by Randall S. Frederick

Earlier this year, my wife and I went on a trip to Israel and Jordan. I had known for a long time that food is sacred in the Middle East but the particulars, the invisible details, the folkways and customs, cannot be found in a book or traveler’s guide. Some things you have to experience for yourself, observe, and take note of. You have to ask questions and challenge your assumptions, not only about the things you’re observing which are new and surprising but also the things you take for granted and no longer notice until it is done in a new way.

In Islam, feeding the poor is a sacred act. It was once this way in Christianity as well, before American Evangelicals twisted their scriptures to make Jesus into a capitalist whose primary concern was the accumulation of individual, private wealth and retirement accounts to the neglect of neighbors and forsaking of the world entire. In other faiths around the world, sharing goods and resources was an expression of compassion and the divine. In America, because the Republican leadership and Fox News have capitalized on and exploited the fears, ignorances, prejudices, and illiteracies of citizens, we call any act of kindness to a stranger “Socialism”. Acts of charity are handouts. For the Evangelical at least, expressions of love are unearned, joy evidence of stupidity, peace a rejection of Americanism, patience is laziness, kindness is now seen as a weakness, goodness is wokeness, gentleness a personal rejection of every soldier and veteran, and self-control an assault on personality liberty. To show mercy is to entertain wickedness, to pervert Jesus’ teachings on judgment and discipline with us as arbitrators. 

It’s a strange thing, the ways that Americans celebrate isolationism, baptizing it as “rugged individualism.” Jesus did not do this. Neither did the Apostles. Nor the prophets, or any other key religious figures throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. In Judaism, isolation and individualism are laughable because we are all the children of God and have a responsibility for and to one another, especially when someone is suffering. And again, in Islam, giving food to those who need it is a sacred practice. A practice, mind you, that you do so frequently that is is a practice and habit rather than an occasional exception. Charity, giving, and sharing out of your abundance, these behaviors are expected. To not be charitable would be a strange thing.

In Islam, one of the five pillars of the faith, zakāt, insists that the believer extend care toward others. How one “extends care” is not prescribed, but a dictate that takes on the form of the moment and parties involved. Often, zakāt takes the form of money and charitable donations to the community, but it is also a way of life. Zakāt may be an act of kindness to help the suffering, or helping refugees, victims of environmental disasters, urban areas, the poor, and those in conflict zones. In the South where I grew up, it is far (far) more common to make someone a meal after the death of a loved one. Even among those who are not Muslim, food and sharing one’s food is a cultural expression of hospitality. I have made food for people I didn’t even know when I heard they were going through a hard time; knowing them personally was not a requirement to be kind. In fact, whenever my mother and I were experiencing a period of deep poverty, she would still make food for people and even baked things for church members because charity towards others was not only a sacred practice but a culture and way of life.

Sharing food and water was so much a part of ancient Judaism that it appears in the early stories of Genesis without comment. Hospitality was expected, both from and towards one’s neighbors, strangers, and travelers, as well as the gods. To refuse someone the necessities of life was to assign death to them, to murder them potentially but to assuredly welcome the anger of the divine. If one did not extend hospitality, it violated the customs of the land.

Only later, coming out of a time of scarcity during the Exodus stories, was there a need to codify this as a cultural attitude, a worldview for people of faith. The Jewish people were leaving an empire that emphasized productivity and human enslavement, rather than shared responsibility and human dignity. Even later, when the stories of the Jewish people were being assembled during yet another of their seemingly endless exiles, religious and political leaders, priests and prophets, insisted that it was the hard-heartedness of the Israelites that had contributed to their suffering. Surely, they had learned this from other nations because it was not a natural part of the Jewish story, and their laws explicitly condemned such behavior. Surely this was why they continued to suffer, because they had forgotten their responsibility to care for one another. The Jews were explicitly told to remember who they were, what it meant to be merciful toward one another, and how to be generous to those who saw things differently. They were to extend kindness to one another in an act of solidarity, to welcome strangers whenever possible, to discharge debts if necessary. In tradition and practice, the Jewish people would even set an additional place setting at dinner in the hope that the divine would visit them in the form of a guest.

Into the 19th Century, this remained a custom for many Americans too, Jew and Gentile alike. The future of the United States, the future of the American people, rested on helping one another.

