Christians are stupid.
That was the thought of Dr. Rosaria Butterfield. Back in the 90s (which, don’t freak out, was thirty years ago), she was a tenured professor of English and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University, and she was convinced that Christians were racist, misogynistic, oppressive, and worse. Here’s how she later described it:
“The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn’t hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that ‘knowing Jesus’ meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it.”
In many ways, she had data to back up her experience. Theologian Ron Sider, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, has found over the last three decades that Christians who identify as evangelical:
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Are more likely to abuse and divorce their spouses than non-evangelicals
Are the most likely religious group to object to having neighbors of color, and to exhibit racist assumptions about them
Are statistically just as materialistic in their giving as non-Christians. In fact, the wealthier evangelicals get, the lower their giving percentage dives. If every Christian in America gave 10% to their church, the American church could immediately provide basic health care and education to every human on earth and still have $60–70 billion left over for other purposes
He summed it up this way:
“Whether the issue is marriage and sexuality or morality and care for the poor... the data suggests that in many crucial areas evangelicals are not living any differently than their unbelieving neighbors.”
Now, there is data that nuances Sider’s findings. In American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that religious Americans give more, volunteer more, and are more neighborly than their secular peers, but that the effect comes less from professing belief than from belonging to a community of faith. Sider’s findings about self-identifying evangelicals and Putnam’s churchgoers aren’t necessarily at odds: being a Christian in name is one thing, and being a Christian who is actually embedded in a loving community which lives like Jesus is another. And, as the “Great Dechurching” of our time shows us, Rosaria’s experience rings true for millions of others in our culture: many take the name of Jesus without embedding themselves in a community of those who follow Him in their lives. The evangelical captivity to partisan politics only hammered this hypocrisy home.
Rosaria was fed up with people who worshiped a Jesus who, in her words, looked about as powerful as a “shampoo commercial model.” She cared about morality, justice, and compassion. In her studies of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, she strove to stand with the disempowered. She and her lesbian partner were great citizens, actively involved in advocating for children’s health and literacy, AIDS support and care, Golden Retriever rescue, and much more.
In 1997 she published a scathing article critiquing American Christian culture. In response, she set up two Xerox machines (I told you it was the 90s): one for fan mail and one for hate mail, all of it fuel for her fire. She began writing a book as an extension of the article.
But one letter gave her pause. It came from the pastor of a small Presbyterian church in Syracuse, the same city where she taught. His name was Ken Smith, and he didn’t spout anger or condemnation. He showed her something she had never seen from Christians: curiosity. He had clearly listened to her critiques, and he even validated some of her experience. Then he asked questions that, as an intellectual, she deeply appreciated:
How did you arrive at your interpretations?
What assumptions do you carry about the world and humanity?
How do you know you are right?
Then he did something even more shocking: he invited her to dinner at his home. At first she wanted to toss the letter out. But after a week of it sitting on her desk, she decided to go. After all, it would make great research for her book and would confirm what she already knew about Christians.
But something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, became her friends. They entered her world. Dinners became a regular, enjoyable rhythm. They traded books, spent time with her friends, and talked openly and non-confrontationally about sexuality and politics. And Ken was just... different. He prayed with a grateful intimacy with God. He repented of his sin, in front of her. And he never once invited her to church. He just became her safe friend.
Eventually, driven by nothing more than morbid curiosity, she picked up a Bible. And as any good English scholar would, she devoured it. She read it multiple times that first year, and couldn’t help being intrigued by how it spoke of God, of the human condition, of the world. She saw immense overlap between her own passion for justice and the words of Jesus.
Soon her friends grew confused. One of them, a former minister who had left the faith after fifteen years of feeling God was absent, and who was herself a lesbian, told her, “The Bible is changing you, Rosaria. This is dangerous.”
Rosaria fought with everything she had. She didn’t want to change her life. She hadn’t asked for any of this. But one Sunday morning, for reasons she wasn’t entirely sure of, she went to Ken’s church. And honestly, not a ton changed that day. But she met a group of gracious, loving Christians, and she found an invitational space that was both emotionally and intellectually stimulating. So she kept showing up, a little more and a little more: Bible studies and meals, church gatherings and service opportunities.
At first her approach was skepticism. She wanted God to prove to her, on her terms, that His claims about sex, identity, and the rest were true. She wanted full understanding before she bought in. But God offered the opposite: understanding after buying in.
This is a relational kind of knowledge, and honestly, that’s how truth always works. You don’t come to it in theory; you come to it in practice. A spouse can only understand lifelong love after getting married. A person can only understand sacrificial love for a child after becoming a parent. To understand, you have to take a leap. In the middle of her wrestling, Rosaria found herself asking deep questions: Do I really want to find truth, or am I just looking to argue with God? Has the love I’ve been fighting to feel my whole life been born out of a mistaken identity? Who am I, after all?
hen, one ordinary day two years later, she came to Jesus. She chose to give Him everything. Ken was there. Floy was there. It wasn’t smooth. By her own account she was a broken mess. She didn’t want to lose her old life, yet she kept hearing the deep, unutterable echo of God’s love song in the rubble of her own turmoil. She kept wrestling with that song over meals, drinks, and conversations with safe and trusted Christians.
Slowly she ate and drank in a new life with God:
A life of deep connection to His loving Spirit
A life of new identity
A life of holistic care for others
A life of acknowledging what’s wrong and turning around, not out of shame, but out of the eternal dignity of being loved by a God who was wooing her to become her true self in Him
She calls herself the most unlikely convert she has ever met. Today Rosaria is married to a Presbyterian pastor. She’s a writer, speaker, mother, and foster parent, and she and her family run a kind of Christian hospitality commune out of their home.
Reflecting on her story over the years, she has noticed one recurring place where God met her: tables. With Ken and Floy and other Christians, the table, a space of welcome through eating and drinking, is where she experienced God’s love, mercy, and invitation. It wasn’t loud arguments that convinced her. It wasn’t a forced conversation with a hidden agenda, like multi-level marketing for Jesus (let’s be honest, that’s what a lot of what we call “evangelism” looks like today: a bait-and-switch where five minutes into a normal conversation someone asks, “So, if you died tomorrow...”). For Rosaria it was simply welcoming, hospitable tables. The table is where transformation began.
Jesus At The Table
If you know the story of Jesus, this shouldn’t surprise you. The table was one of the primary places where He embodied and proclaimed the Kingdom. Think about one of the main critiques the religious culture leveled at Him: He was “a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” He wasn’t actually overeating and getting plastered, of course. But people said it because He was constantly eating, drinking, and befriending the outcasts, the ones the religious folks had discarded: the last, the least, and the lost.
In fact, if all you had was the Gospel of Luke, you’d find it littered with stories that connect Jesus and food:
Chapter 2: He’s born in an animal feeding trough. He is food for the world.
Chapter 5: Dinner at Levi’s house, a tax collector and an outsider.
Chapter 9: The feeding of the 5,000. He loves a good potluck.
Chapter 10: Mary and Martha.
Chapter 11: Dinner with Pharisees.
Chapter 14: “When you throw a party, invite the poor.” A story about who belongs on your guest list.
Chapter 15: The prodigal son, where the entire message of who God is culminates in a barbecue for the ages.
Chapter 16: The rich man and Lazarus, where how one eats is tied to one’s understanding of God and others.
Chapter 19: Dinner at Zacchaeus’ house. Another tax collector. Anotha one.
Chapter 22: The Last Supper with His disciples.
Chapter 24: After the resurrection, the road to Emmaus, where He breaks bread with two disciples. Then, appearing to the rest, He asks, “Can I have some fish?” Apparently resurrection works up an appetite.
As Robert Karris put it in Eating Your Way Through Luke’s Gospel:
“In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.”
Now that sounds like a Jesus I’d like to follow.
The primary way Jesus ushered the Kingdom to people on the margins, people hurt by religion, people with bad experiences in the past, people who have deconstructed their faith (which describes many of our neighbors under 30 today), was by eating and drinking with them. He shared a table. He welcomed them.
So in this second installment of my essay series, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? it seems prudent to explore the radical nature of this transforming location in Jesus’ ministry, the same location where He met Rosaria: the table. To do so, we’ll examine perhaps the most powerful example of Jesus’ table ministry in Luke 7:36-50:
36 One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and when he went into the Pharisee’s house he reclined to dine. 37 And a woman in the city who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. 38 She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.” 40 Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” he replied, “speak.” 41 “A certain moneylender had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.” 44 Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven loves little.” 48 Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” 49 But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” 50 But he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Our story begins with Jesus in the thick of His early ministry. Miracle after teaching after healing, one after another, and then suddenly it all stops in verse 36 because of a dinner invitation. More food! A Pharisee asks Him over for a meal.
In Jesus’ day, that was no small thing. In the ancient Near East, the table was a place of radical unity and shared blessing. Who you ate with signaled who you approved of, who you believed belonged in God’s Kingdom, who you considered pure or clean, who you respected and dignified. Scholars call this dynamic table fellowship. Scott Bartchy writes:
“It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of table fellowship for the cultures of the Mediterranean basin in the first century. Mealtimes were far more than occasions for individuals to consume nourishment. Being welcomed at a table for the purpose of eating food with another person had become a ceremony richly symbolic of friendship, intimacy, and unity.”
To sit at a table was a radical act of affirmation.
Which is exactly what makes this invitation so odd. For the past three chapters of Luke, and really since the start of Jesus’ public ministry, the Pharisees haven’t exactly been buddy-buddy with Him. It’s been the opposite. Jesus’ actions, especially the people He eats and drinks with and the radical nature of His teaching, are shaking up the status quo. The Pharisees have mostly offered accusation and condemnation, not dinner parties.
But this Pharisee extends an invitation, and we aren’t told why. Maybe:
Like Rosaria, he had a morbid curiosity and wanted to see what everyone was talking about
He was a bit jealous. The Pharisees were the trusted religious experts, and Jesus was stealing their thunder
He wanted the social benefit, a first-century photo-op that would let him be seen with Jesus
Or maybe, just maybe, he had an inkling that Jesus really was the prophet and Messiah the Scriptures had promised
Whatever the reason, Jesus goes. And in doing so, He sets the table for a radical encounter, one that changes the lives of everyone involved and invites us into some hard questions about our own tables.
The Woman
So Jesus follows Simon home for dinner.
Wealthy homes like Simon’s often had courtyards, sometimes with a garden or fountain in the middle. When the weather allowed, meals were eaten out there, right beside the road. That meant passersby could easily see and hear what was happening, and sometimes even wander in, especially when someone important like a rabbi was speaking.
Jesus arrives, takes off His sandals, and reclines at the table with Simon, as was the custom. You didn’t sit in chairs back then. You leaned on a cushion with one arm, leaving the other free to eat.
Soon a woman enters the scene. Luke says she “learned” Jesus was eating there, which is a significant detail. It means she was actively looking for Him. She was seeking Him out.
That little detail matters for our own neighboring: we should assume the people around us are looking for Jesus. We don’t have to convince them. Many are already longing for peace, for wholeness, for life and joy and freedom. Our job is to be receptive, to be curious about what they long for, and to extend love and invitation, very often through a table.
And we quickly see that Jesus is receptive to those who seek Him.
Luke is careful to tell us this is a woman “in the city, who was a sinner.” Scholars think this was a gracious way of describing a sex worker. Her alabaster jar of ointment was likely an expensive perfume she used for her work, which suggests she had been in that trade for a long time.
It’s easy for us to look at her through a negative lens and see her as immoral or unclean or deviant. But before we jump to conclusions, we have to reckon with the social realities of her time. Very few women chose prostitution then. More often it chose them. She was likely a slave or former slave pushed into the marketplace by her lack of attachment to a man or her inability to earn a living. She may have been sold into it by her family. She may even have been a victim of trafficking.
Whatever her situation, she carries into this scene the weight of years of shame and condemnation. She occupies the lowest rung of the moral and social ladder. Imagine her peering into that courtyard. She knows exactly who she is: a sex worker approaching a hyper-conservative, male-dominated world. She knows what the Pharisee and every other guest will think of her. Imagine the weight she carries.
But she has also heard what this Jesus says. She is seeking Him because she knows Him, whether from His teaching or an earlier encounter. She knows this prophet from God has come preaching forgiveness, release from bondage and shame, a new identity of belovedness, and hope and life for the weary and broken.
So forget what anyone else thinks. She crashes the dinner party. She may not be completely free from her situation, but she believes the good news Jesus has been preaching: forgiveness, homecoming, rest, peace. The courage it takes to walk in there is astounding.
Before she says a word, the tears start to flow. She falls at Jesus’ feet, her tears wetting His toes. She lets down her hair and wipes His feet dry, kisses them, and pours her ointment over them.
Every one of those gestures would have violated social expectations for women. A woman letting her hair down in public was an erotic gesture. Handling a man’s feet evoked intimate, even romantic behavior. Pouring out the ointment was standard practice in her profession. She is approaching Jesus the only way she has ever been taught to approach a man.
It’s no wonder the Pharisee is appalled. He says to himself:
“If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.”
That’s an understandable struggle. Remember what table fellowship meant in his world: welcome, friendship, unity. Can Jesus really be a holy man if He welcomes this kind of gesture from an unclean sinner?
It’s easy to look down on Simon’s lack of grace, but that’s largely because sex work doesn’t always carry the same moral stigma in our culture that it did then. So transpose her to our time. Who sits at the bottom of our moral and social ladder? Who would we be repulsed to see Jesus welcome at the table? Imagine Jesus sitting down with a pedophile. Or having lunch with a white nationalist. How does that feel? What does that thought experiment stir up in you? Who couldn’t you even conceive of welcoming, because they’re just too far gone? That’s what Simon is feeling.
Without pause, Jesus knows what Simon is thinking, and He answers: “Simon.” It’s the first time we’ve heard the man’s name, as if Jesus is proving He really is a prophet by knowing his thoughts and speaking his name. “Simon, I have something to say to you.”
“Rabbi, tell me,” says Simon.
And then Jesus tells a story. Classic Jesus move.
The Story
“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.”
A denarius was a day’s wages, so we’re talking about two years of wages versus about two months. Do the math with your own salary: two years versus two months.
Neither could pay the creditor back, so he forgave them both. Then Jesus asks Simon, “Which of them will love him more?”
“I suppose the one who was forgiven more,” Simon replies.
“You have judged rightly,” says Jesus, which honestly reads to me like a sarcastic gold star. Great work, Einstein. You nailed it.
Then Jesus turns toward the woman and asks, “Do you see this woman?” It’s a great question, and we’ll come back to it.
But first, look at the shade Jesus throws at Simon:
“I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet.” This was basic hospitality. People walked around in dust and dirt all day in sandals, so when guests arrived, it was standard to offer cool water to wash their feet.
“You gave me no kiss.” Another custom of the day: greeting a guest with a kiss on the cheek.
“You did not anoint my head with oil.” A slightly fancier welcome, but still fairly common.
Meanwhile, this woman has bathed His feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with ointment.
The whole scene is a brilliant piece of irony. It’s the exact opposite of what anyone in that culture would have expected. Jesus has made Simon, the upstanding holy man, the foil, and made the morally corrupt outsider the hero. That’s how Jesus tends to operate: it’s always the ones who know they’re in need who understand and receive Him, not the ones who think they have it all together.
He closes by reflecting on forgiveness. It is precisely because this woman knows the vast, expansive nature of what she’s been forgiven that she is able to love so extravagantly. According to Jesus, true hospitality, true welcome, true love of neighbor through the table, flows from the one who knows how much they’ve been forgiven.
Then He speaks to the woman words as sweet as honey: “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”
Go in shalom. In a culture where her identity and very personhood had been discarded, she can return fully restored and healed, with every right of every other person. This isn’t only individual, personal forgiveness. It’s a sweeping social, spiritual, and sexual restoration. Joel Green puts it beautifully in his commentary:
“Jesus addresses her with words usually reserved for the conclusion of miracles of healing: ‘your faith has made you whole’; and he sends her away ‘in peace’ (shalom). Such language cannot be limited to ‘spiritual’ well-being or even to ‘physical’ vitality, but speaks of a restoration to wholeness, including restoration to the full social intercourse from which she has been excluded.”
She is named a beloved daughter of God again. She is welcomed to the table by Jesus, and she leaves utterly transformed.
Jesus uses the table to turn an outcast into a daughter. And He uses the same table to challenge Simon, and ultimately you and me, the religious people. He forces us to ask three questions of ourselves as we think about our own tables and our own neighboring:
What are your invisible walls?
Do you see this woman?
What have you been forgiven?
What Are Your Invisible Walls?
As often as tables can be bridges, they can also be invisible walls.
In the 1970s, anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote a landmark paper arguing exactly this: who we eat with, and who we don’t, are extensions of who we consider better or worse, good or evil, friend or enemy. Our tables are often the invisible walls we put up around others.
You don’t have to look far in our culture to see it. Think of the segregated restaurants in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement. Or the signs posted outside restaurants and boarding houses in mid-20th-century England that said simply, “No Irish. No blacks. No dogs.”
Simon has an invisible wall around his table. He uses his religion and his supposedly superior morality to build it brick by brick, until he can justify his lack of love for the one who is truly in need. If we’re not careful, we do the same thing. Think about it: who do we mostly eat with? Our immediate family, the people we’re already closest and most similar to, challenges and all. People who look, sound, and act like us. People in our same socioeconomic class. People whose personalities we prefer.
When was the last time you welcomed someone who annoyed you to a meal? Or someone you adamantly disagreed with? Or someone who had no ability to return the favor? Or someone your religious instincts want to judge or distance yourself from?
One of the main reasons Jesus was killed was the people He ate with, the people He invited to the table. He was constantly tearing down the invisible walls of His day. He saw the “other,” and He welcomed them.
In the Kingdom, tables are never boundary markers to keep people out. They are invitations to bring people in.
So what are your invisible walls? What traits, actions, beliefs, or behaviors do you use to justify pushing others away? Look at the freedom and life that arrive when Jesus tears those walls down. Sometimes all God needs for a breakthrough in someone’s life is a seat at the table.
Do You See This Woman?
This is the exact question Jesus asks Simon, and the exact question He asks you and me. Do we see the marginalized and hurting around us? Do we make space in our lives to welcome them into all that we have: our tables, our homes, our lives?
How we answer depends entirely on what we see when we look at other people. Do we see a neighbor experiencing homelessness as a nuisance who needs to move along, or as a beloved son in need of love? Do we see the angry coworker as someone to get back at, or someone to be curious about? What do we see?
Simon sees a corrupt woman full of sin. And that sight can never lead her to healing. It can only drive her deeper into a neglected and shameful identity. As John Alan Turner puts it, “It’s hard to convince people that a God they can’t see loves them when a church they can see doesn’t even seem to like them.”
But Jesus sees a beloved woman searching for love. That sight is what lets Him welcome her. That sight is what heals her.
When Jesus approaches a table, He is always looking for who might be excluded, othered, or left outside. It’s never about His own social status, His enjoyment, or how impressive the evening is.
That flies in the face of what so many of our American tables and homes look like, especially in the internet age. Too often the table is a way of showing off, impressing people, or signaling social status.
If you want to see it clearly, look at one famous couple: Chip and Joanna Gaines. You know, the Magnolia aesthetic. Flawless white cabinets surrounding a marble island, lighting that’s a little industrial but with a homey touch, a backsplash with just enough color, like a subtle sage or turquoise. Then we bring out dishes that match the backsplash and serve some trendy Pinterest-worthy organic meal with sweet potatoes or avocados or chickpeas or whatever everyone’s hyped on this month. That’s what we’re sold as what a table should look like.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But if we’re not careful, this carefully manicured image can turn our tables and homes into stages for showing off, keeping up, and entertaining, rather than radical, wall-breaking moments of welcome for the outsider.
Christian tables are never about the setup or the aesthetic. They are about the assumptions we bring to the table and the people we welcome there. That means a Christian table never has to be impressive by worldly standards. Top Ramen can be served at a Christian table (college students, rejoice!), because it’s not about the impressive product. It’s about the welcoming posture we take toward our neighbors.
To help us navigate this, it’s worth comparing American entertainment with Christlike neighboring. They’re two very different things.
When we live in the Kingdom, people are seen not as society or personality constructs them, but as God defines them: beloved. And the table becomes a primary place where we express that new identity, not through an impressive aesthetic, but through tangible welcome and care that elevates the other.
What Have You Been Forgiven?
This is where Jesus ultimately lands. Notice that the key point of His parable is that the amount of debt isn’t the issue. Both debtors were lent everything they had. Both are unable to pay it back. They are in the same situation: in debt, and unable to cover it themselves.
What Jesus is claiming is a radically anti-religious view of humanity and God. In every other religious framework, there are hierarchies, boundaries, and lines separating insider from outsider, tables with invisible walls. You’re in if you do this, believe that, or act this way. You’re out if you don’t.
But Jesus says those walls don’t actually exist. There is only one kind of human: forgiven debtors beloved by their lender. Forgiven sinners beloved by God. The difference between Simon and this woman has nothing to do with morality, social standing, or religious beliefs. Jesus tears all of that down. The only difference is that one recognizes her need for forgiveness, and that she has been forgiven, and the other doesn’t.
The woman shows Jesus great welcome and love because she knows she has been shown great welcome and love by God in Christ. She understands the love she has received and passes it on.
Simon, on the other hand, fails to extend real love to either Jesus or the woman, because he still lives with a heart of self-sufficiency. He senses no need in himself. He is a good person, justified by his beliefs, actions, and status. As a result, he is shut off from Jesus and from his neighbor in need.
There is only one thing that can truly close us off from God and others. It’s not morality. It’s not religious status. It’s not what we’ve done or left undone. It’s self-sufficiency: believing, as Simon does, that we on our own are not in need of God or forgiveness.
If we’re honest, our thoughts and actions often look more like Simon’s than the woman’s. We stack ourselves against someone we, or our culture, or our religion defines as “worse,” and then use the comparison to build hierarchies and categories that separate us from others. But according to Jesus, that misses the point. All of us, in our own ways, have turned away from the source of life in God. As Eugene Peterson writes in The Contemplative Pastor:
“The word sinner... is not a word that places humans somewhere on a continuum ranging from angel to ape, assessing them as relatively ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ It designates humans in relation to God and sees them separated from God. Sinner means something is awry between humans and God.”
But Jesus makes clear the story doesn’t end with debt. He gives Simon, and us, good news: both debtors are forgiven. Without a second thought. It’s already done. The lender has gone ahead and absorbed the debt himself. It’s costly, and it’s remarkably loving.
This is the good news Jesus came to proclaim: there is no dividing wall between us and God, or between us and each other. His entire life, death, and resurrection point to this religion-shattering, hierarchy-destroying truth: you and I and every human we meet are forgiven, beloved, and welcome at the table. Every social, religious, or moral category we once used is leveled in the presence of this God.
That changes how we see our failures, our sin, and our brokenness. They no longer separate us from God or from one another. Now they are only ever an arrow pointing to forgiveness and life. Even our falls reveal the abundant, laughable, joyous forgiveness and love of God.
And when we become people who gaze on that reality, who let this boundary-breaking love soak into our souls and muscles and sinews, it will change our own tables. It will transform the way we see everyone around us.
Being a good neighbor means returning to the truth of Christ’s forgiveness day after day, letting His love and peace wash over us again and again. That truth is what will make us far less like Simon (judgmental, discontent, dismissive, cynical) and far more like the woman (joyful, grateful, loving, and gracious toward others). It is Christ’s forgiveness that makes us radical, table-opening neighbors.
I love how Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century monk, put it in his famous letters, Practicing the Presence of God. Every day, for decades, he turned himself toward Christ in this way:
“Touched with a sensible regret, I confess to Him and ask His forgiveness, I abandon myself in His hands that He may do what He pleases with me. The King, full of mercy and goodness, far from chastising me, embraces me with love, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the key of His treasures; He converses and delights Himself with me incessantly, in a thousand and a thousand ways, and treats me in all respects as His favorite.”
Notice that his regret isn’t morbid or shame-filled. It’s sensible: true and accurate. And this is the fuel for radical neighboring, for welcoming others to the table: the one forgiven much loves much.
Come To The Lord’s Table
The means to true, radical neighboring is not our own moral integrity: it is the grace and welcome found at the Lord’s own table. This is the place where He welcomes each and every one of us. It’s where we can approach Him again and again, and where He forgives and receives us. It’s where we learn what it means to be a good host.
So we always start at the Lord’s table, for it is the only way to open up our own.