Time to Eat!

A Reflection on this Friday’s Gospel, Matthew 9:9-13 – 5 July 2024

     The movie, Babette’s Feast, is a true feast for the soul! The story, by Isak Dinesen, centers on a lavish dinner prepared by a French servant woman named Babette. Babbette sacrifices all she owns, every cent won through a lone lottery ticket, to pay for the dinner. It is given in thanksgiving to an isolated group of religious ascetics in a Danish village for giving her shelter. The Film is in Danish; yet, even with the subtitles, you are immediately drawn into a story of how Babbette’s sacrifice heals a community whose once strong bonds of love for God and each other have deteriorated into back-biting and bickering. Babbette’s loving gift of an extraordinary meal transformed the community. Coming together over dinner restored the bonds of long forgotten love.

     A good friend of mine used to say that a shared meal is the best way to solve the world’s most difficult problems. The table is a special place of “solidarity” with the other. It is where we gather, connect through shared experiences, and nourish not only our bodies but, our souls. A shared meal, even with the worst food and drink, can become like a thread that weaves a community back together. Over food, we recognize our common humanity. Community is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

     Conversion stories often center on, “how I came to Jesus.” The reality is that Jesus always comes to us, first (1 John 4:19). He meets us amid our sin and instantly begins to break down the barriers that a lifetime of sin and guilt constructs. In Sacred Scripture, that conversion is often consummated over a shared meal.

     Fourteen meals are specifically mentioned in the Gospels beginning with the wedding at Canaan (John 2:1–10) and conclude with a meal of fish which Jesus shared with His disciples as He sent them into the world (John 21:12–19). Within each meal, and especially at the institution of the Eucharist, there is the miracle of a divinity revealed and a community reconciled, stitched back together. In ancient Israel, meals were sacred. To invite someone to a meal was to nearly invite them into your family. Shared food and drink embody a shared life. Isn’t that the reality of the celebration of the Eucharist?

     In the Gospel today, in an extraordinary counter-cultural move, Jesus, God incarnate, eats a meal with the town’s most notorious sinners. In sharing this meal, Jesus treats those cast out for their sin as family. Jesus sees them not as sinful and evil but as the sick needing loving care. The first thing they need is not a teacher of the Law to judge them, but a friend who will help them to get the sustenance that they need. Jesus saw himself not as a judge passing sentence, but as a doctor who comes to seek and save those who are lost. He comes to them in a shared meal. Sound familiar?

     In eating a meal with sinners, Jesus calls us to solidarity with the other, especially those who are cast out for their sin. “What is this solidarity? It is the manifestation of the love which has its source in God himself.” (St John Paul II Audience 10 February 1988) We are not called to stand at a distance from those engaged in sin but to go to them with mercy, in love. We all share in our common need for salvation. They are not SINNERS but people, just like us.

     Solidarity does not mean that you must accept the sin. It does mean that we must recall our familial bond and that we are called to a common meal (Acts 2:42). Isn’t that what Jesus does as we receive the Eucharist. Jesus is the author of the meal and the food which binds us together, not just spiritually but physically, of one heart and soul. He stitches us back together with each Mass. (John 6:54-56)

     Perhaps it is time to be a “Babette.” Invite an individual or a group from whom you are estranged, or who is struggling with sin, to sit down and share a meal with you. May this meal become a true “feast of love.” In this, you are an agent of God, the divine physician, and an agent of mercy and love in a world that is spiritually starving.

Every evening I shall sit down to dine with you. Not with my body, which is of no importance, but with my soul. Because this evening I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible.

(General Lorens Löwenhielm to his beloved Maritime after eating Babette’s Feast)

End Notes:

John Paul II. Audiences of Pope John Paul II (English). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2014. Print.