The careful observer and student of history, however, would have already noticed that a poison had begun circulating through the body of America. Rugged individualism had infected the people within the American experiment. The telltale symptoms were the blush of poverty and the pained grimace of slavery. Even after slavery was prohibited within the American states, new laws were erected to ensure people of color knew “their place.” Women were the “property” of their husbands. A man was “king” of his own home. By the turn of the 20th Century, individualism had become part of the American Dream, as though it had always been this way for centuries stretching back into ancient times. This ahistorical revision corrupted the American people and just when the sickness was about to be reconsidered, as it had before with the Jewish people in exile, Evangelicals stepped forward to baptize Rugged Individualism as a sacred practice.

Between 1910 and 1915, a series of essays were published by the Testimony Publishing Company of Chicago, Illinois. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth (generally referred to simply as The Fundamentals) were conceived of by California businessman Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil. Stewart was a devout Presbyterian and dispensationalist who gently guided the editors of the essays to promote big business (like Union Oil) and perpetuate individualism as not only an American ideal but a Christian virtue. 

After all, Stewart reasoned, Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to the Wittenburg door were about the power of an individual to separate himself from the unreasonable expectations of global responsibility. In the decades that followed, Stewart’s influence began to harden into fundamental, inarguable, capitalized Truth Claims. Every Christian, every good Christian at least, could agree on these guiding ideas: Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself for the foreigner, and certainly not some Socialist or Communist. Those sad folk always managed to get colonized. There was something to be said about the triumph of capitalism, with its emphasis on the individual. That should be seen as proof of the Gospel’s saving message that Jesus died for the individual.

Individualism, to the true believer, was the Gospel. Neglecting the poor? Well, Jesus forgives. Besides, if God cared, maybe he should open up Heaven’s pocketbook and take responsibility instead. It’s hassle enough to take care of oneself here in America.

The influence of the cult of Evangelicalism on American life was profound. Coming out of World War II, many Americans felt the fatalistic message of Evangelicalism had been proven. Hitler had convinced a nation of National Socialists to do terrible things. Wasn’t that proof that Socialism, something entirely different from National Socialism, was misguided? Mussolini’s style of Fascism had found success among Catholic Italians and they had won the war beside us, arm in arm. Meanwhile, the collectivist message of Russia’s Communism had brought about their collapse. It didn’t matter that the toll of war was so great on Russia that the continent had changed from a patriarchal to a matriarchal society; their suffering was Communism. Not the economic collapse that America and Italy and Europe and Germany had suffered along with them. After all, once Germany began utilizing the tools of capitalism and entered into trade with America, all was forgiven and forgotten. No, Russia’s failures were because of Communism. Everything pointed toward American individualism as a Gospel of prosperity. It worked so well whenever other nations allowed themselves to be colonized by the tenets of Capitalism, Rugged Individualism, and Evangelicalism, that this Holy Trinity of social restoration must surely be the Gospel itself, fully embodied.

While Evangelicalism was transformed into a selfish cult of greed and individualism, many Americans continued to hold the values of their predecessors in charity and table fellowship. Dinner parties continued as they always had, but had taken on new qualities.

Christian charity organizations had been organized in response to the corrupting influence of expanding business and racism in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Christians felt a responsibility for their neighbors and the victims of Big Business, while Evangelicals began to dismantle government support. Muslims continued to care for the poor and needy, as did Jewish communities. After all, caring for one another was not a new concept among people of faith. Outside religious circles, dinner parties were a response to politics as much as culture. Various political, social, literary, cultural, racial, and reform societies began to percolate out of the pot of non-religious dinner parties. The popularity of the television had begun to erode something, many felt. Its bright and loud chatter, commercials blaring, felt superficial. Salons were needed harbors for deep conversation and deeper understanding. Sometimes well-intentioned parties took on an attitude of paternalism and tokenism, welcoming someone expressly because they were poor to speak for all poor people, for example, or needling someone of a different politic to see whether they could be convinced to change parties. But on the whole, these dinner parties were guided by the idea of table fellowship, which was often overlooked because it was not made explicit. Television had begun to shape the American mind, changing it from active critical thought and questioning to passive acceptance of what one was told. In the intimacy of a small group, one could share thoughts and have them gently challenged. Of course, sharing a meal made this easier because it occupied the mouth, satiated the stomach, and engaged the listener. It was hard to truly hate someone when you were able to hear how pithy they were, how intelligent, how amusing and nuanced.

