” that is, all the commodities of control and wealth (Daniel 5:4). The scene is one of shameless indulgence that was from the outset exploitative and exclusionary. But the lavish royal scene of extravagance was abruptly disrupted in an inexplicable way. Strangely enough, handwriting appeared on the wall that precluded royal decoding. In his helplessness the king was terrified and “turned pale.” By the end of the narrative the king is dead; his great wealth and luxury could not protect him; he was rendered helplessly penultimate.
-A third royal banquet is mentioned in Mark 6:21 (Matthew 14:6). The dinner, in the narrative, is simply an occasion when Herod caters to his wife and daughter by authorizing the murder of John the Baptist. The king exercises absolute control over life and death and uses that power to execute a man outside of the social order.
These three luxurious royal tables are quite in contrast to the welcome table mentioned above. Indeed the royal tables issue no welcome; they are exclusionary. They serve only the elitist company of the king, and so contradict any practice of welcome. The table of welcome and the table of exclusion stand in stark contrast to each other. It is clear that the two tables in turn represent and embody a bottomless habit of abundance or a frightened practice of scarcity. Our society is to a great extent governed by an ideology of scarcity that produces fearful greed that evokes private surpluses. The welcome table, to the contrary, is grounded in abundance with a readiness to share resources with all who are needy. The church’s sacrament of abundance is the Eucharist; we faithful eagerly acknowledge that “all good gifts are sent from heaven above.” That is, they are not self-produced. For that reason they are not privately possessed. It is too bad, in my judgment, that the church’s sacrament of abundance is most often performed with parsimonious bits of bread. Far better, I suggest, that we should celebrate with a table of abundance that matches our gratitude for the limitless abundance of God.
We do well, as an act of affirmation and of defiance to host the welcome table that is a promise and an anticipation of the abundant life intended by the generosity of God:
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
Sit at the welcome table one of these days
One of these days.
I’m gonna feast on milk and honey
I’m gonna feast on milk and honey one of these days
I’m gonna feast on milk and honey
Gonna feast on milk and honey one of these days.
All God’s children gonna sit together
All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days
(Hallelujah)
All God’s children gonna sit together
All God’s children gonna sit together
One of these days
One of these days
Soon and soon!
