Signs of Life. Rick Fabian
conservative; his opponents are the wrongheaded innovators. Some scholars wonder if Jesus may have been a Pharisee, though of a different stripe than later Judaism would recognize. In any case, if Jesus is the author of this parable—as today’s critics and their opponents styled “conservative” concur—then his dining with impure and unqualified sinners laid his strong claim to biblical orthodoxy. His sign came directly from Hebrew scripture itself, in the prophecy of Isaiah, unlike widespread chaburah practice. And it upheld the well-published Old Testament doctrine of God, in contrast with the puristic new movements of Jesus’s own time.
Rabbis soon shifted their focus from the purity of the diners to the purity of their dinner foods—and the kosher kitchen was born. Today Jews welcome non-Jews to their tables, while Christians cannot agree formally to eat with each other. Instead, we mimic Jesus’s opponents, with their various chaburoth for diners variously purified. Then in what sense can we call our official closed-Communion policy traditional? Recent essays deploring the Open Table appeal to ancient theologians who indeed required Baptism before Communion, and a few writers side with those for institutional reasons, against Jesus’s radical sign of biblical orthodoxy. Yet not one of those ancient Christian authorities would ever have done so. Their purpose was to follow Jesus fully, and their arguments appeal to scripture first, as every Christian theological argument must.
“Fashionable liberal” values do but support our practice. Welcome, acceptance, and openness are indeed important to the gospel but the current debate about such virtues’ rightful place within eucharistic discipline sidesteps the main point. It is as though after Jeremiah broke the pot at the garbage dump, the faithful had debated for twenty-five hundred years How God Wants Us to Recycle Trash. (Who should take the trash where? Who may receive it? Who should say what words?) Like the virtue of hospitality, recycling is important: it shows our respect for the environment and our responsibility toward Mother Earth, and may impact our chances for a human future on this planet, but recycling was hardly the point of Jeremiah’s sign. Likewise, welcoming strangers and telling them God loves them, building community, and growing bigger and more effective ministries are all fine things; moreover they yield moving stories about people introduced to Communion for the first time. Sara Miles’s book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion18 recounts her change from atheism upon first Communion at St. Gregory’s, and how she founded a famous feeding ministry in response. Yet these noble results were not the chief point of Jesus’s sign. His chief point was: God is reconciling people who scarcely imagine how they belong together, and making peace among them—God is doing this everywhere in the world, not just in churches—and if we do not recognize what God is doing, we are headed for disaster.
Talk of Jesus’s own orthodoxy, and Christian and Jewish inheritance from it, raises the question of faith. Classical theory requires faith for sharing Christian rituals effectually, and both Eucharist and Baptism rites expressly evoke faith. Today’s public exhibit religious diversity such as our forebears barely imagined: not only ethnic immigrants, but many Christian youth pursue other world faiths and spiritualities, and criticize church standards. Indeed, Luther’s Small Catechism holds that the essential action of Baptism is not the water bath, but the progress in virtuous living that follows it, where faith grows. Might we not say the same of eucharistic sharing? What truer faith can we require than the aggressive desire that Zacchaeus19 exemplifies and newcomers show as they communicate at St. Gregory’s Church for the first time in their lives?
Forgive Us as We Have Forgiven
John Patton bases his provocative work Is Human Forgiveness Possible? on many years’ experience guiding people through forgiveness processes. In practice, he finds forgiveness involves discovering that you have forgiven people and given up your desire to be separate from them. From Patton’s perspective we may remark the line in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (perfect tense in Matthew).20 More radical than Rowan Williams’s well-meant praise for “the meals that Jesus shared with outcasts and sinners to show that God was ready to welcome and forgive them,”21 Jesus’s scandalous meals were signs that God has forgiven all humanity and holds no desire to be apart from us. Today when we watch people whom we think unworthy join our eucharistic gathering, instead of our telling ourselves we were mistaken about these folks and should reconsider how they deserve inclusion—we had rather think: these are real, nasty, active sinners, and God sees no difference between them and me. I am just like them. So I hereby quit my desire to separate from them.
It is not sinners we accept, but the world that God has already forgiven and redeemed. We can embrace Turner’s preferred “theology of redemption” if we recall that biblical redemption means paying off our relatives’ or fellow tribesmen’s compounded debts without their help because they are fiscally or morally bankrupt and absolutely cannot quit them—not because they have reformed and become a better risk now, and should get a second chance. They are not reformed. Neither are you who read this. Let me list some of my own qualifications for this eucharistic feast, which your lives surely mirror. We are a pack of lying, cheating, thieving, treacherous snobs; we are misogynist, misandric, homophobic, racist, ageist hypocrites. You just like me; no changes. Psychology Today magazine says the average North American tells hundreds of lies a day. “Lovely to see you!” “I’m doing just great, thanks!” “I’ll be there in a minute!” At Jesus’s table we liars eat together, offering nothing. Not our repentance; not our frail New Years’ resolutions, which neither God nor Jesus could credit; not our little moral improvements; nothing. God does all that happens there.
Still the Right Scandal for Our Day
Today, as in Jesus’s day, the eucharistic table is a sign of what God is doing everywhere, which the world otherwise tragically fails to see. Yet the world offers no other answer, and God’s answer is urgent. No option remains but forgiveness. That is our world, the world God has already forgiven and completely reconciled to God’s self, through Jesus’s sacrificial life and death.
In our liturgy, Jesus’s Open Table feeds all the genuinely wrong guests together. This banquet serves for more than making people feel accepted, or building community, or growing churches. It serves for more than sharing gifts that baptized Christians, or faithful Trinitarians, or sanctified and morally improved converts can have. Jesus’s Open Table remains today a scandal, a stumbling block thrown down on our path, to teach a blind and reeling world what God is doing everywhere in this world, before it is too damned late.
Jesus knew the self-doomed took offense: “blessed is anyone who does not stumble blindly over me.”22 Not that he was an unfeeling man, or a social iconoclast. Rather, Jesus was importunate. Importunity means demanding attention boldly at the worst possible time, in order to gain what you cannot gain politely.
In Jesus’s parables, importunity always works. A neighbor pounds on your door at night to borrow food, betting correctly you will jump out of bed before he wakes your household;23 a poor widow screams at a corrupt judge in open court, until he grants her justice without his customary bribe;24 a hungry child demands bread and gets it;25 violent people storm into the kingdom.26 In the gospel midrash stories added by Christian preachers, a blind man shouts politically dangerous titles ever louder over the disciples’ protests until Jesus heals him;27 and a bleeding woman successfully grasps her healer’s robe, when she knows she is ritually impure.28 By contrast, in real life prophetic importunity is always risky: Jeremiah was shut up (in every sense) in a dry well.29 Likewise, Jesus could have expounded his policy politely—but that would have undone his purpose, which was to seize his nation’s attention and show them what God was up to while they remained tragically blind. So Jesus chose to make a scandal: importunate, deliberate, and fatal for himself.
Textual criticism undercuts an alternative interpretation favored by some opponents of the Open Table: that the Last Supper differed from Jesus’s suppers with whores and greedy villains. At his Last Supper, that argument runs, Jesus dined with his close disciples only, and the Eucharist is properly celebrated thus, with only the qualified present. (This argument is also raised against the liturgical presidency of women.)
Certainly there