Food has always been a folkway, a social lubricant, and a comfort. Perhaps there is some primal part of the human brain that holds on to this. In animals, we see food as each of these as well as a marker of status. The strongest eat first, their partners, moving down the hierarchy until the weakest and feeble are left with scraps if anything at all. In human development, the upending of this behavior is remarkable. Sharing a meal, everyone’s status being equal, humbles the proud as much as elevates the least among us. Emphasizing communal enjoyment and conversation elevates a sense of security. After all, when you don’t have to fight for your food, status, or portion, a sense of security can be found.

In contrast, we might look to the individualism of America. Security is not transmitted by the community and engaging with one another, but — reverting to the laws of the animal kingdom — by portion size and sequence. In America, food portions are larger than in other countries. In America, there is an insistence on being first in line. On speaking to a manager when you’re not. To demand things, roar when we don’t get them. In anger and hierarchy, the erasure of a shared experience, private dining in our cubicle caves, and treating servers as expendable and replaceable when they are noticed at all, these are the behaviors that now define us.

Table fellowship, who we share meals with, presents an alternative way of living and organizing one’s life. To the casual observer, it seems simple. You’re having a meal with a small group of friends, occasionally inviting new people. Or perhaps you have been to one of the growing number of restaurants that feature shared dining, one long table that places the individual across from a stranger, practically forcing them to talk to one another. These seem like small things, hardly worth mentioning, except to note that interesting person we met at the party or the inconvenience one feels in having the privacy and entitled space we have become accustomed to disturbed. Only — and here I would encourage you to think about what it happening underneath those protests — the inner life is being reorganized in a noticeable way. You feel the tension of having to acknowledge other people exist, that their need for a napkin is very much like your own, that their children are loud and playful just like you once were or like your own, if you have kids too. Conditioned to believe that we are alone in the world, might that elbow that touched yours be a call to something outside our own insulated world?

Whenever I am in New York, I always notice how boxed-in everything feels. I notice the effect of the crowds, the constant dodging of bodies and jungle gym of scaffolding, and the hiss of steam in the grates and puddles everyone tries to avoid. I notice too that, leaving the city, I miss these things. Yes, I complained. Yes, I made withering remarks. Yes, I felt myself hardening against the overwhelming sensation of loneliness. Yet I also felt the opportunity for kindness. Holding a door open for someone, I noticed they did a double take. I suspect they were not used to small gestures like that. When my wife asked a waiter about his day, he seemed taken aback and met her question with a new level of kindness. She saw them in a city where no one notices anyone. My wife and I are not saints by any stretch, but we recognize the impact of an isolated society in the faces and behaviors of other humans. We also notice the ways people open up when given the chance. Especially around tables and meals and these cramped places where we have a choice, timshel, to either close ourselves off and live into the narrative that isolation and individualism are aspirational goals or, alternatively, to extend warmth and hospitality.

In her book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, theologian Christine Pohl has observed, “A shared meal is the activity most closely tied to the reality of God’s kingdom, just as it is the most basic expression of hospitality.”

Tables, and food in general, are a small part of what I’m discussing here, a lab of sorts for our Lebenswelt or “life-world” and lived experience. How many of us, I wonder, actually think through the tension we feel in a cramped elevator? Why we feel not only inconvenienced but truly overwhelmed when one more thing is added to our calendar? I suspect many of us are not paying attention to where, how, and why the seemingly different and distinct parts of our lives (which we try so hard to compartmentalize and control) overlap, intersect, and collide. Tables, or table fellowship, are a part of this.

As I write this chapter, it is the week between Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish holidays. An amateur cook, I made a few light spins on the traditional Jewish holiday plate: grilled beef tips substitute for brisket, for example, but of course a traditional challah. Food is a staple of the Jewish table and home, and in writing this, I am aware how interchangeable these words are for many people. Food, table, and home — at least here in the South — are synonymous. In the New Testament, Jesus goes about allegedly performing miracles and preaching to those who follow him. Food is often part of the stories that were once told about both Jesus and his ministry moving around the Sea of Galilee. He recruits fishermen to be part of his movement, he feeds people, he eats with questionable characters, and even after he is said to have died, Jesus returns from the dead to ask his most public-facing disciple Peter to feed his followers.

Let’s not drop this thread just yet, though. Clearly, the authors of the New Testament are either encoding something important into the stories or there is something familiar here that the authors are taking for granted. They didn’t need to unpack it or overexplain it, because they were confident it would be understood immediately. As someone who discourages conspiracy theories or secret codes in religious texts, I’m more inclined to believe this is the case. I don’t think there were hidden “codes” in the New Testament. I think something was so common, so obvious, to the original audience that they would have picked up on something quickly.

So Jesus dies and comes back to life, supposedly. He visits a few key characters in the story like the women who are coming out to prepare his body for burial and he briefly visits his closest followers to ask them to stay in Jerusalem, where he was just killed, for a few more days and to be patient with him. So far, other than the fact that a not-alive guy is the one asking this, nothing seems out of the normal to me. But then, a few days after this, Jesus visits Peter again privately. And here’s the part the original audience would have noticed: Jesus asks Peter, his close friend and coworker, to feed the people who are part of this new religious movement that is developing. Food, even after Jesus dies and his ministry is transitioning into something different, is still so important that not only does Jesus feel this is important enough to discuss post-mortem, but he pulls Peter aside to emphasize it.

But wait. There’s more.

Peter does this, or at least he starts to do this, but there’s a problem. The Jews have a lot of laws and rules about food that have come about during their various exiles. Do this, don’t do that. Pork and bacon? Forbidden. Shellfish? Another forbidden food. Some of these may feel like small things. Okay, so no bacon. No crabs. Got it. No big deal. One day, Peter has a vision where the sky opens up and a sheet (tablecloth?) is laid out with these supposedly “unclean” animals prepared. A voice tells him it is okay to eat these “unclean” or “common” foods. Pork, shellfish, special breads and other animals are now permitted foods. Even if you are not religious, and perhaps especially if you not religious, you can see that food and the customs around them remain important even after Jesus is no longer the central character of the stories Christians are telling.

Later, food was still a concern for other members of the early Christian communities. Peter explains to the community that these forbidden foods are not permissible to eat, but then he seems to favor those Jews who continue to refrain from “unclean” foods. Paul, another active and important person in the Christian community, publicly condemns Peter for doing this. Did he actually have a vision or not? Food is never just about food.

And it’s not just Jesus, Peter, and Paul that are asking questions about what is on the table. Other people are asking questions about who is allowed to eat first and even who is allowed to eat. This is not a new question, who is in and who is out, who is permitted and who is forbidden. In hindsight, these seemingly benign and simple questions about food and customs were a part of the Jewish and Christian debates all along.

From early on, Jesus raised several alarm bells with the religious leaders of his time. If he fasted, how often and why? If he ate, who was he eating with? When he was alive, one of the sects of Judaism, the Pharisees, demanded to know “Why does he, Jesus, eat with tax collectors and sinners?” If Jesus was a godly man, then why was he spending so much time with sinners? Worse, why was he eating with them? Jesus replied, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” With this answer, Jesus was proclaiming table fellowship was vital to what he understood to be his mission while on Earth.

Though many distinctions exist in Jesus’ table practice, it is not unique in every aspect. For starters, the group meal was often more than an opportunity for sustenance. As James D.G. Dunn puts it in his Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making (2023), “in Jewish thought Abraham and Job were extolled as the models of hospitality, where again it was precisely the sharing of food which was the expression of that hospitality.” Joachim Jeremias described it this way in his textbook New Testament Theology (1977), 

In Judaism in particular, table-fellowship means fellowship before God, for the eating of a piece of broken bread by everyone who shares in the meal brings out the fact that they all share in the blessing which the master of the house has spoken over the unbroken bread.

Table fellowship was one usual way of forming or celebrating a bond and a mutual welcoming or acceptance of guest and host.

While table fellowship created a sense of union between guest and host, it had the potential to create (or exacerbate) boundaries between those welcomed to the meal, and those excluded. According to Dunn, “Table-fellowship functioned as a social boundary, indicating both who was inside the boundary and who was outside.” Often these boundaries represented the divisions between various Jewish sects, but we might ask similar questions of ourselves. Who do we allow in our lives and who do we keep at a distance? More importantly, what is motivating these decisions? Racism, class, religion, politics, all of these are reasons we typically use to avoid other people. We believe they are bad people, sinners, or they are part of some group that is evil and which causes us disgust.

To some extent, the living room might be our social sphere. The place where we keep things social and sociable, although superficial. But the dining room is a little more intimate, we discover. It compels us to think deeply and reflect on the compulsions, and assumptions that compel us to make decisions in a particular way, those thoughts and beliefs that motivate us to do one thing over another. 

Of course, we’re not at the bedroom or bathroom yet. We’ll get to those in a bit. But here, in the dining room, we might consider who are are talking to, who we are laughing with, who we are familiar with to say offensive things to because, after all, these are “our people.” Not neighbors, and not family, but the people we share ourselves with, with whom we share ideas, and those with whom we “break bread.”

Whether this is a good thing or not, there are certain people I refuse to “break bread” with. I tolerate them in my living room, so to speak. I admit it. I am guilty of creating excuses for looking down on people. I cannot avoid them by keeping them on the porch or at the door. But I will not share a meal or raise a glass with them.

As Sarah Sahu writes in her essay, “Life in the Kingdom: Meal as Symbol of Jesus’ Mission”,

Just as the parties above (Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes) were still participants in the common form of Judaism, but believed they were groups with special knowledge of God’s will, Jesus, too, believed himself to be in special relationship with God. For Jesus, however, his distinction served not to close himself off from other groups, but to open himself to others…

Eating with sinners was something that “seems to have been a genuine offence: something he actually did that really offended people.” The reason for the offense probably relates to Jesus’ hallmark emphasis on “mercy and not sacrifice.” The point was not necessarily that Jesus came into contact with sinners, but that he did not demand their repentance or atonement in order to continue their association with him, and this could be perceived as a sanctioning of their behaviors. Crossan refers to this as “open commensuality” and its radicality lies in his contemporaries’ conception of him as “having no honor” by making “no appropriate distinctions and discriminations”…

The existing importance of the meal in first century Palestinian culture as communal, bond-strengthening events for guests and hosts provided the perfect vehicle for Jesus to express his central message of the kingdom of God in a way understandable to all levels of socio-cultural society. His preaching complements his use of the meal in praxis, and a prime example of this is Luke 14:7–24, the “Parable of the Great Dinner.” Here Jesus says, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” These words are actualized in Jesus’ daily meal practice, realizing what he preached about the kingdom, in regards to who was included. Any divergence from customary table fellowship on Jesus’ part had the potential to transform minds and hearts or to offend them. Jesus’ table fellowship was marked by an openness that was distinctive among the table practice of his contemporaries, and it is highly probable that these divergences were intended by Jesus as catalyst for transformation.

It turns out, among my many faults is a strain of self-righteousness on display whenever I refuse to eat with people I disagree with politically, socially, or personally. The lesson here is that the table embodies how we truly believe about one another. When we refuse to even have a meal in one another’s presence, and especially in denying them food itself, we show a disregard for their humanity or perhaps, as in my case, a self-righteousness that asserts superiority in some way by refusing to step down to them, to level the field and sit together, to acknowledge another person as having dignity and as deserving of respect. 

Granted, I’m not suggesting Jesus was right in how he embodied his beliefs, or that he had perfected a paradigm. Jesus ate with sinners and prostitutes regularly, but there was at least one instance where he refused to eat with a Canaanite woman. Those familiar with the story will recall that the woman “corrects” Jesus, insisting that even though she is his political and social opposite, she still deserves his attention. It is one of the rare instances, apparently, when Jesus got his own message quite wrong and not only failed to embody his own teachings but did so in a way that needed public correction.

I’m also not suggesting that the Christian community – then or now – understood what Jesus was doing and saying. There is a long and deplorable history of Christians failing to embody an awareness of the importance of the table, as we are discussing here. The Christian Church is best known, historically and even unto the present moment, not for their generosity and tolerance but for excommunicating their own and expressing such blinding hatred and disregard for fellow humans that wars have been conducted in the name of God and Jesus, to their discredit. I do not need to comment on this further, since the Christian community has done a sufficient job of undermining their own message.

What I am saying is only this, that the stories about Jesus’ table fellowship give us pause to consider our own decisions about who belongs and who doesn’t, what is fit to eat and what is profane. In the end, a meal is never just a meal.