Table Manners

Read Luke 14:1, 7-14

This story about Jesus’ encounter with the stringent table manners of his own culture reminds me of a story I heard once of a young, western man who travelled to a foreign country – I think it was somewhere in the east. He was to stay with a local family for some months and was at pains during his welcome meal with the family not to cause offence. His mother had taught him to finish whatever was set before him so that’s exactly what he did – neatly polishing off every morsel and leaving his plate empty save for his utensils. Having satisfied himself, he was dismayed as the mother of the household piled his plate high again with a helping equal to his first. Not knowing how to politely refuse this generosity, he found himself having to finish this plate as well, which he did. Having cleaned his plate once more – this time with great difficulty – he was again shocked to find the mother replenishing his plate with a fresh helping as generous as the first two! It turned out that in the culture of his host family anyone who emptied their plate was politely asking for more food!

Table manners are something we take for granted, until we are inserted into a culture where we do not know the rules. It is exhausting having to learn a new set of rules. It is an indication how much energy we spare ourselves being able to take certain things for granted because they are simply the done thing. But sometimes the rules need to be examined because they are also habituated means of manipulating and controlling people.

Stanley Hauerwas once commented that people do not have values – second hand cars have values – people have habits, attitudes and practices.

Much of what passes for civilised manners is in actual fact a very carefully worked out system of economics which helps us assess the value of a particular person to us.

It may be easier for us to see this in first century Palestine where the rules were stricter and strange to modern, individualistic cultures, but they functioned in the same way that our manners function today.

Jesus’ parable this week is another one of those parables often confused as being an indication of what the Kingdom of God is like, when in fact Jesus does not preface this parable with the words “The Kingdom of God is like…” If we take this to mean that what Jesus is reflecting on here is not the Kingdom but the world in which he lived, the parable takes on a more authentic meaning, especially in the light of his following teaching.

We need to understand firstly the importance of place at the table. Take for instance the Dead Sea sect that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. It seems they practiced something of an annual review of all members of the community. Based on one’s religious performance you would be graded and placed in a strict hierarchy within the community. The result of this was most keenly felt at group meals where people could see where you were sitting. A demotion would have been catastrophic.

For first century Palestinians the arrangement of people at a meal communicated their station in life but it also reinforced that station. In a highly communal society one’s station was a matter of life and death as it meant access to the stuff of life.

Jesus is reflecting common wisdom of his day based on the table manners of his culture. If you placed yourself at a lower station one could guarantee a very pleasant demonstration of one’s higher status when the host bumped you up a station or two. This is sensible economics - something all of us can understand: how to get what you want as cheaply as possible.

Jesus then makes an invitation to his followers, that when we have a meal we should invite those who cannot repay us in kind. He is inviting us to cultivate friendship’s not based on what may be gained from the relationship, but purely for gratuitous offering of ourselves.

What a shocking invitation.

At our wedding Yvette and I had a terribly difficult time sorting out the seating plan for the bridal table as we had to manage our respective familys’ varying political beliefs as well as troubled relationship history. We never got it completely right and anyway disaster struck long before the bridal table could ever be an issue. A significant family member pulled out of the wedding at the last minute taking many guests with him so that we were left with about 15 seats to fill and a day to find the guests to fill them.

On the day of our wedding, we’d made no progress but we let it go and tried to enjoy the day as best we could. A friend of ours, Lizeka, who was attending her first “white” wedding arrived at the reception with a taxi load of her friends from Khayelitsha. In Xhosa culture this is perfectly acceptable table manners for a wedding! There were just enough new arrivals to fill the vacant seats at the reception. Lizeka’s taxi of friends ended up making our reception the best party we’d ever had.

My wedding taught me to let go of some of the rules and expectations I have about how things ought to be. I learned a valuable lesson that day about the opportunities there are in venturing beyond my cultural assumptions.

If I am honest, much of what I count as friendship is really a carefully calculated transactional economics designed to further my own self-interest. How can I get the best for myself out this or that relationship? While friendships are almost always mutually beneficial, the fact remains that it is for my benefit that I entertain relationship at all.

It would be grotesquely immature to pretend that friendships are not fundamentally about self-interest. And this is not a bad thing. But I worry when I find that my choices seem to reflect very little else – very little grace.

I am particularly in danger of this in my closest relationships. It is much easier to keep a careful internal record of all the things I can reasonably expect Yvette to do for me, to get grumpy and self-righteous when these expectations are not met; than it is to love her for just being Yvette, to allow myself to be loved just because I am lovable. Jesus is inviting me to let go of the daily merry-go-round of working out who should be doing what and start loving graciously, abandoning myself to the simple joy of loving for love’s sake.

I am also in danger of becoming an economist in my relationships when I forget to cultivate friendships with those less fortunate than myself. John Wesley believed that the most important spiritual discipline was “visitation of the poor.” He believed that the orientation of the world was always loaded in the direction of the wealthy so that we all look to those who are richer than ourselves for wisdom and teaching. A Kingdom spirituality necessarily must turn this around – not so that those who are wealthy may give to the poor (though this may be a fortuitous outcome) but primarily because the wealthy have much to learn about God and life from the poor. Jesus is inviting me to seek wisdom and meaning amongst those whose lives are harder than my own, who benefit from less privileges and take less for granted.