In the past Sunday service of my local church, my Spiritual Father spoke of the special table, it brought many reflections and it shook me tremendously how the Holy Spirit makes us think and recognize our mistakes, also the way to love and remember that Despite our failures, disobedience, there is still an opportunity to achieve dreams.
It's nice how the wonderful God pushes us to fulfill our call, one of the words that confronted my spirit was that where I asked: who have you sat at your table?
It brought to my memory how many wrong people I have sat, I have heard, how many bad decisions I have made that have not allowed me to live the fullness of Christ in my life.
In any of our cities we can find Chinese, Italian, Arab, Jordanian, Thai restaurants ... of course, restaurants with typical food from the region itself or from other Spanish regions, and when we go abroad, we always have two big problems: the language and the food, which becomes difficult by not understanding the terms; the tongue and the kitchen are the features that more identify a culture.
In every culture there are rules that govern what you can eat, when you can eat, with whom you can eat ... Anthropologists say that if you want to meet a group, it is best to observe how they eat, because all food, even the most everyday, has its ritual. For example, in a family, in a group of friends, see what place each person at the table: the father, the mother, who gets close to the kitchen, who is the one who gets up, who is served first, who starts to eat ... Let's say nothing if it is a banquet, or an official banquet, with a rigorous protocol, where the Head of State occupies a relevant place, evidently the header, on your right the second authority of the State, opposite the guest of honor ... Observing how the posts are distributed on the table, how they eat, you can even know how the life of that State is organized.
Inviting a person to eat at home is a gesture of special trust and friendship. If a poor knock on our door, it is easier to give him thirty or forty dollars than to invite him to sit at the table, which costs much less money but is more difficult. When have we eaten together? It is a Castilian expression that We all know, and we use when we want to establish differences with a person who perhaps has taken too much trust with us. When different groups - a family, a community, a group of friends ... - want to celebrate something, they celebrate a common meal, and there they manifest the internal relationships of the group, their identity, their solidarity, sometimes also their history because the food they eat is traditional, perhaps in the songs they sing after they have finished ...
Going through a special and favorite place, I brought to my mind that person I want to sit at my table forever and that is: Jesus.
Now we find Jesus eating with his disciples. No doubt he ate many times with them, but there are three meals, in three key moments, that Luke highlights in a very special way in his Gospel: The meal shortly before dying, what we call The Supper, and two meals after the resurrection . They are meals in which Jesus will teach you the most important teachings about follow-up.
It can be said without exaggeration, that the meals of Jesus-a key theme in the Gospel of Luke-are prophetic signs, charged with meaning, with provocative force, that accompany their words, make them present and express them plastically.
At meals with publicans and sinners, Jesus expresses the God of mercy, the loving God who welcomes sinners who, in a theocratic society, is as much as saying that he welcomes the marginalized, the badly seen, the socially stigmatized Jesus does not legitimize simply the current social order, but promotes alternative values that are born of the acceptance of the reign of God in one's own life, personal and social.
In the meals of Jesus with the Pharisees, the value of generosity, of simplicity, of preference for the last, for the poor, to discover the hidden face - sometimes hidden - of reality, the need for see reality with the eyes of the victims ...
The disciples, in their meals with Jesus, discover that following Him passes through the cross and through service to the brothers.
Jesus longs to dine with us, to sit at our table, he ardently longs for it, let our faithful friend direct us to fulfill the purpose for which we come to earth.
20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock; If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with me.
