One of signs of being a Christian community is our willingness to welcome strangers into our midst. Actually, the capacity to do that is an essential part of any community’s future survival and growth. If you close yourself off to new ideas, you go backwards. It is a defining mark of being a Christian. From the very beginning, Christian communities welcomed strangers into their midst and helped them feel at home.
Our example for welcoming strangers comes from Jesus himself. One of the most disturbing things about Jesus, in the eyes of his opponents, was his willingness to have dinner with tax collectors and other sinners: the very people whom the religious leaders of the day wanted to exclude from their company (see, for example, Matthew 9: 9–13). Yet here we have Jesus, a respectable, popular Jewish man, who was influential partly because of his popularity, having dinner with sinners. Tax-collectors were viewed as sinners, because they were collecting tax for the hated Roman Empire, usually with a cut for themselves, and so were traitors to their own people.
You might think it’s not a great crime to have dinner with the wrong sort of people. Anyone can make a simple mistake. It’s true in our contemporary culture that eating together is a way of getting closer and expressing our respect for one another, part of the reason we’re having supper together tonight, but in the ancient world it defined who was in the group and who was out of the group. Whether you were invited to dinner or not was a sign of whether you were accepted as a law-abiding, respectable Jew or not.
When I was 20 years old (some years ago now!) I was invited to a friend’s 21st birthday party. On the day of the party I met several other friends for lunch. The party was happening in the evening. Not one of us mentioned the fact that we were going to the party, just in case someone else in the group hadn’t been invited. As it turned out, we all had been invited and later that night we joked about the fact that none of us had dared mention it at lunch. In a simple sort of way, whether we were invited to party determined, at least in our minds, whether we were accepted in our circle of friends or not. So even our culture uses events such as dinners and parties as a way of showing who is accepted and who is not.
As an aside, the only person from that particular circle of friends who wasn’t invited to the 21st was my flat-mate, which made for some awkward domestic moments with him!
Our culture does have ways of showing who is accepted and who is not. However, the ancient cultures were more formal about it; if you shared a meal together it formed a tie between the diners. If you did business with someone, or if a king made an agreement with another king, one way of sealing the deal was to have dinner together.
When Jesus has dinner with the tax collectors and sinners, in other words, when he includes them in his circle of friends, he is showing that they are people accepted by God.
So, that’s the model of community that Jesus taught his disciples and which we in turn need to accept. Our task is to make sure we are inclusive communities. No-one is left out, or put down, or thought of as less important: we are all important in God’s eyes.
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain