“And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Matthew 9:9-13
It’s the wrong question.
Or maybe it’s the right question asked the wrong way. I think we know why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. He does because time and again Jesus reveals that a family meal must include every member of his family. He eats with those who are not welcome at the tables of worldly power, prestige, segregation, and elitism because he knows there is no room for those things at God’s table–the table where true life and fulfillment are nourished.
But to ask the question another way might say a bit more about us. Instead of “why does Jesus eat with tax collectors and sinners,” we might ask: “why do the tax collectors and sinners eat with Jesus?” Why do they follow him? More, what would cause them to drop everything, even if what they are dropping is meager and all they have, to follow.
In “Confessions,” St. Augustine expressed the core truth about the desire of our human hearts: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” As my friend and colleague Bishop Jake Owensby interprets Augustine’s words: the human heart has infinite desire, but the true desire of our heart is for the infinite. Which is to say that we desire God.
Our problem is that the infinite desire of our heart can put us on a grinding pursuit for fulfilment–for life, through finite things–power, wealth, fame, elite status, all the selfish and self-serving practices that bring us a sense of control, security, or happiness. The problem is finite things never last. That hunger, the desire for the infinite, always returns.
Jesus gives us an invitation to feast at the table where the infinite is served. There our hungry hearts may find nourishment that lasts. This is the path of life, the table of life, that the sinners and tax collectors realized in Jesus. They dropped their pursuit of a life of infinite hunger to eat with the one who feeds the human heart with its one true desire, its fulfillment, its rest–God.
What must you drop to follow Jesus? What keeps you from feasting at his table of life?
